My first and only exposure to Stephenson was Seveneves.
I think he writes for autists and I don't mean this in a derogatory sense. Stephenson's focus on technical details in his novels buries the story and any character development in a mountain of minutiae making them a chore for anyone who does not need exhaustive technical explanations to suspend disbelief. Thus my guess is that his books really hit the spot for people on the spectrum as their bar for technical consistency is much higher than for those who are more neurotypical.
I've always felt as though he's writing like someone excited to have researched something and wanting to tell people. It's not highbrow, more rollicking and as though you can imagine him grinning "this is so cool (for nerds)" while he's writing it out. My last exposure was Seveneves, and Reamde before that.
Autism, like most personality traits in the DSM, is only a problem if it affects your every day life in three spheres (e.g. work/relationships/hobbies). Otherwise you might just have the superpowers without the side-effects.
In spite of reading and mostly liking everything else by Stephenson.
Edit: but then I couldn't enjoy Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series (I did get to the end) too much. Because half the book was a RPG system manual describing game mechanics.
Think that was my problem with Seveneves as well. It read like a 'how to build and run a space station' manual.
To me, 'Seveneves' took longer than usual to world build and get things going. Once it got going after 'the event', things moved along as a pretty good clip. Don't know if he has any plans to revisit that world but it would be interesting to explore things from after the time jump in more detail.
I'm pretty sure OP is referring to either the ramifications of that event (the climax of part 1), or perhaps the end of part 1 which sets part 2 in motion (with a drastic change in focus).
I'm being deliberately vague in order to not reveal spoilers.
for years, every time I tried read Seveneves I got bored before I even found out what the plot was. There's something about the description of the ISS that I find tedious even by Stevenson standards
LOL. I read REAMDE on Kindle, so I didn't know its length. I thought it was a rollicking good time, and I recommended it to my wife for her book club. I assumed it was about 300 pages long. Turns out it's over 1000.
I think it’s a lot more charitable to say that it’s writing for engineers who get excited about ideas. Lots of the ideas aren’t particularly realistic or plausible. The point of the technical sections isn’t for suspension of disbelief, it’s just for the fun of digging into new topics and speculating on how you might use it to build something. I’d say it’s a cousin of Randall Munroe’s what if series.
I think he writes for autists and I don't mean this in a derogatory sense. Stephenson's focus on technical details in his novels buries the story and any character development in a mountain of minutiae making them a chore for anyone who does not need exhaustive technical explanations to suspend disbelief. Thus my guess is that his books really hit the spot for people on the spectrum as their bar for technical consistency is much higher than for those who are more neurotypical.