For more than a decade, it's been virtually impossible to find a copy of Cryptonomicon author Neal Stephenson's The Big U, and Stephenson himself has said he considers that a good thing. His trepidation over republishing his long-out-of-print debut novel is understandable; it's chaotic and lightweight compared to his later works, and he made some awkward mistakes in constructing it, particularly in including an unnecessary narrator whose first-person voice emerges randomly in other characters' third-person scenes. That said, The Big U is still worth more than its obvious curiosity value. The quirky style, sardonic humor, and larger-than-life characters that made Stephenson's breakthrough novel Snow Crash a hit are here in nascent form, turning an unlikely tale of campus terrorism into a playful burlesque that strongly recalls Catch-22. The Big U is a sloppy mishmash of interlocking subplots concerning various enrollees at American Megaversity, where all 40,000 students live in a single, massive dorm complex both designed by and populated with sadistic psychotics. The few relatively sane residents—including an engineering student who saved for 10 years to afford a formal education and a no-nonsense student-government president—are flabbergasted by the beer-swilling, gang-raping, vandalism-happy troglodytes around them. The AM students who aren't brain-dead hooligans are instead lunatics organized into cult-like splinter groups, including a war-gaming society which stages live-action Dungeons & Dragons in the sewers and a drug-addled coterie of neon-sign worshippers. The Big U begins by satirizing the isolated, self-created worlds of each of the major players, but their environments begin to merge when a cabal of maintenance workers takes over the toxic-waste dump under the dorm complex. A literal civil war breaks out, with students, staff, and faculty shooting it out for supremacy, and societal and narrative anarchy simultaneously take over. Like Stephenson's other books, The Big U drapes comedy elements over a focused agenda, in this case a bitter satire on the state of American education. Also like Stephenson's other books, it starts strong, blazes along, and abruptly collapses at the end. But armed with Stephenson's many disclaimers, readers should enjoy the book's stylistic strengths without expecting it to either transcend his usual structural weaknesses or live up to the standards he's developed over the past 15 years.