Pun Salad

This is early Neal Stephenson, his second novel after The Big U. He says on his website that it took "about a month" to write. It's set mostly in the Boston environs, and thanks to occasional Red Sox shoutouts, we can determine that it's set in the late 1980s, the era of Dwight Evans, Sam Horn, and Marty Barrett.

I enjoyed it, although it's not on the par with later work like Snow Crash, Cryptnomicon, and so on. To a certain extent, it's refreshing to know that, a few decades back, Stephenson was merely "pretty good" as opposed to "masterful."

The protagonist, Sangamon Taylor, is a self-described "granola James Bond", an eco-warrior working for a Greenpeace-like organization called GEE ("Group of Environmental Extremists"). He's kind of an asshole (and Stephenson, in his "Acknowledgments", avers that this is what he was going for). He has an unfortunate laughing gas habit, but his heart is in the right place.

Mostly his work involves publicizing, and semi-illegal vandalizing, of firms' criminal toxin-dumping. Plugging pipes that dump dioxins into rivers, for example. But he runs across something very nasty around Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor—you don't want to eat those lobsters, fellah. Before you can say "massive conspiracy", there's murderous gunplay (and boatplay) involving (maybe?) the Mafia, a presidential candidate, an evil corporation, mad scientists, Satan-worshipping fans of a metal band ("Pöyszen Böyzen"). A lot goes on.

Needs a map of (at least) Boston and Boston Harbor so the interested reader can follow Sangamon on his travels. As an occasional visitor, I was able to mostly keep track, but someone less familiar might get swamped in the geography.