Storyline: 3/5 
 Characters: 2/5 
 Writing Style: 4/5 
 World: 4/5 
 --Below information added approximately a year after original reading-- 
 I had a friend in high school who was both unusually intelligent and creative. He also could be bitingly sarcastic and ironic. You put those things together and you get something like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash or China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. If, for instance, I were to come across a long-handled object (golf club, shovel handle, etc), I was the kind of teenager who would pick it up and challengingly thrust it as a sword. My friend, by contrast, was the kind that would pick up something random and incongruous (like a banana) to parry with. It was just what he did. He leapt into the mock fight adding his own sword of irony and humor. 
 This is what Neal Stephenson does too. It is cool. It is hip. It is sarcastic, biting, edgy, and entertaining. That pizza delivery opening of the book was perhaps the pinnacle of the cool, hip, sarcastic, biting,edgy, entertaining attitude and writing. It just doesn't get any better than that. That was also a problem since it was the beginning of the book. It didn't get any better than that. It had a good hook, but it was style not substance, and nothing in the rest of the book matched it for entertainment value. 
 I liked the whole language aspect of the story. I wanted it to be presented and explored differently for the entirety of the reading. Stephenson could just as easily incorporated and explored that in another of his works (The Diamond Age, for instance). There was nothing that made it uniquely connected to the story here. Similarly, the snow crash could have been caused by something else just as easily. Its one of the weaknesses of Stephenson books, I think. He's got this treasure trove of awesome ideas, and he's just got to write the rest of the book so he can slot them in. They're often interchangeable though. Thus the couple of works I've read by him are choppy, lacking momentum and a real goal. 
 I usually hate cyberpunk, so it probably is a good indication of Stephenson's merits that he can still turn the subgenre into a positive experience for me.