Let us say that novelists are like unannounced visitors. While Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow pound manfully on the door, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith knock politely, little preparing you for the emotional ferociousness with which they plan on making themselves at home. Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting. Then one morning you wake up and find him gone. You are relieved, a little, but you also miss him. And you wish he’d left behind whatever it was he was smoking, because anything that allows a human being to write six 1,000-page novels in 12 years is worth the health and imprisonment risk.

It is tempting to call Stephenson a “cult writer,” but cult writers are typically under-or selectively read. All of Stephenson’s novels published since the late 1990s have been best sellers, and some of his original editions go for precious-metal asking prices online. His still-fresh, still-­astounding cyberpunk parody “Snow Crash” (1992) standardized use of the Sanskrit word “avatar” to denote virtual human identities and came impressively close to predicting how the Internet would come to be understood, which is to say as a “metaverse” paradoxically larger than the world that enfolds it. For these and other reasons, Stephenson is the rare writer whose 20-year-old magazine essays have their own Wikipedia pages.

That leaves us with his dense, funny and erudite novels, which are packed with so many different kinds of information, they sometimes scarcely feel like novels at all. What do they feel like? Eldritch downloads, maybe, from some mind-­flaying computer brain.

This critic — a Stephenson fan and admirer of long standing — has read most of Stephenson’s novels. His “Baroque Cycle,” a three-volume megatome about 17th- and 18th-century Europe and New England published over 2003 and 2004, put the author’s many gifts on full display. But halfway through the second volume I set the “Cycle” aside. Mainly it was the prose, which made it feel as if one were being winked at for a thousand pages by a Laurence Sterne impersonator. Stephenson followed up with “Anathem” (2008), a work of philosophically inclined science fiction that seemed determined to scare away anyone who regards “A Canticle for Leibowitz” as anything less than the premier achievement of human imagination.