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1->''"Tenuring and tenuring in the ivory tower!''
2->''The flagon cannot fill the flagoneers.''
3->''Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold''
4->''Dear academe, our Lusitania, recoils."''
5-->--'''Bert Nix''', paraphrasing William Butler Yeats
6
7''The Big U'', Creator/NealStephenson's first novel, is a satire of American college life focusing on the fictitious American Megaversity, somewhere in a stretch of quasi-urban sprawl, and its gradual slide towards apocalyptic destruction.
8
9Not to be confused with ''Anime/TheBigO''.
10----
11!!Tropes:
12* AbhorrentAdmirer: Fred Fine to Sarah
13* AttemptedRape: [[spoiler:The Terrorist leader tries to assault Sarah, but her girlfriend, wearing a clown costume, shoots him first.]]
14* {{Bizarrchitecture}}: The protagonists theorize at one point that the architecture of the Plex is slowly [[AlienGeometries driving everyone insane]]. What's certain is that its natural resonating frequency matches the frequency of Klein's music, making the entire building vibrate whenever he turns on his stereo.
15* BlackAndNerdy: Professor Bud, our narrator.
16* CargoCult: The Terrorists' acid-induced worship of the Big Wheel and its avatar, Fenrick's Go Big Red Fan.
17* ChekhovsGun: The building's aforementioned resonating frequency, which ultimately allows [[spoiler:Klein and Bert Nix to destroy the Plex once and for all by playing the organ]].
18* CoolOldGuy: Bert Nix, the Megaversity's resident eccentric bum.
19* DeanBitterman: DoubleSubverted. Septimus Severus Krupp is presented initially as a conservative and authoritarian dean who makes life hell for the students. However, when he finally appears to the protagonists, he seems quite the ReasonableAuthorityFigure, a bulwark against the rowdy Stalinists...[[spoiler:at least, until it's revealed that he's been using the school as a nuclear waste storage facility]].
20* DirtyCommies: The Stalinist Unity Battalion.
21* EscalatingWar: Klein and Fenrick's stereo battles, which get more and more dramatic, ultimately culminating in [[spoiler:Fenrick's death and the accidental creation of a race of mutant rats]].
22* GeekPhysiques: Both Casimir and Fred Fine are the "unhealthily skinny" kind.
23* HippieTeacher: Professor Embers, who will happily award an A for an eight-sentence analytical essay riddled with grammatical errors since the author has "escaped orthodoxy."
24--> A grade is actually a form of poetry. It is a subjective reaction to a learner's work, distilled and reduced down to its purest essence – not a sonnet, not a haiku, but a single letter.
25* KarmaHoudini: [[spoiler:Ephriam Klein, at least in the "on-screen" narrative. He gets away with murder, or at least manslaughter, after electrocuting his roommate John Fennick with his own fan. CoolOldGuy Bert Nix even helps Ephraim destroy the Big U at the end!]] Bud does imply that the truth eventually came out, so it's possible that [[spoiler: Ephraim]] ended up behind bars. But as of the story Bud is telling us, [[spoiler: Ephraim]] effectively gest the last laugh.
26* MindScrew: Is this really a campus? Or is it the mystical Plexus? Does magic truly exist here?
27* MoodWhiplash: The Terrorists' [[spoiler:attempted rape of Sarah]] is pretty jarring, coming as it does in the midst of a relatively lighthearted satirical novel.
28** The final "prank" in Ephriam and Fennick's "war" definitely counts as well. That one is so jarring, that for some readers it might not even be clear that [[spoiler: Fennick is actually dead]] until Bud confirms so in passing several chapters later.
29* {{Ruritania}}: The janitorial staff are all immigrants from the [[CommieLand People's Free Existence Node of Crotobaltislavonia]].
30* ThisIsMySide: Part of Klein and Fenrick's EscalatingWar.
31* ScienceHero: The protagonists are mostly hard science majors, and end up using their technical skills to combat an alliance of loony leftists and drunken cultist fratboys in a very bizarre example of RomanticismVersusEnlightenment.
32* StrawmanU: The novel manages to avoid either extreme version of Strawman U, but the SUB and the unionized professors would fit in well at a Berserkeley, and the administration and Temple of Unlimited Godhead (a fundamentalist Mormon offshoot) are close to a Jim Jonestown.
33* UnreliableNarrator: Bud admits to the reader right in the prologue that he may have "embellished" certain details, and outright fabricated others for events that he wasn't present for.
34* WackyFratboyHijinx: The Terrorists's antics are a surprisingly terrifying example.

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