Maybe he's one of those fashionable post-modern writers and what you've got is more of a story-forking-path; or web, hypersphere, mobius-strip, tesseract type thingy.

I think that Neal Stephenson is more of a throw-in-everything kind of modernist writer. In this respect, he is similar to Lyly, Rabelais, or Joyce in creating huge lists (or catalogs) and lots of extra info.

Ceci n'est pas un seing.