Neal Stephenson
Author of Snow Crash
About the Author
Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author, was born on October 31, 1959 in Maryland. He graduated from Boston University in 1981 with a B.A. in Geography with a minor in physics. His first novel, The Big U, was published in 1984. It received little attention and stayed out of print until show more Stephenson allowed it to be reprinted in 2001. His second novel was Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller was published in 1988, but it was his novel Snow Crash (1992) that brought him popularity. It fused memetics, computer viruses, and other high-tech themes with Sumerian mythology. Neal Stephenson has won several awards: Hugo for Best Novel for The Diamond Age (1996), the Arthur C. Clarke for Best Novel for Quicksilver (2004), and the Prometheus Award for Best Novel for The System of the World (2005). He recently completed the The Baroque Cycle Trilogy, a series of historical novels. It consists of eight books and was originally published in three volumes and Reamde. His latest novel is entitled The Rise and Fall of D. O. D. O. Stephenson also writes under the pseudonym Stephen Bury. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Neal Stephenson
The Mongoliad, Book One: Collector's Edition [includes the prequel Sinner] (2012) 54 copies, 2 reviews
Jipi and the Paranoid Chip {story} 11 copies
Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out {essay} 9 copies
[unidentified works] 8 copies
Spew {story} 6 copies
It's All Geek to Me {essay} 4 copies
In the Kingdom of Mao Bell {essay} 3 copies
D: Heavy Water (Bomb Light Book 2) 2 copies
The EOS Reader 1998-2008: Celebrating a Decade of the Finest Fantasy and Science Fiction in the Universe (2008) 2 copies
Seveneves [sampler] 2 copies
Smiley's People {article} 2 copies
Raven 1 copy
Sedmeroev 1 copy
Two for the Road 1 copy
The Future of Ideas 1 copy
Associated Works
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003) — Introduction, some editions — 1,670 copies, 31 reviews
Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society (2010) — Contributor — 1,160 copies, 19 reviews
Robot Artists & Black Swans: The Italian Fantascienza Stories (2021) — Introduction, some editions — 64 copies, 6 reviews
Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest (2003) — Contributor — 13 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Stephenson, Neal Town
- Other names
- Bury, Stephen (pseudonym)
史蒂文森尼爾
Стивенсон, Нил - Birthdate
- 1959-10-31
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Boston University (BA | Geography | 1981)
- Occupations
- novelist
short story writer
essayist
Subutai Corporation (Chairman of the Board, Co-Founder) - Organizations
- The Clock of the Long Now Project
Subutai Corporation - Awards and honors
- Robert A. Heinlein Award (2018)
- Agent
- Liz Darhansoff
- Relationships
- Jewsbury, George Frederick (uncle)
Lackermann, Ellen Marie (wife) - Short biography
- Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction.
His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque.
Stephenson's work explores subjects such as mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired. He has also written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.
Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (founded by Jeff Bezos) developing a spacecraft and a space launch system,[1] and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He is currently Magic Leap's Chief Futurist. - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Fort Meade, Maryland, USA
- Places of residence
- Fort Meade, Maryland, USA
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, USA
Ames, Iowa, USA
Seattle, Washington, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Discussions
The Role of Language in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson in Science Fiction Fans (October 2025)
Anathem by Neal Stephenson - LinuxLefty tutoring UnrulySun and kgodey in 75 Books Challenge for 2012 (October 2025)
purchased the latest Neal Stephenson book yesterday in The Green Dragon (August 2019)
entry point for Neal Stephenson in Science Fiction Fans (June 2013)
Reviews
Cryptonomicon is mostly spent see-sawing across a half-century divide of two generations between World War II and the late 1990s. Its central topic is cryptology, and it was written when one could still be idealistic about cryptocurrency. It is an enormously long novel made up of short, single-sitting chapters, and it includes such apparent digressions as a gratuitous Penthouse "reader's" letter (365) and a functional Perl script (480).
My favorite chapter was certainly "Organ" (569 ff.), show more which built on the running conceit that the electronic computer had been inspired by the programmability of a pipe organ. But it also punned on the organ of generation belonging to 1940s viewpoint character Lawrence Waterhouse, whose libido takes center stage for most of the chapter. It offers hilarious notions regarding a global Ejaculation Control Conspiracy, and supplements this theory with a walk-on character's paranoia about the Bavarian Illuminati's engineering of the well-tempered musical tuning system as a medium for subliminal corruption.
Cameos by historical figures, including Alan Turing, Ronald Reagan, and General MacArthur, are handled amusingly. Although Stephenson's acknowledgments page disclaims any supposition that the book is a roman à clef regarding his own family, there are certainly some other characters and businesses given new names to insulate our actual world from their fictional deployment. For reasons I can't quite fathom, for example, he calls the Linux operating system Finux.
The ubiquitous use of present tense, general narrative sprawl, and conspiracy theorizing all reminded me of the work of Thomas Pynchon, and in particular Gravity's Rainbow. (Pynchon later tried out a hacker yarn of his own in Bleeding Edge as well.) Although Stephenson is published as a genre author, I think the comparable Pynchon books are actually more science-fictional than Cryptonomicon.
I have read other reader reaction that took issue with the end of this book. I didn't find it weak or dismaying at all, but I think the last five chapters (after "Return") need to be read as denouement, or they will suffer the appearance of anticlimax. show less
My favorite chapter was certainly "Organ" (569 ff.), show more which built on the running conceit that the electronic computer had been inspired by the programmability of a pipe organ. But it also punned on the organ of generation belonging to 1940s viewpoint character Lawrence Waterhouse, whose libido takes center stage for most of the chapter. It offers hilarious notions regarding a global Ejaculation Control Conspiracy, and supplements this theory with a walk-on character's paranoia about the Bavarian Illuminati's engineering of the well-tempered musical tuning system as a medium for subliminal corruption.
Cameos by historical figures, including Alan Turing, Ronald Reagan, and General MacArthur, are handled amusingly. Although Stephenson's acknowledgments page disclaims any supposition that the book is a roman à clef regarding his own family, there are certainly some other characters and businesses given new names to insulate our actual world from their fictional deployment. For reasons I can't quite fathom, for example, he calls the Linux operating system Finux.
The ubiquitous use of present tense, general narrative sprawl, and conspiracy theorizing all reminded me of the work of Thomas Pynchon, and in particular Gravity's Rainbow. (Pynchon later tried out a hacker yarn of his own in Bleeding Edge as well.) Although Stephenson is published as a genre author, I think the comparable Pynchon books are actually more science-fictional than Cryptonomicon.
I have read other reader reaction that took issue with the end of this book. I didn't find it weak or dismaying at all, but I think the last five chapters (after "Return") need to be read as denouement, or they will suffer the appearance of anticlimax. show less
Well, I've been pleasurably wading through this slab of witty exposition for what feels like most of the year now, re-reading it, to be exact, and finding comfort in the chaos, warfare, catastrophe and upheaval of the late 1600s. Daniel Waterhouse wends his way back to England beset by pirates and recalls his formative years attending Cambridge with a young Isaac Newton. Raised by a religious extremist who believed the world would end in 1666 (obviously) and wanted Daniel to stand on the show more Cliffs of Dover ready to great the returned Jesus in a variety of ancient languages, Daniel's education begins as a great revolution in science and philosophy takes hold, shaking the world to its core simply by explaining it. Then we have Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe, who rescues Eliza from a seraglio at the Siege Of Vienna. Together they cross Europe as Vagabonds, ready to take the world of finance by storm.
These books aren't everybody's cup of tea: too big, bloated and clever-clever. I love 'em. I eat 'em up. They're epic, picaresque, hilarious celebrations of wild intelligence at war with crazed irrationality, and you're not always sure which of them are the good guys at any given time.
2021 - here comes the autumn and winter of yet another plague year, time for comfort reads.
Found my original review from 2004:
This vast, sprawling historical (actually an alternative history) novel is the first in a vast, sprawling historical trilogy that ambitiously sets out to chart the rise of the age of reason and enlightenment, which, it must be noted, marks no abatement in man’s eternal quest for new and interesting way to kills each other, but which certainly saw a marked increase in the numbers of obsessive scientists suffering from mercury poisoning.
1713, the story opens in the Colonies and the arrival of Enoch Root, Stephenson’s more sanguine immortal Melmoth figure (who also figures in Cryptonomicon, to which this trilogy is a prelude) searching for the now aged Daniel Waterhouse and prevailing upon him to return to England to mediate in a bitter, wildfire scientific feud that has riven the ranks of the Philosophical Society which Daniel helped found. Old Daniel then spends the rest of the nine hundred-odd pages on a ship trying to leave Boston Harbour. Unfortunately the ship is beset by a large fleet of pirates and is captained by a man with a real hard-on for buccaneers and whose idea of a good time is to send as many of them as possible to a watery grave. Lively and all as the ensuing maritime manoeuvres prove to be, the bulk of the actual book is thankfully filled with the tale of Daniel’s early career in the Philosophical Society and his friendships with various historical characters, most significantly one Isaac Newton. Against the backdrop of plague, fire, revolution and restoration, we are treated to debates, feuds, intrigues, dissections, theories, revelations and the whole cloistered, obsessive world of mad, venerable old scientists who can’t blow their nose without making new and awesome discoveries and then writing treatises of thousands of closely reasoned pages on the issue, and others who blunder down disastrous dead ends ruining their lives, fortunes and reputations.
Book One ends, and Old Daniel is finally making progress for England. But never mind about him, Book Two brings us the exciting adventures of the legendary Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, and Eliza, rescued from a Turkish harem at the Siege of Venice. The two set out to make their fortune in the markets, courts and battlefields of war-torn Europe. ‘Half-Cocked’ Jack is slowly going mad from a fatal dose of the pox while Eliza has a gift for numbers, intrigue and networks which gets both of them into horrible amounts of trouble. Swashbucklingly stupid exploits and fiendishly clever stratagems which flounder and backfire keep the second book a lively read, and we even get to revisit young Daniel – well… getting on for middle-aged Daniel - in filthy, teeming bristling London.
Personally, I love this sort of thing, and I’m also a fan of Stephenson anyway, so Quicksilver was never going to be a hard sell to this particular reviewer. The giddy sense of scientific discovery fuelling the progress of civilisation, for better and for worse, is all part of the pure bliss of science fiction, and the counterpart in historical fiction can be every bit as exhilarating. The work of the Philosophical Society does not occur in a vacuum, cannot be divorced from the cultural, political, religious and economic milieu in which it is set, which enables it far more than it hampers. The scientists are not innocently unaware of the personal dangers of questioning widely held beliefs of the nature of the universe, nor are they ignorant of the admittedly unpredictable, potentially catastrophic repercussions on the wider world (or, in the case of their work on cannon and gunpowder, very predictable) it is simply the nature of the world in which they live.
Tons of historical detail abound, but Stephenson makes no effort to capture much in the way of period dialect or idiom, though he does well in capturing the rhetorical rhythms of courtiers and Natural Philosophers. The ferment of scientific endeavour and extremes of thought and behaviour in the Philosophical Society allow for a great deal of high and low comedy, while unashamedly vicious behaviour can shock and the uncertainties of life in such tumultuous times leads to much tragedy and horror. One passage consists of an hilarious description of the outrageously flamboyant dress of a foppish young aristocrat, a patron of Isaac Newton and a deadly swordsman. In the very next paragraph amusement gives way to revulsion as the same fop horribly abuses an agent in his pay.
Ending with all the principal characters in assorted unpleasant if not downright disgusting circumstances and with two equally massive books to go, it’s clear Stephenson is just getting started. Reading the whole lot looks like as potentially exhausting experience: heck just lifting the damn things could leave you prostrate, but me, I’m a glutton for punishment. show less
These books aren't everybody's cup of tea: too big, bloated and clever-clever. I love 'em. I eat 'em up. They're epic, picaresque, hilarious celebrations of wild intelligence at war with crazed irrationality, and you're not always sure which of them are the good guys at any given time.
2021 - here comes the autumn and winter of yet another plague year, time for comfort reads.
Found my original review from 2004:
This vast, sprawling historical (actually an alternative history) novel is the first in a vast, sprawling historical trilogy that ambitiously sets out to chart the rise of the age of reason and enlightenment, which, it must be noted, marks no abatement in man’s eternal quest for new and interesting way to kills each other, but which certainly saw a marked increase in the numbers of obsessive scientists suffering from mercury poisoning.
1713, the story opens in the Colonies and the arrival of Enoch Root, Stephenson’s more sanguine immortal Melmoth figure (who also figures in Cryptonomicon, to which this trilogy is a prelude) searching for the now aged Daniel Waterhouse and prevailing upon him to return to England to mediate in a bitter, wildfire scientific feud that has riven the ranks of the Philosophical Society which Daniel helped found. Old Daniel then spends the rest of the nine hundred-odd pages on a ship trying to leave Boston Harbour. Unfortunately the ship is beset by a large fleet of pirates and is captained by a man with a real hard-on for buccaneers and whose idea of a good time is to send as many of them as possible to a watery grave. Lively and all as the ensuing maritime manoeuvres prove to be, the bulk of the actual book is thankfully filled with the tale of Daniel’s early career in the Philosophical Society and his friendships with various historical characters, most significantly one Isaac Newton. Against the backdrop of plague, fire, revolution and restoration, we are treated to debates, feuds, intrigues, dissections, theories, revelations and the whole cloistered, obsessive world of mad, venerable old scientists who can’t blow their nose without making new and awesome discoveries and then writing treatises of thousands of closely reasoned pages on the issue, and others who blunder down disastrous dead ends ruining their lives, fortunes and reputations.
Book One ends, and Old Daniel is finally making progress for England. But never mind about him, Book Two brings us the exciting adventures of the legendary Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, and Eliza, rescued from a Turkish harem at the Siege of Venice. The two set out to make their fortune in the markets, courts and battlefields of war-torn Europe. ‘Half-Cocked’ Jack is slowly going mad from a fatal dose of the pox while Eliza has a gift for numbers, intrigue and networks which gets both of them into horrible amounts of trouble. Swashbucklingly stupid exploits and fiendishly clever stratagems which flounder and backfire keep the second book a lively read, and we even get to revisit young Daniel – well… getting on for middle-aged Daniel - in filthy, teeming bristling London.
Personally, I love this sort of thing, and I’m also a fan of Stephenson anyway, so Quicksilver was never going to be a hard sell to this particular reviewer. The giddy sense of scientific discovery fuelling the progress of civilisation, for better and for worse, is all part of the pure bliss of science fiction, and the counterpart in historical fiction can be every bit as exhilarating. The work of the Philosophical Society does not occur in a vacuum, cannot be divorced from the cultural, political, religious and economic milieu in which it is set, which enables it far more than it hampers. The scientists are not innocently unaware of the personal dangers of questioning widely held beliefs of the nature of the universe, nor are they ignorant of the admittedly unpredictable, potentially catastrophic repercussions on the wider world (or, in the case of their work on cannon and gunpowder, very predictable) it is simply the nature of the world in which they live.
Tons of historical detail abound, but Stephenson makes no effort to capture much in the way of period dialect or idiom, though he does well in capturing the rhetorical rhythms of courtiers and Natural Philosophers. The ferment of scientific endeavour and extremes of thought and behaviour in the Philosophical Society allow for a great deal of high and low comedy, while unashamedly vicious behaviour can shock and the uncertainties of life in such tumultuous times leads to much tragedy and horror. One passage consists of an hilarious description of the outrageously flamboyant dress of a foppish young aristocrat, a patron of Isaac Newton and a deadly swordsman. In the very next paragraph amusement gives way to revulsion as the same fop horribly abuses an agent in his pay.
Ending with all the principal characters in assorted unpleasant if not downright disgusting circumstances and with two equally massive books to go, it’s clear Stephenson is just getting started. Reading the whole lot looks like as potentially exhausting experience: heck just lifting the damn things could leave you prostrate, but me, I’m a glutton for punishment. show less
Even though I enjoy reading Neal Stephenson I was put off by the title of this book. Termination Shock signals this book is about a coming dystopia. There are plenty of novels placed in a future dystopia and I avoid almost all of them. But this was Neal Stephenson, who has had a few duds but many more excellent books so I was willing to suspend, reluctantly, my concerns. I’m glad I did because this is one of his best.The author knows what he’s talking about. He doesn’t take us into show more fantasy, he deals with truly possible events. He knows his physics, he knows computers, he knows the world so he bases his stories on what could be. Yes it’s fiction, but he’s building a case for what might really happen. Yikes.
Termination Shock takes place in a world which has already failed the primary challenge of climate change. We’ve already passed the point where slowing our use of fossil fuels will stave off climate change. It has already arrived and the new challenge is to figure out how to live in a world where warming is already here. Just being outside in daylight requires wearing suits with cooling systems. The political system has failed and the billionaires are ready to take the situation into their own hands and put together geoengineering projects to reflect some of the sun’s light. They realize there are people who recognize that some people will be negatively impacted by changing the climate - they rely on monsoons to grow crops and feed their people. So the billionaires are ready to defend their project - a big gun to put sulfur into the stratosphere. What they need are allies. They turn to those already impacted by the rise in sea level - places like the Netherlands and Venice.
Stephenson humanizes this story by introducing us to players like the Texas billionaire who has been working on this to the point where his big gun is beginning operation. The other major player is the Queen of the Netherlands, a person without political power but with something even more important: a bully pulpit and the following of many of her citizens, and access to movers and shakers around the world. She also is a modern woman, a widow, who pilots her own jet and is able to DM with her daughter and discuss intimacies only a modern woman could even imagine. Around each of them are their staff including security personnel, political advisers, and of course the Queen’s stylist given her constant public appearances.
To make this a pot boiler he introduces us to a Sihk man who is an expert in martial arts and becomes a hero in the conflict between India and China in Kashmir. While he leads a successful attack he has fallen in battle. During his long recuperation India has taken the opportunity to make him a bionic man. Eventually he heads to Texas with a weapon designed to put the big gun out of action. What Stephenson adds to the equation is a new way of conducting war - with drones, many, many drones.
Even though this was a dystopia, I got sucked into the story. I recommend the book. show less
Termination Shock takes place in a world which has already failed the primary challenge of climate change. We’ve already passed the point where slowing our use of fossil fuels will stave off climate change. It has already arrived and the new challenge is to figure out how to live in a world where warming is already here. Just being outside in daylight requires wearing suits with cooling systems. The political system has failed and the billionaires are ready to take the situation into their own hands and put together geoengineering projects to reflect some of the sun’s light. They realize there are people who recognize that some people will be negatively impacted by changing the climate - they rely on monsoons to grow crops and feed their people. So the billionaires are ready to defend their project - a big gun to put sulfur into the stratosphere. What they need are allies. They turn to those already impacted by the rise in sea level - places like the Netherlands and Venice.
Stephenson humanizes this story by introducing us to players like the Texas billionaire who has been working on this to the point where his big gun is beginning operation. The other major player is the Queen of the Netherlands, a person without political power but with something even more important: a bully pulpit and the following of many of her citizens, and access to movers and shakers around the world. She also is a modern woman, a widow, who pilots her own jet and is able to DM with her daughter and discuss intimacies only a modern woman could even imagine. Around each of them are their staff including security personnel, political advisers, and of course the Queen’s stylist given her constant public appearances.
To make this a pot boiler he introduces us to a Sihk man who is an expert in martial arts and becomes a hero in the conflict between India and China in Kashmir. While he leads a successful attack he has fallen in battle. During his long recuperation India has taken the opportunity to make him a bionic man. Eventually he heads to Texas with a weapon designed to put the big gun out of action. What Stephenson adds to the equation is a new way of conducting war - with drones, many, many drones.
Even though this was a dystopia, I got sucked into the story. I recommend the book. show less
This is a magnificent example of serious hard science fiction based around one simple idea - the world is to be destroyed and humanity has two years to prepare its response. I enjoyed it as welcome relief from what I call the Brin-Mieville syndrome - the idea that SF and future fantasy has to pile idea on idea like Pelion upon Ossa in order to stimulate the geek CNS without any coherent order underpinning it.
Not that this book is unflawed. Its first two sections are far superior to the show more third, based on Earth 2.0 five thousand years after the apocalypse. This too falls into fashionable Brinnery as a standard show case for extrapolations of technologies being currently invented or developed by no doubt breathlessly enthusiastic pals of the author.
On the other hand, Stephenson does not mention the Singularity once - oh praise! oh glory! - and puts artificial intelligence precisely in its place as servant of men and not man's master. The cultural concession, of course, is to the current hysteria about existential risk but we can forgive that because otherwise there would be no cause for the narrative at all.
Unfortunately, because of the 'spoiler issue' which we respect as a matter of honour to later readers, we cannot really spend a lot of time being very specific either about why this book is so good or why aspects of it are flawed.
If hints will do, we can say that the flaws are intellectual related to the actualities of global society and politics and arise out of the heavily US-centric vision of humanity and the fairly obvious commentaries within the text on current American cultural torments (which are becoming increasingly less interesting to non-American readers).
To Stephenson's credit, he pays tribute to the Russian contribution to the future survival of humanity but the Chinese are virtually non-existent yet would have as equal a weight as any other major spacefaring nation in such a crisis. Stephenson has not quite worked out that the US no longer quite matters as much as he assumes nor that the sort of political deal involved in the Casting of Lots would not last more than five minutes under really existing democratic political conditions.
The politics and sociology are thus much weaker than the technology and hard science in the book but (though I am not qualified to comment on the latter as true or false) the imaginative extrapolations of contemporary thinking in space exploration, aerodynamics, genetics and epigenetics, asteroid and comet 'mining' and geo-engineering and terraforming are impressive.
If the last third is a showy entertaining romp through the seven archetypes (the progeny of the 'seven eves'), the first two thirds represent a serious, well written, heroic (rare these days) and thoughtful story of human relationships under extreme existential threat.
Later, Stephenson refers to this story (under conditions five thousand years later) as the Epic. This is a clue to his method of creating a human story out of the archetypes who are nevertheless presented as real persons in real tension in a real situation (albeit that we know that it is unreal). His prejudice is in the direction of engineers and scientists and against bureaucrats and politicians (the President of the US, a triangulating monster of narcissism and paranoia, is deeply unpleasant yet critical to the narrative) but he recognises that humanity by its very nature has to include the genes of such people. Or is he just plain wrong on that assumption? It is a moot question.
In the symbolic archetypal universe he creates, four eves represent 'good' and three eves represent 'dodgy'. He, intentionally or not, creates a flawed pantheon like that of the Greeks but as not-gods who can represent human drives in an accentuated way. If Eros represented a certain inner impulse, Dinah represents a certain way of dealing with the world - all the archetypes and many of the characters who surround them are symbolic representations of ways to deal with the world, whether of matter (the tendency of the 'good') or other persons (the tendency of the 'dodgy').
Within the model, it is noticeable that the tension is not only between humanity and material reality but between a vision of the world as a material reality and one which is symbolically created. The novel is thus a paradox - a symbolic created world which tends to assert the primacy of a humanity that looks on the world materially first and symbolically second.
It is a reaction, in this respect, to the SF that goes inward into virtual worlds and contests with AI or which is interested in constructing alien environments that re-envision humanity. Stephenson is not really re-envisioning humanity at core but envisioning humanity under materially extreme conditions.
The 'good', in rough summary, is 'get it done' pragmatism, selfless disciplined heroism (made 'archetypically' into a Russian virtue but as easily a Republican military one), engineering nous and scientific knowledge. The necessary 'dodgy' aspects of humanity are passive-aggressive caring (wheedling or manipulation as a critic may see it), political machination and devious survival instincts capable of anything to survive - basically, sociopathy.
Many readers may wonder why no one takes responsibility for simply 'taking out' at least two of those 'eves' early on. The 'good' characters are remarkable for the insane trust they put in their rivals but now we are getting too close to spoilers. Let us just say that the propensity to naivete of our society of nerds is certainly true to life.
Many people have commented on the dominance of female voices in the book. My first reaction was to feel great pleasure that a male had started writing about women as a strong capable individuals who could cry without shame, without introducing fashionable feminist cant or matriarchalism as the guilty over-compensation for being tragically born a healthy white male.
However, these strong characters are still archetypes and not to be trusted. The shadow over all of them are male heroes (I can say this) who undertake the most physically dangerous and ultimately productive (for future survival) missions - after all, the 'real' leader is Markus (a European who seems to embody a balance of the good virtues spread amongst the four 'good' Eves and displaces one from a leadership role). Similarly, it is a male 'Doob' who has the scientific insight that creates the conditions for ultimate survival.
Throughout the book, a careful gender balance is maintained with equal sexual relations and a very free and healthy attitude to sex but the dominant values are culturally (historically) masculine - straight forward, pragmatic and disciplined. It is as if Stephenson wants humanity to weed out or contain the deviousness and manipulation that Nietzsche identified as the culture of the weak but then accepts that humanity is not humanity without it ... the resulting society is thus only partly the dream of all nerds: it is Arthur C. Clarke mated with Asimov but the rational is having tiresomely and constantly to deal with the irrational at enormous cost in lives and resources.
In this sense, the novel is a sign of our times - a frustrated educated middle class attempting to hang on to rational discourse in worlds where irrationality is inbuilt into the human condition and maximised by modern communications technology, both prior to the Apocalypse and after it.
It is noticeable that Stephenson makes social media out to be highly problematic in the management of the apocalypse on earth and then of the survival of the spacers before making it clear that, in the Earth 2.0 section, the spacers had achieved enormous engineering feats but had not recovered the technology to reproduce the world of Apple and Samsung. I suspect we are supposed to draw the conclusion that humanity does not need the chatter of the social internet to progress.
In some respects the book is not about space at all but about modern America. The 'simpatico' for Russo-Chinese heroism is perhaps the most unexpected element in the book but, looked at from a certain vantage point, Russians and Chinese can look peculiarly rational and disciplined compared to the America of the Tea Party, flag banning and political correctness. The President is horribly like one possible imagining from outside of a certain H. Clinton. The Russians (though oddly not the Chinese) have their cultural influence but are rather quickly disposed of once brute survival is no longer in question. In fact, one wonders if the Russians are not mere stand-ins for a more American remembrance of Apollo space heroes.
All in all, an excellent and stimulating novel that deserved to be a US bestseller, filled with ideas and stimulation about not only possible futures (which hard SF does well) but the present condition of America, even if that part of the story is becoming to seem somewhat parochial in the rest of the English-speaking world. It is good to see SF returning to the simple viable premise and (mostly) resisting the temptation to deliver idea after idea without narrative (a frequent word used by Stephenson as if critiquing his contemporaries) in order to create an 'epic' that reflects our own time.
The only warning to the general reader is that this is very hard SF in places. Stephenson is good at keeping the story moving to the extent that it is a page-turner even at its most dense but non-nerds will have several pages of seriously detailed technology to skip through to get to the narrative meat.
The best strategy is to skim read these sections and leave them to the nerds. Let them flow over you and pick up the meaning in the sub-conscious and just move on to the story. After a while the technicalities become no more important than the technicalities of how a fridge works but you can still understand what the technology basically does - as one understands that a fridge chills food and drink.
My own suspicion is that this will become a classic and that it contains sufficient cohesion and complexity to be the sort of book that could profitably be studied in schools and colleges to educate literary types about scientific thinking and nerds about narrative.
It might also return some confidence to the diminishing numbers of rational men and women in America and perhaps give them some back bone. At a certain point, it might have saved a lot of misery for humanity if a certain person had been pushed out of the air lock on arrival ... but nice liberal people do not do that sort of thing. This may be why their empires always turn to dust in the end and the book ends on an implicit threat to come - it does not come from space. show less
Not that this book is unflawed. Its first two sections are far superior to the show more third, based on Earth 2.0 five thousand years after the apocalypse. This too falls into fashionable Brinnery as a standard show case for extrapolations of technologies being currently invented or developed by no doubt breathlessly enthusiastic pals of the author.
On the other hand, Stephenson does not mention the Singularity once - oh praise! oh glory! - and puts artificial intelligence precisely in its place as servant of men and not man's master. The cultural concession, of course, is to the current hysteria about existential risk but we can forgive that because otherwise there would be no cause for the narrative at all.
Unfortunately, because of the 'spoiler issue' which we respect as a matter of honour to later readers, we cannot really spend a lot of time being very specific either about why this book is so good or why aspects of it are flawed.
If hints will do, we can say that the flaws are intellectual related to the actualities of global society and politics and arise out of the heavily US-centric vision of humanity and the fairly obvious commentaries within the text on current American cultural torments (which are becoming increasingly less interesting to non-American readers).
To Stephenson's credit, he pays tribute to the Russian contribution to the future survival of humanity but the Chinese are virtually non-existent yet would have as equal a weight as any other major spacefaring nation in such a crisis. Stephenson has not quite worked out that the US no longer quite matters as much as he assumes nor that the sort of political deal involved in the Casting of Lots would not last more than five minutes under really existing democratic political conditions.
The politics and sociology are thus much weaker than the technology and hard science in the book but (though I am not qualified to comment on the latter as true or false) the imaginative extrapolations of contemporary thinking in space exploration, aerodynamics, genetics and epigenetics, asteroid and comet 'mining' and geo-engineering and terraforming are impressive.
If the last third is a showy entertaining romp through the seven archetypes (the progeny of the 'seven eves'), the first two thirds represent a serious, well written, heroic (rare these days) and thoughtful story of human relationships under extreme existential threat.
Later, Stephenson refers to this story (under conditions five thousand years later) as the Epic. This is a clue to his method of creating a human story out of the archetypes who are nevertheless presented as real persons in real tension in a real situation (albeit that we know that it is unreal). His prejudice is in the direction of engineers and scientists and against bureaucrats and politicians (the President of the US, a triangulating monster of narcissism and paranoia, is deeply unpleasant yet critical to the narrative) but he recognises that humanity by its very nature has to include the genes of such people. Or is he just plain wrong on that assumption? It is a moot question.
In the symbolic archetypal universe he creates, four eves represent 'good' and three eves represent 'dodgy'. He, intentionally or not, creates a flawed pantheon like that of the Greeks but as not-gods who can represent human drives in an accentuated way. If Eros represented a certain inner impulse, Dinah represents a certain way of dealing with the world - all the archetypes and many of the characters who surround them are symbolic representations of ways to deal with the world, whether of matter (the tendency of the 'good') or other persons (the tendency of the 'dodgy').
Within the model, it is noticeable that the tension is not only between humanity and material reality but between a vision of the world as a material reality and one which is symbolically created. The novel is thus a paradox - a symbolic created world which tends to assert the primacy of a humanity that looks on the world materially first and symbolically second.
It is a reaction, in this respect, to the SF that goes inward into virtual worlds and contests with AI or which is interested in constructing alien environments that re-envision humanity. Stephenson is not really re-envisioning humanity at core but envisioning humanity under materially extreme conditions.
The 'good', in rough summary, is 'get it done' pragmatism, selfless disciplined heroism (made 'archetypically' into a Russian virtue but as easily a Republican military one), engineering nous and scientific knowledge. The necessary 'dodgy' aspects of humanity are passive-aggressive caring (wheedling or manipulation as a critic may see it), political machination and devious survival instincts capable of anything to survive - basically, sociopathy.
Many readers may wonder why no one takes responsibility for simply 'taking out' at least two of those 'eves' early on. The 'good' characters are remarkable for the insane trust they put in their rivals but now we are getting too close to spoilers. Let us just say that the propensity to naivete of our society of nerds is certainly true to life.
Many people have commented on the dominance of female voices in the book. My first reaction was to feel great pleasure that a male had started writing about women as a strong capable individuals who could cry without shame, without introducing fashionable feminist cant or matriarchalism as the guilty over-compensation for being tragically born a healthy white male.
However, these strong characters are still archetypes and not to be trusted. The shadow over all of them are male heroes (I can say this) who undertake the most physically dangerous and ultimately productive (for future survival) missions - after all, the 'real' leader is Markus (a European who seems to embody a balance of the good virtues spread amongst the four 'good' Eves and displaces one from a leadership role). Similarly, it is a male 'Doob' who has the scientific insight that creates the conditions for ultimate survival.
Throughout the book, a careful gender balance is maintained with equal sexual relations and a very free and healthy attitude to sex but the dominant values are culturally (historically) masculine - straight forward, pragmatic and disciplined. It is as if Stephenson wants humanity to weed out or contain the deviousness and manipulation that Nietzsche identified as the culture of the weak but then accepts that humanity is not humanity without it ... the resulting society is thus only partly the dream of all nerds: it is Arthur C. Clarke mated with Asimov but the rational is having tiresomely and constantly to deal with the irrational at enormous cost in lives and resources.
In this sense, the novel is a sign of our times - a frustrated educated middle class attempting to hang on to rational discourse in worlds where irrationality is inbuilt into the human condition and maximised by modern communications technology, both prior to the Apocalypse and after it.
It is noticeable that Stephenson makes social media out to be highly problematic in the management of the apocalypse on earth and then of the survival of the spacers before making it clear that, in the Earth 2.0 section, the spacers had achieved enormous engineering feats but had not recovered the technology to reproduce the world of Apple and Samsung. I suspect we are supposed to draw the conclusion that humanity does not need the chatter of the social internet to progress.
In some respects the book is not about space at all but about modern America. The 'simpatico' for Russo-Chinese heroism is perhaps the most unexpected element in the book but, looked at from a certain vantage point, Russians and Chinese can look peculiarly rational and disciplined compared to the America of the Tea Party, flag banning and political correctness. The President is horribly like one possible imagining from outside of a certain H. Clinton. The Russians (though oddly not the Chinese) have their cultural influence but are rather quickly disposed of once brute survival is no longer in question. In fact, one wonders if the Russians are not mere stand-ins for a more American remembrance of Apollo space heroes.
All in all, an excellent and stimulating novel that deserved to be a US bestseller, filled with ideas and stimulation about not only possible futures (which hard SF does well) but the present condition of America, even if that part of the story is becoming to seem somewhat parochial in the rest of the English-speaking world. It is good to see SF returning to the simple viable premise and (mostly) resisting the temptation to deliver idea after idea without narrative (a frequent word used by Stephenson as if critiquing his contemporaries) in order to create an 'epic' that reflects our own time.
The only warning to the general reader is that this is very hard SF in places. Stephenson is good at keeping the story moving to the extent that it is a page-turner even at its most dense but non-nerds will have several pages of seriously detailed technology to skip through to get to the narrative meat.
The best strategy is to skim read these sections and leave them to the nerds. Let them flow over you and pick up the meaning in the sub-conscious and just move on to the story. After a while the technicalities become no more important than the technicalities of how a fridge works but you can still understand what the technology basically does - as one understands that a fridge chills food and drink.
My own suspicion is that this will become a classic and that it contains sufficient cohesion and complexity to be the sort of book that could profitably be studied in schools and colleges to educate literary types about scientific thinking and nerds about narrative.
It might also return some confidence to the diminishing numbers of rational men and women in America and perhaps give them some back bone. At a certain point, it might have saved a lot of misery for humanity if a certain person had been pushed out of the air lock on arrival ... but nice liberal people do not do that sort of thing. This may be why their empires always turn to dust in the end and the book ends on an implicit threat to come - it does not come from space. show less
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