Tea with Neal Stephenson

His books are multi-layered adventure stories with tomorrow’s technology mixing with yesterday’s archetypes to threaten a world that’s never quite as we know it, but Neal Stephenson still has to visit London to promote his latest best-seller. Mary Branscombe uncovered him in a Kensington hotel and discovered a dark-eyed and intense man with a very dry sense of humour and a penchant for painfully descriptive neologisms.

Neal Stephenson has only written four-and-a-half novels (including, Interface, a collaboration with his uncle under the pen-name Stephen Bury) but Snow Crash was probably the most successful SF novel of 1993 and 1994 put together, establishing him as a trendy, must-read author who gets his short stories into Wired and Time magazine. Stephenson enjoys the sort of mainstream success normally reserved for Terry Pratchett and Iain Banks’ non-SF novels; The Diamond Age looks set to repeat Snow Crash’s success and his earlier ecological thriller, Zodiac, has just been published in this country. His books touch on everything from virtual reality, nanotech, computer viruses and how to keep credit card transactions secret, to teenage rebellion, martial arts, personal morality and the inner meaning of fairy tales. And they’re damn good reads as well. We asked him about the secret of his success.

In the bookshops, we’re seeing Snow Crash and The Diamond Age in the mainstream section rather than on the science fiction shelves. Is your all your work SF or do you see Zodiac and The Big U and Interface as being completely different sorts of novels?

No, but those are the two that have been labelled and marketed as science fiction. I try not to be label conscious when I’m writing. Arguably everything I’ve ever written could be classified as science fiction and arguably it could all be categorised as fiction that has a lot of technical stuff in. If you look at it there's no real logic to the way the labels work and Michael Crichton writes what could very easily be described as science fiction but it's simply not labelled and marketed as such.

You haven’t published any short stories in the traditional SF markets. Instead you had Spew (a story about monitoring everything from shopping habits to cable TV) in Wired and Simoleons (about the development of cyber-cash) in Time Magazine. Are you deliberately looking for new markets for your writing?

I don’t know much about short stories - I don’t write many of them, I don’t think I’m particularly good at them, I haven’t published many. The one in Wired, I don’t think there’s anything unusual about that - they like to publish fiction but they don’t very often come across any that’s really suitable. And the one in Time was a complete fluke, it was a shocking fluke. They were doing this special issue on technology, they decided they wanted some fiction and they hired me as the “cyberlebrity” of the moment to write it for them. You can’t ring up Time magazine and ask if they want to publish fiction!

Are you planning to turn Spew into a novel?

No. I realise it’s got a sort of indefinite ending but that’s not to be interpreted as a sign that I’m going to continue it.

Your main characters are often very active, using martial arts, riding inflatable boats round harbours and diving in polluted water. Are any of these the sort of antics you get up to - how much of you is there in the books?

Not very much! The character in Zodiac was loosely inspired by a good friend of mine who did some of that kind of work and so he was able to help me out with some of the details - really all of the details. A lot of people are frequently surprised to find out how different writers are from the characters in their books, because I think sometimes people may underestimate the amount of creative work and imaginative work that goes in to writing a piece of fiction.

So do you get your inspiration from anywhere in particular?

I am more and more attracted to the ancient Greek view that it comes from the muse who is capricious and unpredictable, because there’s no logic to it at all.

There’s a very strong sense of place in Zodiac - Boston is virtually one of the characters in the story. I went to college in Boston and I lived there for a while after college and compared to other locations I could mention in the United States, Boston does have architectural style and a feel that is entirely its own. I think it helps to anchor any book if you can try to provide some clear description of the setting.

In nearly all of your books you have a fairly cynical view of government as manipulative and politicians as corrupt. Are your personal politics reflected in your writing?

I think that if you do even a cursory reading of 20th century history you can’t help but come away with a somewhat sceptical attitude towards large governments and government power in general and that doesn’t have to glow out of any fundamental philosophical or political belief system. It’s just very simple - if there’s a big beast that keeps running around and eating people in plain sight and knocking you around and threatening you then you can see and agree that the big beast is nasty and scary and ought to be caged or done away with without having to base that opinion on any kind of political system of belief system. So my position at this point is that I’m really sceptical of any kind of totalising ideology and that includes Libertarianism - but it also includes just about any governmental system you can think of. Actually, the more I go along, the more respect I have for some of the really old tried and tested political systems like the United States constitution, the parliamentary system here. They’re both imperfect and they’ve both occasionally been vulnerable to excesses of government power but as we’ve gotten more experience and become more sceptical of government power ,I think those systems still have a lot to offer.

The technical side of your books is always convincing, you seem to know a lot about exotic weapons as well as cryptography and computer networks. Do you hack?

Well, I've been programming computers since I was fourteen. Most of my experience in the last decade has been on the Macintosh. I'm trying to develop some facility in Unix and Internet-related coding but that's sort of a future project. But along the way I've been reasonably fluent in probably eight different computer languages. So while I haven't actually sat down and written cryptocode I'd like to think I have enough grounding in math and computers to be able to give a convincing account of how that stuff might work, what would and wouldn’t work - what the bugs would be.

I’ve never been paid to write code, which may be all for the better! I come from a family with a lot of techies. One of my grandfathers was a physicist and the other was a biochemist, my father is an electrical engineering professor and I’ve got various other scientists in the family and I grew up in a town that’s a one-industry town centered on a technical university so all when I was growing up of my friends’ daddies and mommies were PhDs and hard scientists. Wherever you grow up, you think that’s normal, so that’s what I thought was normal until I left. I’ve kind of been immersed in that world ever since I was born and I feel reasonably comfortable with it. I studied physics in college and moved over into geography because they were doing a lot of computer stuff at that time and it was a good way, probably the best way to get a chance to just play with computers (particularly graphical computers). I did some work as a research assistant during my summers in physics labs but I’ve never used my degree or my computer programming skills to actually make money.

How feasible is the science in your books - is it hard science or flights of fancy? Do you expect to see any of it in real life?

I think that the best approach is to stay with hard science as far as it can go and then if you want to go on a flight of fancy try to blur the dividing line a little bit. So, in Snow Crash for example, the science and the computer science is mostly pretty straight and the historical research is all for real - the only thing that’s fancy is just that one extra step of imagining that an ancient virus could actually infect the brain!

Another example that’s come up just recently is in The Diamond Age. The nanotech in that book has been vetted by the leading experts in the field like Drexler (author of Engines of Creation), and Merkle (a researcher at Xerox who’s worked out the major equations describing how nanotechnology would work) gave it a good review after the fact but the one complaint Merkle has is with the notion of a centralised feed system (which I won’t explain because it’s in the book!). That that notion is not really technically sound because it wouldn’t be that hard for every house to have its own source and you wouldn’t have to have it all networked in that way. And I have no doubt that that’s technically correct statement because he knows much more than I do! However! In a way it’s not exactly the point here, because the question is, suppose you were designing a new society that was going to be built around nanotech you might - in fact you probably would - feel the need for some kind of central control mechanism and so you might build it that way.

There are many examples of technologies in our world that aren’t necessarily the most logical way to do something. It’s not what you would do if you were starting from scratch but it’s what we ended up with because it’s path dependent.

Another point I would make regarding technical accuracy is that in The Diamond Age the Drummers are presented as being able to use some kind of collective mind to break into the most advanced crytpto schemes - well there’s a great deal of speculation there. On the other hand we’ve all seen examples of math prodigies who could do amazing things in ways that couldn’t quite be explained so it’s at least got some grounding.

Do you see nanotech as being the next big development, rather than Artificial Intelligence or a singularity with people uploading themselves into computers?

I'm pretty resistant to any scenario that presumes some kind of equivalence between the brain and computers. It just seems too schematic to me and whenever people have these really schematic ideas about what’s going to happen in the future, the reality always turns out to be much more complicated. Reality is an adaptive system; simple things don't happen in reality, reality changes as things are happening and particularly as regards anything to do with brains and artificial intelligence - I'm sort of a follower of Roger Penrose when it comes to all that.

I think it's possible to be very sceptical about artificial intelligence without being mystical or unscientific at the same time. The predictions of the strong AI people have been just so pathetically far off the mark, so consistently for such a long time that I think one has to assume that there's something there that they're not getting, that we're not getting and one therefore has to take a cautious sceptical approach.

Were you trying to achieve anything in particular with Diamond Age, like recreating the Victorian novel, following the lives of the characters like Dickens?

Well that I guess it's true that that aspect of the book is a little Dickensian; that was not a conscious effort to be Dickensian because I've always has a bent for writing very long complex novels so I suppose that writing a pseudo-Victorian novel gave me the license to give in to that tendency!

I don't know if there ever is any one clear pre-existing goal that one pursues in these cases. It just struck me as an interesting idea and I thought that I would have a go at it; I did want to do something with nanotech because after reading Drexler's book I felt that it would be very hard to responsibly write any science fiction again that didn't largely revolve around nanotech so I did want to explore that, see what could be done with it.

You obviously don’t see nanotech as being the solution to our every problem because otherwise you’d have to write about post-scarcity utopias where there aren't any problems left and it's terribly terribly boring...

Like Star Trek? Yeah! Well, there's a really fundamental split there, in one's attitudes about human nature. The Star Trek attitude is that the only reason we're nasty to each other is because sometimes we run out of stuff and that if we stopped running out of stuff we would all stop being nasty to each other and then our only problems would occur when our spaceship inadvertently ran into a tachyon storm out in the middle of nowhere! And I don't buy that view, I don't see any reason to buy that view of human nature.

I mean we're very close to a post-scarcity future right now - at least in my country. There's poverty but there's not starvation, except in really odd places, and there's disease but there’s not plague, there's not people dying in the streets and there's homelessness but most people can find a place, can find a roof over their heads if they need it - it may be in a homeless shelter or something nasty but anyway it’s something - and it certainly hasn't stopped people being nasty to each other. I mean look at OJ - he wasn't lacking for anything, nobody in that sick sub-culture in LA was lacking for anything but all it did was remove all the limit from how tawdry they could be to each other. That's all post-scarcity did for them, break down the barriers that kept them from being as grotesque as they could theoretically be. So I guess one of the points that's being made in The Diamond Age and it's kind of a sledgehammer point, is that you've got this group of people, the thetes, who have everything they need in the way of food, shelter and even information and they're still miserable wretches, just like Dickensian miserable wretches.

But Nell escapes. Does that mean you believe in the redeeming power of education?

Sure. I don't think education by itself is a panacea, I think in general that it can raise people up out of the really nasty primitive lifestyle. But there are plenty of educated people who behave badly, so I think there's also a need for some kind of cultural norms that encourage some sort of ethical system, what ever it may be - whether it's based on scientific rationality or some kind of religion or whatever. I think that there is a need for ethics and morals if you will, but education is a good start.

Talking of education, at the end of Snow Crash we’re left wondering what might happen to YT and in The Diamond Age there’s this prim and proper pseudo-Victorian schoolma’am racing her wheelchair and coming out with phrases like “chiseled spam”. So tell us, is Miss Matheson YT?

I prefer not to issue a definitive opinion on that.

So she might be?

I prefer not to issue a definitive opinion on the subject!

Moving on to Interface, the novel you wrote with your uncle, is the marketing of politicians in that book based on anything in particular?

It’s very simple straightforward observation of reality in the United States, slight exaggeration and out comes a novel. They came very close to doing this with Reagan in his last election campaign, they actually had a real-time polling system hooked up during one of his debates and the results were being telephoned to Ed Meese who was standing about six feet away from Reagan just off stage and the only thing that kept them from closing that feedback loop was the six-foot distance between Meese and Reagan so it’s hardly science fiction or even fiction to talk about closing that loop.

Why did you pick the name Stephen Bury?

Well he couldn’t use his real name because he’s an academic who writes a lot of books and his publisher made an ultimatum that it would have serious consequences on their future relationship if his name began to appear on tawdry novels! So we had to come up with a pen name from him and this was before my name was worth anything and we just thought “well let’s go for it”. If we could even get one or ten percent of the Tom Clancy-Stephen King market - the airport book market - we’ll be rich so let’s come up with something really short and pithy that can be put in very large letters on the cover of a novel, or a whole series of them! So it was just pure mendacity and of course now we’re being heavily second guessed and there are those who think that we should go ahead and start putting my name on these books, combined with some fake name for my uncle but we’re going to stick with Stephen Bury because in the science fiction world everybody knows so there’s no point. It’s not going to help because everybody already knows!

So there’ll be more Stephen Bury books?

Yeah, we just finished one called The Cobweb which is going to be out in the States next summer and we have ideas for more, it’s just we’re taking a breather from it now for a year or two, we may get back to it later.

Cobweb is set in a Twin Cities area in Iowa in 1990 and one of the cities is a university town - lofty and affluent, up on the bluffs, oak trees and gothic buildings - and the other one is down in the flood plain and it’s a really depressed industrial town with rendering plants and packing houses and there’s a deputy county sheriff in this town who becomes aware that some of the Iraqi foreign students are engaging in some highly disturbing extra-curricular activities. It’s the adventures of this sheriff trying to deal with this problem when nobody else takes it seriously.

Are you working on any other books yourself?

No. I need to get back into a productive cycle again but at the moment I’m writing a screenplay, I’ve written a script for a CD-ROM game - of course we don’t call it a game! Actually the term I prefer to use is “edfotainucation”! It’s an edfotainucational piece set in Seattle in the present day and it’s a noir type of psychological thriller, it has a lot to do with memory, how our memories work and putting an audio-visual interface on that.

The production company is Shadowcatcher Entertainment and it’s a newish company in Seattle that was founded by some people who got out of Hollywood because they couldn’t take it any more. Any time you try to produce anything where a couple of millions of dollars are required, it’s funny how those people with millions of dollars get particular about who they give it out to! I can’t imagine why it’s that way but they’re just ever so cautious about writing out two million dollar cheques.

Do you think media like CD-ROM will ever replace books?

No. I think they will replace certain types of books, I think they will replace reference books, do-it-yourself books, cookbooks, atlases - anything where there’s cross-referencing, where there’s lots of graphics but I think that’ll just clear the field for good old linear narratives. I’m quite convinced people will be reading novels on paper a thousand years from now. I think it’s a technology that’s well developed and pretty much reached perfection and it will pretty much keep on going.

What about films? Is work progressing on the film of Snow Crash and are you involved?

That is also happening, but that script has been written by another fellow, which is fine with me. I was hired to write an unrelated original screen play. The script is written and so again it comes down to trying to figure out why these people are so cautious about writing 40 or 50 million dollar cheques for the budget. But there are some people on the job in LA who are as good as anyone in the business at handling that sort of political stuff so they’re busily trying to come up with these machiavellian schemes for convincing the people in question that there’s nothing better they could possibly do with that particular 40 or 50 million dollars.

Do you have any strong feelings about actors for particular roles?

The first thing that has to be said is that my opinion is completely irrelevant! That is a decision that will be made partly by the director but largely by the people who write out the cheque for 40 or 50 million dollars. As far as I know the only person who’s physically right for the part of Hiro is Roland Gift, he’s the only person I’ve seen who could really come anywhere close to matching the way Hiro looks - but that’s just rank speculation. I have the feeling that people who make the movie will be a lot less concerned with matching the description in the book to the character than they are with marquee value so I wouldn’t be surprised if Hiro underwent some racial changes. Other than that I think Patrick Stewart would make a good librarian.

Do you have any idea how long it might take?

The complications of producing it are such that from the time that the fateful cheque is written out to the time they actually begin shooting will probably be a year, which is a pretty long time but it would take that long just to organise the whole production and work out the details with ILM regarding the effects and from the time that filming begins to when it comes out could easily be an additional year, so - not any time soon.

There’s such a lot going on in your books that it can be difficult to pick out the themes or the messages. Do you feel that people understand your books or are there issues that consistently get misunderstood?

I think that a lot of people felt that Snow Crash was an all out attack on all forms of religious belief which it wasn’t. It was more an attempt to point out a distinction between religions that are kind of viral and not based on any kind of rational thinking versus ones that are, as the Muslims would say, “Religions of the Book”, meaning ones that are based on fixed text and immutable and from an informational point of view more hygienic!

That’s one skewed interpretation that seems to come up frequently and another one that I get all the time is the d-word, dystopia. It seems as though a lot of people can’t talk about this kind of fiction without framing it terms of a dystopian view of the future and so I’m constantly pointing out that the twentieth century has been pretty damn dystopian and nothing shown in any of my books is as dystopian as a good part of the world has been for a good part of the twentieth century. I don’t go to either extreme, I don’t believe in the Star Trek world and I don’t believe in the George Orwell world either. People will be doing good things and bad things to each other and there’s going to be a really fine granularity to it. You won’t have entire continents suffering from massive persecutions, but you may have a lot of individual people who are being persecuted within a family or a small community instead. I just think that the future’s going to be really, really complicated.

The (snow) crash guide to Neal Stephenson

The Big U (1984)

A gonzo campus caper described by John Clute as “rather in the style of National Lampoon’s Animal House” only with intelligence.

“The Big U is essentially sophomoric campus humour, a few worthy moments, a few bright spots but probably not worth seeking out.”

Zodiac (1988)

An ecological thriller, following the strange adventures of Sangamon Taylor as he tries to avoid being poisoned by the unethical chemical companies or sacrificed by the drug-crazed heavy metal fans before he has time to save the world (again).

“Zodiac is a fun book and a book I still have great affection for.”

Snow Crash (1992)

The future of virtual reality and the end of the nation state collide as the katana-wielding Hiro Protagonist and the hip skateboard courier YT bike across America running from the prehistoric computer virus that infects the human mind.

“Snow Crash is the famous one and it’s probably worthless for me to introduce it.”

Interface (1994 - with J Frederick George as Stephen Bury)

The conspiracy that controls all the other conspiracies decides that the best way to make money is to control a US president, not just assassinate one. Take a senator with a stroke, implant a radio-controlled microchip and you can react to the polls in real time but can the senator stay human?

“Interface is meant to be an entertaining but not stupid book - I hope that’s what it turned out to be.”

The Diamond Age; or, a Young lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995)

In the nanotech age of plenty, in a South China slum on the other side of tomorrow a streetwise tearaway steals a book to give to his sister Nell and the Illustrated Primer changes her life and that of its inventor. We said “violence, adventure, sex, serious hardware and an intriguing plot - it's all here and it makes an excellent story.”

“Diamond Age is my take on nanotechnology which I think is going to be very important and on the way it’s a continuation of some the thoughts on society and culture that are there in Snow Crash.”

(Published in SFX magazine)