Neal Stephenson

It would be quite unusual for me to get deep into a project and then shitcan it. One of the advantages of having done this for a while is that I have a better sense than I used to of when something is or isn\'t working. Until I developed that sense, this was a pretty dicey career for me, both in terms of paying the rent, and emotional wear and tear.

They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword.

You don\'t want your readers seeing easy connections; it becomes a distraction.

Whenever I get distracted or bored, my eyes wander over to that chalkboard and I read the words. Some of them grow on me, and others annoy me. I attack the latter with eraser and chalk, and keep nudging at them until I like the way they look and sound. Others never make the cut at all and simply get erased. Perhaps one day I will sell these on eBay to RPG players who need names for characters or alien races.

But I\'m not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I\'d developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that\'s what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it\'s what I wrote.

In the case of Anathem, most of the research had to do with philosophy and metaphysics. Reading this sort of thing has never been my strong suit, so I actually had to be somewhat more \'organized and results-driven\' than is my habit. I just made up my mind that I was going to have to read some of these philosophy tomes, and I forced myself to read something like 10 pages a day until I had bashed my way through them.

Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man's work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes.

Having a persistent nature is part of being human. Otherwise we wouldn\'t be able to speak of knowing another person, or loving them, or being their friend or enemy or rival.

What writers of fantasy, science fiction, and much historical fiction do for a living is different from what writers of so-called literary or other kinds of fiction do. The name of the game in F/SF/HF is creating fictional worlds and then telling particular stories set in those worlds. If you\'re doing it right, then the reader, coming to the end of the story, will say, \'Hey, wait a minute, there are so many other stories that could be told in this universe!\' And that\'s how we get the sprawling, coherent fictional universes that fandom is all about.

[Regarding] the soul, I\'m a little wary of any discourse on that topic that pretends to have an answer, so I tend to keep my musings to myself. There is interesting, legitimate metaphysical work on the topic going at least as far back as Leibniz and continuing today, following the theme that consciousness, or at least computation, might be at least as fundamental as phenomena such as space, time, energy, and matter, which are the usual subject matter of physics. I follow that sort of thing with interest but with very modest expectations that answers will be arrived at during my lifetime.

The less attractive the character, the more I enjoyed writing them. Officious bureaucrats and PowerPoint weasels are where it\'s at for me.

At the beginning of the project, I wasn\'t certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I\'d devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.

The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I\'m writing about topics I find interesting, so I can\'t gripe too much.

The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard's unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.

Just as an informal, nonscientific observation, most people\'s personalities don\'t seem to change very much during their lives. There are exceptions in the case of people who go through hugely traumatic events or suffer from brain injury or disease. Some would argue that religious conversions can have deep personality-altering effects. But these are all exceptions to the rule.

Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-deion issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world.

A species has to become pretty intellectually advanced in order to grasp the concept of death in the abstract, and to dream up the idea of immortality. Long before that (in evolutionary terms) all species with brains have the survival instinct in some form. So, I am just saying that there are many existent proofs of species that have one, but not the other.

Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.

Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows and special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored.

Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.

\'It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats,\' Vic says, looking through his magic sight. \'Five guys on it. Headed our way.\' He fires another round. \'Correction. Four guys on it.\' Boom. \'Correction, they're not headed our way anymore.\' Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. \'Correction. No boat.\'

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ? its DNA ? Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile line of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.

So, you\'re worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?

Am I a technocrat? Im just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?

I really am just trying to tell stories. But stories are often grounded in larger events and themes. They don\'t have to be - there\'s a big literature of trailer-park, kitchen-table fiction that\'s just about goings-on in the lives of ordinary people - but my own tastes run toward stories that in addition to being good stories are set against a backdrop that is interesting to read and learn about.

Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?

Coming up with lectures is a huge amount of work. I was willing to do one lecture for Gresham because I was honored to have been invited, but to create lectures for a class would probably require that I shut down everything else and concentrate on lectures for a couple of years. Then there would be many, many other skills that I\'d have to learn, such as how to sit through a faculty meeting, how to deal with students, etc. It is really not in the cards for me. It\'s not who I am or what I do. I\'m a novelist.

Give me an adventure. I\'m not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I\'m old.\' \'I can\'t predict the future,\' I said, \'but based on what little I know so far, I\'m afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing.\' \'Great!\' \'Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.

If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?

I actually don\'t think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.