George first turned me on to Neal Stephenson when
he lent me the book Cryptonomicon. What an
amazing book! I never wanted to put it down, and I hoped it would never end (it's long enough that
my hopes seemed to be fulfilled for some time). The publisher also provides a web site for the book.
Next I read Snow Crash,
followed by The Diamond Age.
More commentary on these books later.
Neal also wrote a non-fiction essay about personal computer operating systems called In The Beginning Was The Command Line.
You can read it in its entirety here.
This essay convinced me that I should be running Linux and not the Mac OS, but Fred Glover and I have
since convinced ourselves otherwise by completely failing to successfully install two different Linux
distributions on a PowerMac 7200. In my mind, Linux installers are NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME. Maybe I'll try
again on my new G4...
George sent me links a while back to some short stories written by Stephenson:
The Great Simoleon Caper, and
Spew. Enjoy!
I was telling George about Jerry Pournelle's web site Chaos Manor,
where he keeps a daily journal of stuff. George had never seen it, and the first time he looked,
Jerry was reporting that he just read Snow Crash! Quite a coincidence.
BOOKS BY NEAL STEPHENSON
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Cryptonomicon
1999
Cryptonomicon follows characters through two time periods at once, slamming you back and forth between WWII and present day. Marine Sargeant Bobby Shaftoe and cryptography genius Lawrence Waterhouse play their parts in the defeat of the Germans and Japanese, while computer guru Randy Waterhouse and adventurer Doug Shaftoe do their best in the present to unravel the mysteries of the past while creating a secure data haven in the South Pacific.
-- Paul Wren
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The Diamond Age
1995
John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually a super computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord Finkle-McGraw's daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling neo-Victorian society. But Hackworth loses the primer before he can give it to Fiona, and now the "book" has fallen into the hands of young Nell, an underprivileged girl whose life is about to change.
-- Amazon
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Snow Crash
1992
From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet--incarnate as the Metaverse--looks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue.
-- Amazon
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Zodiac
1988
Believe it or not, some readers find Zodiac even more fun than Neal Stephenson's defining 1990s cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash. Zodiac is set in Boston, and hero Sangamon Taylor (S. T.) ironically describes his hilarious exploits in the first person. S. T. is a modern superhero, a self-proclaimed Toxic Spiderman. With stealth, spunk, and the backing of GEE (a non-profit environmental group) as his weapons, S. T. chases down the bad guys with James Bond-like Zen.
-- Amazon
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The Big U
2001 (reprint)
If you want to know Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it's back-to-school time. Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life in the 80's. After years our of print, The Big U is required reading for anyone interested in the early work of this singular writer.
-- Amazon
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In the Beginning... Was the Command Line
1999
Neal has written a manifesto that could be spoken by a character from Cryptonomicon. Primarily, In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line discusses the past and future of personal computer operating systems. "It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old," he writes, "but it is the fate of operating systems to become free." While others in the computer industry express similarly dogmatic statements, Stephenson charms the reader into his way of thinking, providing anecdotes and examples that turn the pages for you.
-- Amazon
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NEAL STEPHENSON DISCUSSIONS
October 27, 2001
I just stumbled across a site which presents essays by students about Snow Crash. This whole site seems to be the result of a scholars program at the University of Singapore: The CyberArts Web. The specific page contains material from an English course at Brown University dealing with CyberSpace.
Here's the site: Commentary on Stephenson's Snow Crash.
March 2, 2002
Here's an incredibly long article called Mother Earth Motherboard written by Stephenson for Wired in '96, apparently part of his research for
Cryptonomicon:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
It features, among others, the following observation:
According to legend, in 1876 the first sounds transmitted down a wire were Alexander Graham Bell saying "Mr. Watson, come here.
I want you." Compared with Morse's "What hath God wrought!" this is disappointingly banal - as if Neil Armstrong, setting foot
on the moon, had uttered the words: "Buzz, could you toss me that rock hammer?"
May 17, 2003
Read a tantalizing excerpt from Quicksilver at the Official Website. I've pre-ordered my copy... it won't be released until September 23rd.
Here's the book description from Amazon:
In this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.
Daniel Waterhouse possesses a brilliant scientific mind -- and yet knows that his genius is dwarfed by that of his friends Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Robert Hooke. He rejects the arcane tradition of alchemy, even as it is giving birth to new ways of understanding the world.
Jack Shaftoe began his life as a London street urchin and is now a reckless wanderer in search of great fortune. The intrepid exploits of Half-Cocked Jack, King of the Vagabonds, are quickly becoming the stuff of legend throughout Europe.
Eliza is a young woman whose ingenuity is all that keeps her alive after being set adrift from the Turkish harem in which she has been imprisoned since she was a child.
Daniel, Jack, and Eliza will traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures including Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, and other great minds of the age. Traveling from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London to the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between, this magnificent historical epic brings to vivid life a time like no other, and establishes its author as one of the preeminent talents of our own age.
May 17, 2003
I found this info at http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/neal/, which
contains links to Neal Stephenson short stories:
The Baroque Cycle
- Book One: QuickSilver - to be released on September 23, 2003
- Book Two: The Confusion, to be released on April 04, 2004.
- Book Three: The System of the World, to be released on October 04, 2004.
So apparently there are more in the pipe. Good news! (I wonder where
they got that information. You'd think it would be on the Baroque Cycle
website.)
Now I just have to wait till September 23. I just ordered another copy
of Cryptonomicon to reread, as my two existing copies are loaned out.
I also found that Neal has apparently made some updates to his own site
(http://www.well.com/user/neal/) somewhat recently, although it could
sure use some more.
George
May 18, 2003
And a short story I hadn't seen before:
Jipi and the paranoid chip
Classic Neal!
George
