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, and baroque.

Stephenson's work explores mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes nonfiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired. He has 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, and also co-founded the Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He was Magic Leap's chief futurist from 2014 to 2020.

Early life

Born on October 31, 1959, in Fort Meade, Maryland, Mike Godwin described Stephenson at this time as "a slight, unassuming grad-student type whose soft-spoken demeanor gave no obvious indication that he had written the manic apotheosis of cyberpunk science fiction."

In 2012, Stephenson released a collection of essays and other previously published fiction, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing. It also includes a new essay and a short story written specifically for this volume.

In 2013, Stephenson said he was working on a multi-volume work of historical novels that would "have a lot to do with scientific and technological themes and how those interact with the characters and civilisation during a particular span of history". He expected the first two volumes to be released in 2014. But at about the same time, he shifted his attention to a science fiction novel, Seveneves, which was completed about a year later and published in May 2015. On June 8, 2016, plans were announced to adapt Seveneves for the screen.

Seveneves won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2016.

In May 2016, during a video discussion with Bill Gates, Stephenson said he had just submitted the manuscript for a new historical novel—"a time travel book"—co-written with Nicole Galland, one of his Mongoliad coauthors. This book, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., was released in 2017.

In 2019, his novel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell was published. It is a near-future novel that explores mind uploading into the cloud, and contains characters from Reamde, Cryptonomicon, and other books.

Termination Shock, published in 2021, is a climate fiction novel about solar geoengineering.

Writing style

Stephenson's books tend to have elaborate plots that draw on numerous technological and sociological ideas. The discursive nature of his writing together with significant plot and character complexity and an abundance of detail suggests a baroque writing style, which Stephenson brought fully to bear in his Baroque Cycle.

In 2012, Stephenson launched a Kickstarter campaign for Clang, a realistic sword-fighting fantasy game. The concept was to use motion control to provide an immersive experience. The campaign's funding goal of $500,000 was reached by the target date of July 9, 2012, but funding options remained open and the project continued to accept contributions on its official site. The project ran out of money in September 2013. This, and the circumstances around it, angered some backers, and some threatened a class action lawsuit. The Clang project ended in September 2014 without being completed. Stephenson took some responsibility for the project's failure, saying, "I probably focused too much on historical accuracy and not enough on making it sufficiently fun to attract additional investment".

In 2014, the Florida-based augmented reality company Magic Leap hired Stephenson as chief futurist. He left the company in 2020 as part of a layoff.

In 2022, Stephenson launched Lamina1 to build an open source metaverse that will use smart contracts on a blockchain.

Influence

Stephenson's writing is influential in technology circles. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Carmack, and Peter Thiel are all fans of his work. In Snow Crash, Stephenson coined the term Metaverse and popularized the term avatar in a computing context. The Metaverse inspired the inventors of Google Earth, According to Publishers Weekly, Cryptonomicon is "often credited with sketching the basis for cryptocurrency".

Publications

thumb|Stephenson in 2008

Novels

  • The Big U (1984)
  • Zodiac (1988)
  • Snow Crash (1992) – British Science Fiction Association Award nominee, 1993; Clarke Award nominee, 1994
  • Seveneves (2015)
  • Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (2019)
  • New Found Land: The Long Haul (2021) with Austin Grossman and Sean Stewart. Audible Original audiobook.
  • Termination Shock (2021)
  • Polostan (2024), volume I of the planned Bomb Light series
  • D (2026), volume II of the Bomb Light series

Short fiction

  • "Spew" (1994), in Hackers (1996)
  • "The Great Simoleon Caper" (1995), Time
  • "Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast" in Full Spectrum 5 (1995)
  • "Jipi and the Paranoid Chip" (1997), Forbes
  • "Crunch" (1997), in Disco 2000 (edited by Sarah Champion, 1998) ("Crunch" is a chapter from Cryptonomicon)
  • "Atmosphæra Incognita" (2013), in Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon (edited by Gregory Benford and James Benford)

Other fiction projects

  • Project Hieroglyph, founded in 2011, administered by Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination since 2012. Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, which includes contributions by Stephenson (preface and chapter "Atmosphæra Incognita"), was published by William Morrow in September, 2014.

Non-fiction

  • "Smiley's People". 1993.
  • "In the Kingdom of Mao Bell". Wired. 1994. "A billion Chinese are using new technology to create the fastest growing economy on the planet. But while the information wants to be free, do they?"
  • "Mother Earth Mother Board". Wired. 1996. "In which the Hacker Tourist ventures forth across three continents, telling the story of the business and technology of undersea fiber-optic cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth."
  • "Global Neighborhood Watch". Wired. 1998. Stopping street crime in the global village.
  • In the Beginning... Was the Command Line. Harper Perennial. 1999. .
  • "Communication Prosthetics: Threat, or Menace? " Whole Earth Review, Summer 2001.
  • "Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out". Op-ed piece on Star Wars, in The New York Times, June 17, 2005.
  • "It's All Geek To Me". Op-ed piece on the film 300 and geek culture, The New York Times, March 18, 2007.
  • "Atoms of Cognition: Metaphysics in the Royal Society 1715–2010", chapter in Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson. Stephenson discusses the legacy of the rivalry between Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, November 2, 2010.
  • "Space Stasis". Slate. February 2, 2011. "What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation."
  • "Innovation Starvation ". World Policy Journal, 2011.
  • Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing. William Morrow. 2012. .

Critical studies, reviews and biography

;In the beginning

;Snow crash

;Termination shock

References

  • Neal Stephenson at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
  • – lecture by Stephenson at Gresham College, London in May 2008
  • Neal Stephenson at authors@Google, September 12, 2008.