Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is an American science fiction and historical fiction author. Stephenson has written about issues impacting human survival, and his books have won several literary awards. He has been described as a writer, academic, video game designer, and technology consultant, and he has joined technology companies as an advisor and chief futurist.

Born in Fort Meade, Maryland, on October 31, 1959, Neal Stephenson grew up in a family of engineers and hard scientists. His father was a professor of electrical engineering, and his paternal grandfather was a biochemistry professor. His mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, and his maternal grandfather was a biochemistry professor.

In 1960, Stephenson's family moved from Fort Meade to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and then again in 1966 to Ames, Iowa, where Stephenson would attend and graduate from Ames High School in 1977. After high school, Stephenson attended Boston University. There, he began studying physics, but later switched to geography when he found it would give him more time to work with the university mainframe. In 1981, he graduated with a B.A. in geography and a minor in physics.

During his time at Boston University, Stephenson worked as a teaching assitant in the physics department in 1979. From 1978 to 1979, he worked as a research assistant at Ames Laboratory at the U.S. Department of Energy, Ames, Iowa. In 1980, he worked as a researcher for the Corporation for a Cleaner Commonwealth in Boston. And from 1981 to 1983, Neal Stephenson clerked for the University of Iowa, in Iowa City. In 1984, Neal Stephenson moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he has mostly lived since, mainly in Seattle.

Outside of his writing career, and in part influenced by his writing career, Neal Stephenson has worked in a few other areas. This includes a period of time he spent as a part-time advisor for Blue Origin, where he spent seven years when the company when it was in an exploratory phase, before their business model shifted to be a more standard aerospace comapany.

Neal Stephenson with Sean Stewart and Austin Grossman.

In 2014, Stephenson was given a position as Chief Futurist at Florida-based augmented and virtual reality start-up Magic Leap. He would leave his position at Magic Leap in 2020, following a series of layoffs at the company. However, he and his colleagues, Sean Stewart and Austin Grossman, were able to turn the experience into an Audible audio drama based on what was developed at Magic Leap, named New Found Land: The Long Haul.

In 2012, Stephenson was part of the development of a realistic sword-fighting fantasy game, CLANG, as part of the Subutai Corporation. Their concept was to use motion control and provide the player with an immersive experience. To begin the development, Stephenson started a funding campaign on Kickstarter with a goal of reaching USD $500,000, which was reached on July 9, 2012, with the funding remaining open to help the project keep moving. However, the project would run out of money in September of 2013. The manner in which the project faltered led some to threaten class action lawsuits. The project would end in September of 2014. Stephenson took some responsibility for the project's failure, stating his desire for historical accuracy overtook the project's focus on making it a fun, profitable game.

Neal Stephenson's writing has made him a leading post-cyberpunk novelist, working with many of the elements of the fictional worlds developed by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson. This includes cyberspace, virtual reality, and a degraded political, cultural, and social environment, often traversed by a lone, marginal hero. Stephenson's novels are generally characterized by complex, multiple, interweaving plots with a style that is considered to be lively and forceful, although sometimes tending toward the banal. The books contain a plethora of technological, mathematical, scientific, and cultural references that can become heavy for a reader, although the books are moved forward by the author's imagination, elaborating on historical events and current social trends in his fiction.

A characteristic aspect of Stephenson's writing has been the "breakdown of events," which is a conscious or otherwise acceleration of plot development that occurs around the final third of the book, accompanied by an increase in violence and confusion of the characters. Further, his books tend to have elaborate, inventive plots, which draw on numerous ideas from technology and sociology. This has helped Stephenson move beyond the confines of genre or cult fiction to establish himself as a best-selling author capable of catching the pace and style of worlds transformed by information technology.

Other than his writing of novels and select short fiction, Stephenson has also written non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired. As well, the author has written novels with his uncle George Jewsbury (J. Frederick George) under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.

First edition of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Previous to the publication of Snow Crash, Stephenson had written two other books. The first, The Big U, published in 1984, was a satirical take on life at an American Megauniversity beset by chaotic riots. But it made little to no impact. Stephenson's second novel, Zodiac, published in 1988, is an environmental or ecological thriller, following a kind of environmental private eye working for a Greenpeace-style environmental growth attempting to expose large and powerful companies that are dumping toxic waste. However, this novel also failed to gain much critical attention.

In 1992, Stephenson published the novel that would prove to be his breakthrough novel, Snow Crash. This novel was a cyberpunk exploration of then-futuristic technologies, which included mobile computing, virtual reality, wireless internet, digital currency, smartphones, and augmented-reality headsets. The book has since earned Stephenson a reputation as a tech Nostradamus, being able to predict addiction to portable technology and the digitization of everything, bringing the Hindu concept of avatar into everyday language. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev would later credit the book with inspiring his work.

One such example comes at the opening of the book, when a protagonist races in a car chase as he needs to deliver a pizza on time or else risk angering a mob. The scene has been credited with predicting the gig economy. Another of these prophetic inventions in the book was the "Metaverse," which in the book, is a wireless, online, virtual-reality experience that many technology companies have since worked to commercialize. As well, the book has since become canon for many in Silicon Valley and has been heralded as a prescient vision of modern technology.

Neal Stephenson's next novel was The Diamond Age; Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, published in 1995, which demonstrated Stephenson's interest in the past and would be his first historical fiction book. The novel's style was described as less hectic and more measured than Snow Crash.

First edition of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

However, Neal Stephenson's next novel, Cryptonomicon, published in 1999, was the most complex and elaborate novel he had published yet. The book follows two timelines, one set in the 1940s and the other in the 1990s, and has to do with cracking the Nazi's communications, similar to the real-life cracking of the Enigma machine by Alan Turing. But then the contemporary timeline of the novel follows the grandchildren of th 1940s timeline as they develop an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and uncover gold once destined for Nazi Germany.

Cryptonomicon was a watermark for Stephenson, as the book broke the author into a wider literary market outside of science fiction and established him as a cultural figure.

The Baroque Cycle was the next product of Neal Stephenson, beginning with the first book of the series, Quicksilver, which was published in 2003. The second book, or more properly the next volume of the cycle was published in 2004, named The Confusion. And the final book of the cycle, called The System of the World, was published in 2005. Stephenson has commented that putting the book into a trilogy, or referring to them as a trilogy, would not be accurate based on the content of the books, although it was done because it was more convenient to publish as such. Further, some have considered Cryptonomicon the fourth book of the Baroque Cycle, as the idea of the cycle is supposed to have come out of the writing process for Cryptonomicon.

Neal Stephenson surrounded by some of the figures included in The Baroque Cycle.

The series of novels follow the adventures of a group of characters living amidst central events of the late 17th century and early 18th centuries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central America. Despite its treatment of historical events and figures, Stephenson still refers to the work as science fiction due to the presence of anomolous occurrences and the books emphasis on science and technology.

Of the books, Quicksilver won the Arthur C. Clark Award and was a nominee for the Locus Award. The Confusion would be a Locus Award Winner, and The System of the World would also win the Locus Award the following year, and was a nominee for Arthur C. Clarke. The books, although they have adventure and picaresque elements, focus largely on the shift from the old world into modernity, including the scientific, philosophical, and mercantile shift in the world.

Following the Baroque Cycle, Stephenson engaged in many of his extra-literary activities. During this period, he wrote Anathem in 2008, which was an overly science-fictional book when compared to the previous works and spends a considerable length of the book following a group of raitonalist scientist-monks whose debates recapitulate much of the history of Western phlilosophy. This was followed with the 2011 publication of REAMDE, which is essentially a near-future thriller that follows the corruption of a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game through a complex scheme including the laundering of virtual money.

In 2015, Stephenson published Seveneves, which is an epic tale spanning or leaping across five millenia after the moon explodes and dooms Earth. The seven eves of the title are the seven women of child-bearing age who survive to find refuge upon a fragment of the Moon. And over time it is discovered that two human enclaves have survived many years later still on Earth, and this creates a great conflict of the book.

In 2021, Neal Stephenson published Termination Shock, in which the author returned to the themes of the environment from his second novel, however focusing on the issue of human-generated climate change. The novel projects a near-future of extreme weather and social chaos. Against this setting, a rogue oilman builds the world's biggest gun to shoot canisters of sulfur dioxide int the air, echoing the effects of a volcanic eruption and temporary cooling parts of the globe.

The novel was anticipated with great interest, especially based on the influence of his work on Silicon Valley and technology. And while Stephenson acknowledges that the geoengineering represented in the book is a radical step, he further suggests that the effects of climate change are already more destructive than they have been accounted for, and that the book reflects what he expects will be a demand for radical solutions to grow.

The title of the novel comes from a hypothetical catastrophe that would happen when someone intervenes in the climate, but is then stopped from doing so, causing the climate to snap back to what it had been prior to the time of intervention. The book also looks more at the geopolitical reaction to the intervention as much as how the intervention could stop or slow the human-generated climate change.