Breaking The Code With Neal Stephenson, Page 2

A month or two after the publication of his latest book, The Diamond Age, I called him to see if he wanted to be featured in ATN. No problem, he said. So a week later we both settled into our respective easy chairs­­Neal in Seattle; me in San Francisco­­and using that antique device, the telephone, proceeded to talk about the inner and outer worlds of Neal Stephenson.

Addicted to Noise: Snow Crash has given people a futuristic vision of life on-line. What you've written, and what William Gibson has written, has provided a fantasy backdrop to what's actually going on in the world. It's also inspiring people who are trying to duplicate or follow this vision in some way. How do you feel about this?

Neal Stephenson: In a strange way, I'm not well-positioned to be aware of it. I wrote Snow Crash in, I think, 1990, mailed it off to my agent, and as soon as I walked out of the Federal Express office, that was it. I was done with it. Now, I'm conscious that it's being read because I get statements from the publisher every so often saying that X-many copies have been purchased, and, more often, I see references to it in the press. When I go out to do readings, which I don't do very often, I run into people who tell me, Neal, there are companies in Silicon Valley who are basically throwing Snow Crash on the table and saying, "This is our business plan". If it's really happening, I'm glad that people are buying the book and finding it that interesting, I guess. But I'm not a part of these companies. I'm not down in the trenches watching what they do from day to day, so I have to take other people's word for it.

ATN: I mentioned to Jon Luini, a principal at the Internet Underground Music Archive and the guy who heads the technological aspects of Addicted to Noise, that I was going to interview you, and he said, "Oh yeah, I just read Snow Crash two weeks ago." Jon is in his twenties and a brilliant hacker. He felt the book described some of where he's heading, and enjoyed the whole world you created. This is a guy who's plugged into a computer terminal writing code 18 to 20 hours a day.

Public Image Limited, "Poptones" (from Second Edition)
(45 second excerpt)

Stereo MPEG (1.08M)

Mono MPEG (541k)

Mono Sun-AU (360k)

Stephenson: I think that techies can tell by little cues here and there in the book that I'm not unacquainted with the nuts and bolts of the technology, and that makes them feel like the book speaks to them perhaps a little more directly than some others.

SOUNDTRACK FOR SNOW CRASH

ATN: I read in your biography at the back of Snow Crash that you were listening to "a great deal of loud, relentless, depressing music" while you wrote the book. What were you listening to?

Stephenson: The primary CDs I listened to were Soundgarden, Bob Mould and Public Image Limited. Those three put together probably accounted for 90 percent of what was on my stereo.

ATN: Were you living in Seattle when you wrote the book?

Stephenson: No, I was living in Alexandria, Virginia. My wife is a physician and she went through undergraduate school on a ROTC scholarship. When she finished medical school and her residency, she had to give four years to the Army. So we left Seattle and went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and that was sort of franchise ghetto land, which got me thinking about the franchise landscape. Then we went to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, right outside DC, and we lived in Alexandria, where I wrote the book.

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