The Salon Interview: Neal Stephenson

At the same time Leibniz is toiling away on a totally different system that's meant to achieve the same goal. It's really the clash between those two systems that's the story, not who invented the calculus first. What Newton and Leibniz were arguing about was broad metaphysical topics of absolute space and time: Do we have free will, and if so, what does that mean? What's a miracle?

Why do you think people find the religious leanings of great scientists so disappointing? Why should they be mutually exclusive?

It's reductionism. You have to be able to reduce everything to interactions among particles. You can't have anything other than that.

There are also the attacks on science made by some religious groups.

The fundamentalist churches nowadays do a much better job of promulgating their views and are much more vocal and outspoken, and if you're a secular person who doesn't have much interaction with organized religion, then the only time you ever see a Christian, it's someone saying that evolution is a lie and the world is only 6,000 years old. It's very easy to miss the fact that the Catholic Church and all the mainline Protestant denominations long ago accepted evolution and have no problem with it at all. I frequently run into militantly secular types who think that all Christians, for example, deny the theory of evolution. That accounts for a certain amount of the militancy of secular types in public discourse. They just can't believe people believe this stuff. It seems patently idiotic to them.

Do you think that reductionist view of science is insufficient?

Steve Horst is working on a book right now called "Mind in the World of Nature," where he talks about our standard method of doing science that Galileo got started -- which is, you break a system down into its parts, you understand the parts, and then you build back up from that to figure out how to explain observable parts. That's a description of how all science has been done for a long time. He's making the argument that a lot of science doesn't necessarily fit that mold: biological science, psychology. There are plenty of cases you can point to, even in mathematics, where being able to break things down into its smallest components doesn't really get you anywhere. It doesn't give you an explanation that's really worth anything. If you look at cellular automata, for example: Sure, each automaton can be explained as a unit, but that's not what's interesting. What's interesting is the really complicated emergent behaviors that you can get out of a whole bunch of these things acting at once. There's really no grid to cross that gap.

Yet we're often led to believe that these things are better understood than they are. Biologists complain that it doesn't make much sense to talk about having "decoded" the genome when how the coding in genes is used to make proteins is still something of a mystery.

My friend Alvy Ray Smith would say that [the making of proteins from genes] is computation. I would avoid the term "mystery." The materialist types just go nuts -- that's their word still. To call somebody a mysterian is their way of flicking somebody off the board. At some level there may be no mystery. You may be able to understand everything if you take the time and trouble to figure out how it all works. But it doesn't give you anything useful, and in the meantime there's lots of perfectly good science you can do by observing the top-level behaviors. People who do cell biology are doing perfectly good science -- you can't claim that they're not doing science.

How much is the "Baroque Cycle" linked to "Cryptonomicon"?

People can decide for themselves how much of a piece they are. I stuck certain little details in "Cryptonomicon" that will make no sense whatsoever unless you've read "Baroque Cycle," but they're so small that you could read through them and not really notice them.

Do you ever worry that the sheer bulk of information you're putting across in the "Baroque Cycle" might overwhelm your readers?

You're seeing it in the context of a story that's hopefully exciting. That makes it more fun to read. I believe that to encounter that kind of material in a story draws people in and gives them a real sense of immediacy, that it was really happening. You want to create a complete picture -- the smells, the look of it, how it worked economically, where the money went. You want to get all that in there.

The birth of modern banking stuff seems like the most daunting thing to turn into entertainment. What interested you about this?

The fact that it was invented. At some point it doesn't exist and then suddenly it's there. They had a market that was basically one stock, which was Dutch East India stock and various derivatives of that. But it still had all the features of the modern stock market. A lot of that stuff got transplanted to London around the time of the Glorious Revolution. The Dutch came over and established links between Amsterdam and London. That's where it really flourished. One thing that London added to the mix that really made it go was a modern banking system. We see them coming up with the idea of it in "Quicksilver," and we see it coming together in "The Confusion," and then we see it operating with various complications in the last volume, "The System of the World." A lot of the people who had a hand in it were the same Royal Society types who were cutting up dogs and pursuing all these other science endeavors.

Speaking of the dogs, some of those descriptions are pretty hard to take.

This is what these guys did. They did it a lot. They went through a lot of dogs in that way.

With something like that, there's only so many different ways for a writer to address it. You can erase it, pretend it didn't happen, and avoid talking about it just because it's unpleasant and you don't want these characters to seem like evil people. But that's not an honest way to go about it. You can turn it into a piece of propaganda to show they were irredeemably vile people, but they weren't. If you're an animal rights advocate, you'll disagree with that and say they were. But to write a book that feels like propaganda for that point of view ... no one would read it. It wouldn't make a good story. So the one thing you're left with is to address the ambiguity of these people and the ambiguity of what they did.

Again, some people won't see any ambiguity. But if you look for it in these Royal Society accounts, it's clear that at a certain point some of these guys started to feel pretty disgusted by what they were doing and they find excuses to avoid doing it anymore. I just decided to present it pretty much as it's described in the historical accounts and leave it to the reader to think about what it means. They had peculiar ideas about pain and what kind of organisms felt pain and which didn't. Of course, they were really just rationalizations. It was believed that black people didn't feel as much pain, also.

The other half of the equation was that they were all feeling pain all the time. Even the most fortunate ones had lice and you name it. They had it. The incidence of bladder stones, something that nobody gets anymore, was incredibly high.

I'd never heard of those.

People get kidney stones still, but they don't seem to get bladder stones anymore. I asked a couple of people why, and you get a vague answer like "changes in diet" or what have you. I think they rarely drank water. They were just drinking alcoholic beverages all the time. Nobody in the world drank water, except maybe Indians and people who lived in really pristine places. That's kind of my pet theory: Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it's tea. In Africa it's milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer.

Do you see yourself as part of any particular literary tradition?

I absolutely look to -- consciously, knowingly look back on -- those 19th-century serialized, potboiler novelists as people who are on to something. They got something right. There was something about living in that environment that made these guys incredibly productive. Dickens was the same deal. I do not have the sheer guts that it would take to serialize something. Before you've written the last chapter, the first chapter has already been published, so you can't go back and change anything to make it all work out. I just do not have the sheer chutzpah to start publishing stuff before it's all done. Mine is a pretty risk-averse strategy.

What do you think makes those writers different from "serious" writers today?

I don't think they spent a lot of time agonizing about their art. I think that they found gainful employment producing stuff that was meant to be entertaining, that readers of the Strand magazine would enjoy reading. A lot of it was forgettable, but guess what, a lot of what those kinds of people wrote is now thought of as literature. I've published books that probably aren't literature, but to me it just feels easier and more natural to sit down and produce the material and let the chips fall where they may.

Let's talk about writing. Do you have some plan for what you're trying to do with your books? They're such an unusual combination of what we call right-brain and left-brain material.

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