The Salon Interview: Neal Stephenson

For me it begins and ends with story. I'm not a great self-analyzer. I don't think a lot about process. Usually it starts with "Hey, wouldn't it be a great yarn if...?" Because if you don't have that, you've got nothing. What I'm doing here is writing novels, and novels -- never mind what anyone else might tell you -- novels are pop entertainment, and they have to tell a story and they have to engage the emotions. There are a few basic tricks they use to do that. One is to tell a good yarn and the other is to make you feel empathy for the characters involved in the doings of that yarn, but you've got to have that yarn. That's what I seize on first. That's what gives me confidence that I've got a pony I can ride. Characters tend to come out of that, and ideas -- I don't know where they come from. The yarn that got me going on "Quicksilver" was Newton pursuing and prosecuting an archvillain in London at the same time as the dispute with Leibniz is at its peak.

Do you see yourself as moving away from the speculative fiction you wrote early on? "Cryptonomicon" was set entirely in the present and past. The "Baroque Cycle" is an entirely historical novel.

But "Cryptonomicon" was nominated for a Hugo Award. I was very happy about that. This gets into a whole conversation about the sociology of writers and the literary world. There's a long-standing tendency of so-called literary writers and critics to say mean things about science fiction. A lot of science fiction writers don't care, but the ones who do care feel wounded by that and get defensive. That leads to a common thing that happens when a science fiction writer has achieved some success and gets a readership outside the pure science fiction world. A lot of science fiction people become nervous that this writer perceives himself as trapped in some kind of notional science fiction ghetto and is trying to break out of it.

Some people in the science fiction world are ever alert to anyone who's showing signs of that. I don't begrudge them that. I understand where they're coming from. So I always make it clear that I consider myself a science fiction writer. Even the "Baroque Cycle" fits under the broader vision of what science fiction is about.

And what's that?

Fiction that's not considered good unless it has interesting ideas in it. You can write a minimalist short story that's set in a trailer park or a Connecticut suburb that might be considered a literary masterpiece or well-regarded by literary types, but science fiction people wouldn't find it very interesting unless it had somewhere in it a cool idea that would make them say, "That's interesting. I never thought of that before." If it's got that, then science fiction people will embrace it and bring it into the big-tent view of science fiction. That's really the role that science fiction has come to play in literature right now. In arty lit, it's become uncool to try to come to grips with ideas per se.

I don't know if that's really true. Don DeLillo, for example, writes about ideas, and he's widely revered by literary writers.

He's less idea oriented now than in the past. If you look at "The Names" or "Great Jones Street," at the core of both of those novels is a conceit that is very science fiction, in a way. I didn't see that as much in "Underworld." You could look on him as a guy who used to write some pretty good science fiction. You could probably find readers and critics who'd say he used to write this iffy stuff with all these geeky ideas, but now he's matured. This is one of these "perception is reality" deals. If you look at science fiction, it's a self-defining community and they know what they like. They've got their own frame of reference for looking at books. If you read the fine print in the reviews in the back of Locus magazine, there's a real intellectual movement represented by the discourse going on in those reviews. It's consciously apart from the mainstream literary world.

One side effect of books getting so little coverage is that different areas of literary activity or excitement often don't seem to know that each other exists. And the literary establishment often isn't aware of what most people are reading. What's most visible in the press isn't necessarily what's reaching the majority of the readers.

There's an interesting phenomenon where... I first noticed this when I was in a bar with a fantasy novelist having a few drinks. We got to the point in the evening when we had the "How big is yours?" conversation. We compared sales figures for "Snowcrash" with this other fellow's latest and I think he'd sold more than I had and he was dumbfounded and so was I. It turns out that there's a whole lot of writers like that, who sell impressive numbers of books. Compared to some of those people I don't sell that many copies. I do fine, but the fact is for some reason I get attention that's out of proportion to actual sales. What was new to me is that there were people like that, mastodons, who I'd never even heard of.

People see you as having become a crossover writer. Are you deliberately trying to bridge that gap with your more recent work, to reach readers who ordinarily wouldn't consider science fiction?

But I got a big review in the New York Times for "Zodiac"! I think I got one for "The Big U," actually, but I'd have to go back and check. I've heard from people, "Oh, I don't like science fiction but someone talked me into reading this book." There was some of that happening, certainly. But this is not what I ever think about. I try to follow my nose and write what I want to write and do it in a way that's presentable and engaging for people. Everything beyond that is a marketing decision. I don't think of myself that way and people don't think of themselves that way.

Do you worry about losing your old audience?

The "Baroque Cycle" is about science, right? And it's got ideas in it. So to me it'll appeal to people who read science fiction. There's always been a lot of historical stuff in science fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson just published "The Years of Rice and Salt" -- which is a kind of historical novel. It's been going on for a long time. Even when I was a kid, reading science fiction stories and books, every so often I'd run across one that happened to be set in the historical past. That was considered to be within the normal bounds of what these people write about.

There was a review of "Cryptonomicon" with a line in it that struck me as interesting. The guy said, "This is a book for geeks and the history buffs that they turn into." I'm turning into one. I'm in this history book club, which is not all geeks but it's definitely got some serious geeks in it. It's been going for four or five years maybe. We're all consistently dumbfounded by how interesting history is when you read it yourself compared to how dull it was when they made you study it in school. We can't figure out why there's that gap. I think they try to cover too broad a sweep at once so you never get down to the individual people and their stories. It's all generalities.

You come from a scientific family, don't you?

Both my grandfathers had Ph.D.'s in the sciences. My dad's dad was a physicist and my mom's dad was a biochemist. My dad is an electrical engineering professor. I have uncles who are scientists. More than anything, growing up in a university town got me interested in it. First we lived in Champaign-Urbana and then Ames, Iowa. Ames is the home of a university with a strong orientation toward science, technology, engineering. The community where I grew up, half the parents of the kids I hung out with were Ph.D. science types.

Were you interested in science as a kid?

I was always one of these little science geek guys who would do little experiments and build things. If you call blowing things up experiments, there were a lot of chemistry experiments. We played with model rockets. It was a freedom to mess around with things. Ames was the site of the Manhattan Project facility where they would take uranium ore that they'd trek down from Canada and extract uranium metal from it and then send the uranium on to Oak Ridge to be enriched. There were all kinds of facilities there for dealing with rare earths and radioactive elements. They also had a big agricultural engineering school. We did a thing in my Cub Scout troop where one of the dads got a bunch of corn seeds that were all from the same plant, divided them up into little bags, carried them across campus to another dad of one of the other scouts who worked with radioactive stuff, and he carried it down to the hot room in the basement and exposed these seeds to radiation, some hot isotope that they had down there. These were handed out to use at the next meeting and we were each supposed to take these home and plant them and at the end of the month a prize was given out to the healthiest plant and another to the weirdest mutation. We got some really weird-looking plants out of that. I've never had a green thumb, so mine died, but I don't think it had anything to do with radiation.

I'm surprised you wound up as a novelist.

I started out as a physics major. I should have stuck with it. At some point I got interested in geography. There were fun people in that department to hang around with, and they had easier access to computers there, particularly to computer graphics terminals. I came within a couple credits of getting a double major, physics and geography. I could have gotten a physics degree, but I was ready to leave school, so I left.

How did you wind up writing your first novel?

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