BookPeople Q&A with Neal Stephenson

~Post by Joe T.

To coincide with the visit of Mr. Neal Stephenson to our little shop, BookPeople, on Saturday, August 11th, we were given the opportunity to email him a handful of questions for him to answer. So, I gathered my little think tank of Stephenson fans and came up with a mess of questions to ask him. These are the ones that made the cut. Thanks Joe Gross, John Lowe, and Stina Leicht for helping me out and thanks to Neal Stephenson for taking the time to answer our inquiries.

BOOKPEOPLE: Of the older articles collected in your new book, Some Remarks, which of them do you feel has aged the most and which one would you say has dated the least?

NEAL STEPHENSON: The most geriatric material didn’t make the cut at all and so isn’t in the book. The most interesting piece from an aging perspective was “In the Kingdom of Mao Bell, or, Destroy the Users on the Waiting List” which is a piece of journalism I wrote for WIRED in the early 1990s when China was just getting revved up and Hong Kong was still British. China has obviously changed a lot since then. Some of what I wrote in that piece now seems blindingly obvious, some of it is clearly just plain wrong, and a lot of it lacks nuance. So we chopped it down quite a bit, leaving in some of the anecdotal and descriptive material that still makes for a decent read.

BP: Considering how interesting these collected articles are, is there a particular reason why you do not write this type of journalism more often?

NS: Thanks, I’m glad you found the material interesting. I would like to write more of it, but it just doesn’t make sense economically. In some ways this kind of work is more demanding than writing fiction, but it doesn’t pay nearly as well, so it’s hard to make a case for devoting weeks or months to one of these projects if I could be doing a novel with that time.

BP: On novels such as The Baroque Cycle and the current Mongoliad series, do you use research assistants to help with the background historical details or do you really just read that much history on the subject(s)?

NS: Well, the Mongoliad is a different situation because it’s co-written by a lot of people who all collaborated on research. As far as my own books are concerned, I don’t use research assistants. I can’t even really understand the whole concept of using them, since the point of doing research is to get all of that material into my own head—not someone else’s.

BP: Cryptonomicon, in retrospect, seems to me a moment of change for you. Before that book, you seemed to be writing about the future and more “sci-fi” topics, whereas after it you seem more focused on the past and a near future that is much more grounded in reality. Was there a reason for this shift and do you see yourself writing in a more science-fiction vein in the future?

NS: No, I never seem to have considered, logical reasons for the decisions I make in my career. I just follow my nose. I’m attracted by interesting stories and characters. I am somewhat genre-blind. I don’t really realize that I’m writing science fiction or historical fiction until someone comes along after it’s finished and points that out to me.

BP: Steampunk, a branch of science fiction that has been, lately, gathering a larger and larger share of the market, seems to have a polarizing effect on readers. Some can’t stand it, some love it. Alongside William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine, your novel The Diamond Age has become considered one of the founding texts of the movement. What are your thoughts on the genre and your place in its creation?

NS: Every movement develops a few stylistic tics that become its signature and that annoy people who have become tired of them. It’s a free country. You don’t have to read steampunk if you don’t like it. Haters are probably beating a dead horse. These movements (or genres or whatever you want to call them) are pretty dynamic; the people who write this stuff have sensitive antennae for knowing when it’s getting tired, and their natural response is to look for creative new angles and sort of work the edges of the field.

As far as my place in it’s concerned, credit has to go to Gibson and Sterling. Until The Difference Engine came out, the idea of mixing SF and Victoriana had never crossed my mind, even though I’d been interested in the Victorian era for a long time.

BookPeople welcomes Neal Stephenson to BookPeople to speak about & sign Some Remarks this Saturday, August 11 at 7p. The event is free and open to the public. For more info or to order a signed copy, visit our website.