Neal Stephenson comes to town
I'm working along today, when Thomas messages me, saying that Neal Stephenson is going to be speaking tonight at the downtown Borders. The first Thursday of the month is my only free Thursday (except in months with five Thursdays), so I went.
I parked in the structure next to the Borders, and went inside. They were distributing colored slips of paper to indicate position in line for signing, and as I took the pink paper, I heard, "Welcome, Neal!" I turned around as a guy with a beard entered and was whisked away. Was that him? I looked at one of the pictures on the back of one of the ubiquitous copies of the books. Yes, that was him.
Had I known that he was going to be in town I would have brought my copy of Cryptonomicon to be signed, but I hadn't any idea. So I bought a copy of Quicksilver and headed upstairs.
The place was terribly packed when I got up there, and I found a spot off to the side to stand that was mostly in the line of sight. When Neal got there, he explained that he wasn't going to do a reading, as most everyone was going to be buying the book and reading it themselves anyway. So he took questions for about 45 minutes. The questions started out to be about some of the technical tools used to create the reference website, but quickly moved into questions about him and his writing.
Neal seems to be very fascinated with math and computer people. Why? Because (as he said) he found the topics to be quite interesting, but he wasn't quite smart enough to do it himself.
Is he done writing books set in the future? He won't say anything permanent, only that he's not doing any of them now. It's more difficult writing about the future, to figure out what it will be like. And in any case, he finds almost anything fascinating, but when it takes 6 years to write a book, you pick a topic and setting and you go with it. He understands that from the outside world it looks like he's moving back in time, but from the inside it doesn't look like that.
Any receptiveness to making movies out of the books? Not really. Even the older, smaller books would have to have about 90% of them chopped out, and more recent books like Cryptonomicon wouldn't survive. If he wanted to see his name on a movie (which probably wouldn't be happening any time soon) he'd go and write a screenplay that wasn't at all intended to be a book.
How about audiobooks? Again, this comes down to having to condense the books, always a painful process. A compromise was made for Cryptonomicon, where selections from the book were read, with interludes explaining the pieces of the plot that were elided. Perhaps something like that would be done for Quicksilver.
Many of Stephenson's books (especially Snow Crash) were very anthropological. Does Neal have a great interest in anthropology? (This asked by an anthro student.) Not any more than observed from human society in general.
In many of Neal's books, traditional and religious characters are portrayed in a very positive light. Did he have anything to comment on that? Neal came up totally blank, and pleaded for understanding as he'd been up since 4 AM.
After the questioning, I hung around the second floor waiting for pink to be called. I returned some calls, bought a copy of Neal's first published book, The Big U, and waited. Finally, pink was called. It was pretty quick from there: get in line, move up, get books signed, shake hand, and then go home.