Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson (b. October 31, 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland) is primarily a science fiction writer, who, although principally writing about computer and computer-related technologies such as nanotechnology, does not belong to the cyberpunk school of writers such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

Although he wrote earlier novels such as the eco-thriller[?] Zodiac, he came to fame in the early 1990s with the deeply funny novel Snow Crash which fuses memetics, computer viruses, and other high-tech themes with Sumerian mythology. He has written two subsequent novels The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer which deals with a future with extensive nanotechnology, and Cryptonomicon, a novel concerned with computing and codebreaking from the second World War codebreakers to a modern attempt to set up a data haven. (Though the title is reminiscent of the Necronomicon, a fictional work detailed within the works of the writer H. P. Lovecraft, Stephenson has stated that this is because he liked the sound of the name; he had not read any Lovecraft at that time, and the novel has no connection with Lovecraft's themes.)

Works

• Fiction:
  • The Big U (1984)
  • Zodiac (1988)
  • Snow Crash (1992)
  • The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)
  • Cryptonomicon (1999)
  • Quicksilver (expected 2003)

• Non-fiction:
  • In the Beginning ... was the Command Line (1999)

He has also written fiction as Stephen Bury together with J. Frederick George - at least two novels, Interface and The Cobweb.

External Links

• Personal Website (http://www.well.com/user/neal/)
• Official Website Cryptonomicon book (http://www.cryptonomicon.com/)