Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

by Neal Stephenson

  At that time, the most important components of these Computers—the CPUs, as it were—were tense young men in starched collars. Whenever one of them stepped out to relieve himself, The Computer went down. As good as they were at their jobs, they could process bits only so fast, so The Computer was very slow. But The Computer has done nothing since then but get faster, become more automated, and expand. By 1870, it stretched all the way to Australia. The advent of analog telephony plunged The Computer into a long dormant phase during which it grew immensely but lost many of its computerlike characteristics.

  But now The Computer is fully digital once again, fully automatic, and faster than hell. Most of it is in the United States, because the United States is large, free, and made of dirt. Largeness eliminates troublesome borders. Freeness means that anyone is allowed to patch new circuits onto The Computer. Dirt makes it possible for anyone with a backhoe to get in on the game. The Computer is striving mightily to grow beyond the borders of the United States, into a world that promises even vaster economies of scale—but most of that world isn’t made of dirt, and most of it isn’t free. The lack of freedom stems both from bad laws, which are grudgingly giving way to deregulation, and from monopolies willing to do all manner of unsavory things in order to protect their turf.

  Even though FLAG’s bandwidth isn’t that great by 1996 Internet standards, and even though some of the companies involved in it are, in other arenas, guilty of monopolistic behavior, FLAG really is going to help blow open bandwidth and weaken the telecom monopolies.

  In many ways it hearkens back to the wild early days of the cable business. The first transatlantic cables, after all, were constructed by private investors who, like FLAG’s investors, just went out and built cable because it seemed like a good idea. After FLAG, building new high-bandwidth, third-generation fiber-optic cable is going to seem like a good idea to a lot of other investors. And unlike the ones who built FLAG, they will have the benefit of knowing about the Internet, and perhaps of understanding, at some level, that they are not merely stringing fancy telephone lines but laying down new traces on the circuit board of The Computer. That understanding may lead them to create vast amounts of bandwidth that would blow the minds of the entrenched telecrats and to adopt business models designed around packet-switching instead of the circuits that the telecrats are stuck on.

  If the network is The Computer, then its motherboard is the crust of Planet Earth. This may be the single biggest drag on the growth of The Computer, because Mother Earth was not designed to be a motherboard. There is too much water and not enough dirt. Water favors a few companies that know how to lay cable and have the ships to do it. Those companies are about to make a whole lot of money.

  Eventually, though, new ships will be built. The art of slack control will become common knowledge—after all, it comes down to a numerical simulation problem, which should not be a big chore for the ever-expanding Computer. The floors of the oceans will be surveyed and sidescanned down to every last sand ripple and anchor scar. The physical challenges, in other words, will only get easier.

  The one challenge that will then stand in the way of The Computer will be the cultural barriers that have always hindered cooperation between different peoples. As the globe-trotting cable layers in Papa Doc’s demonstrate, there will always be a niche for people who have gone out and traveled the world and learned a thing or two about its ways.

  Hackers with ambitions of getting involved in the future expansion of The Computer could do a lot worse than to power down their PCs, buy GPS receivers, place calls to their favorite travel agents, and devote some time to the pursuit of hacker tourism.

  The motherboard awaits.

  The Salon Interview (2004)

  The author of “Cryptonomicon” and the “Baroque Cycle” talks about the brighter side of Puritanism, the feud between Newton and Leibniz, and the literary world’s grudge against science fiction.

  INTERVIEW BY LAURA MILLER

  Rumor had it that Neal Stephenson would follow “Cryptonomicon,” his bestselling 1999 novel combining present-day high-tech entrepreneurs and World War II–era derring-do, with a similar tale of fugitive data and high adventure set sometime in the near future. Last year, with the publication of the first of the three-volume “Baroque Cycle,” “Quicksilver,” Stephenson revealed that he’d turned the dial on his time machine in the other direction. “Quicksilver,” written by hand with a fountain pen in an alcove lined with a huge map of early 18th-century London, immersed the author and his legions of devoted readers in one of the most intellectually exciting and politically momentous periods of history. It was the age of such scientific geniuses as Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and the undersung polymath Robert Hooke, and also the time when our modern economic systems began to take form.

  Unusual subjects for fiction, perhaps, but Stephenson makes the “Baroque Cycle” a weirdly effective mix of high-octane tutorial and ripping yarn. To balance such cerebral characters as Newton and Daniel Waterhouse (Puritan ancestor of the Waterhouses, crack mathematicians and programmers, in “Cryptonomicon”), he introduces Jack Shaftoe, aka the King of the Vagabonds and his sometime-paramour turned countess and financial whiz, Eliza. Shaftoe, like his descendant Bobby in “Cryptonomicon,” skips from one outlandish but irresistibly entertaining exploit to the next, barely escaping with his skin intact: war, thieves, prison, pirates—you name it. As for Eliza, well, she’s the kind of girl who encrypts top-secret military information in her cross-stitch embroidery and surreptitiously handles the investments of half the court of Louis XIV. The second volume in the “Cycle,” “The Confusion,” published on April 19, continues the saga, with an even more lavish serving of the feats of Jack and Eliza.

  Stephenson found time for an interview during the course of a road trip, in a borrowed 40-foot R.V., across the high desert of Washington State from Spokane to his home in Seattle. It was a long conversation.

  What inspired the “Baroque Cycle”?

  It was an unexpected byproduct of “Cryptonomicon.” One of the things I wanted to talk about in that book was the history of computing and its relationship to society. I was talking to Stephen Horst, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan, and he mentioned that Newton for the last 30 years of his life did very little in the way of science as we normally think of it. His job was to run the Royal Mint at the Tower of London. I’d been thinking a lot about gold and money, which were themes in “Cryptonomicon.”

  At the same time, I read a book by George Dyson called “Darwin Among the Machines,” in which he talks about the deep history of computing and about Leibniz and the work he did on computers. It wasn’t just some silly adding machine or slide rule. Leibniz actually thought about symbolic logic and why it was powerful and how it could be put to use. He went from that to building a machine that could carry out logical operations on bits. He knew about binary arithmetic. I found that quite startling. Up till then I hadn’t been that well informed about the history of logic and computing. I hadn’t been aware that anyone was thinking about those things so far in the past. I thought it all started with [Alan] Turing. So, I had computers in the 17th century. There’s this story of money and gold in the same era, and to top it all off Newton and Leibniz had this bitter rivalry. I decided right away that I was going to have to write a book about that.

  Pretty soon I was thinking this was an exceptionally apt time in which to set a novel. There were so many wild and improbable things going on then that made for good material. The siege of Vienna where the Turks penetrated into Europe is a thing that’s almost inconceivable to us today. That was the deepest into Europe that they got. That’s a pretty dramatic little happening. Things like the Barbary pirates and 800 other different flavors of pirates, Spanish treasure galleons, the wars of Louis XIV, the scientific revolution, the plague, the Great Fire of London. All that falls into the period of time when Newton and Leibniz were alive.

  The rivalries between the various scientists yo
u write about are so bitter, it’s surprising even to someone who already knows that science isn’t this Olympian, rational activity totally removed from human pettiness.

  Science was new and they didn’t know how to do it yet. Science was and is a somewhat contentious thing. Someone’s got a theory and they promulgate that theory and then something else comes along and alters, improves on or even flatly contradicts it. Now that we’ve got 350 years of perspective on this, scientists understand that this is how it’s done and there’s a mechanism in place for how to do it. It’s refereed journals and it’s become institutionalized. They didn’t have that perspective on it. They couldn’t stand back and say, Well, my theory may get contradicted here and there, but this guy who’s contradicting it will get contradicted in turn. They didn’t have that expectation. They didn’t have journals. The first two journals were the Journale de Savants, which was about 1665, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society, which was right about the same time. Leibniz had to found his own journal in order to publish his own work. They were kind of banging around in the dark trying to figure out how to do this.

  Hooke, for example, when he figured out how arches work, published it as an anagram. He condensed the idea into this pithy statement: “The ideal form of an arch is the form of a chain hanging, flipped upside down.” Then he scrambled the letters to make an anagram and published it. That way, he wasn’t giving away the secret, but if somebody came along a few years later and claimed that they’d invented it, he could just unscramble what he’d published. He was establishing precedence.

  Hooke squabbled with [Christiaan] Huygens over a bunch of clock-related inventions. This kind of thing was just rife. It came to a head in a grotesque way in the priority dispute over [who invented] the calculus. That was so embarrassing to the whole institution of science and people were so nauseated by it that it taught everyone a lesson. After that, no one would dream of doing what Newton did, which was to invent something really important and then sit on it for 30 years.

  I’m still baffled as to why he’d do that.

  It was a combination of things. Again, the institutions of science didn’t exist. Even if he’d wanted to publish it there were no journals at the time. The prevailing ethos that he would have been brought up in was alchemy, which was called the “esoteric brotherhood.” They were completely of a mind that you didn’t publish your results, at least not in a way that was intelligible to anyone. So if you read the alchemical recipes of Paracelsus or Robert Boyle or any of those people who practiced this, they’re all couched in metaphor. You have to know what stands for what to understand the recipe. They even thought that some of the Greek myths were disguised alchemy recipes, like the myth of Cadmus, who sowed the teeth that grew into soldiers, which they thought was a set of instructions to make some kind of compound. It wouldn’t have occurred to Newton anyway to make any new material public. He didn’t care at all for fame or getting attention.

  But you’d think they’d care about the advancement of their field.

  They didn’t have the sense of progress, I think, though that’s debatable. I talked to one historian of math and science who thinks they very much did. Another thing about the calculus is that it was very controversial because it involves adding up infinitesimal quantities to make something, which is an iffy proposition. Newton was very thin-skinned and would become very withdrawn and bitter when people made even routine criticisms of his work. He didn’t want to put it out and then have to spend all his time defending it. Later in the 19th century the mathematical profession finally said, Look, as currently written, this is nonsense, so we’ve got to tear it down and go back to the beginning. They had to go back and build some serious mathematical underpinnings beneath the calculus. They could see that it worked, but the way in which it had been proved was no longer acceptable. Newton may have suspected that, intuited that, and so was afraid to bring it out.

  It’s odd that so few historical novelists set their books in the late 17th century, when you think about it. The changes in the air were so huge.

  That was one of my reactions, too, when I started getting into this. You see a lot about the late 18th century, the time of the Revolution, you see a lot about the Civil War and the Victorian era. There have been some books about this era published recently—“An Instance of the Fingerpost,” “A Conspiracy of Paper,” about the fall of the South Sea company in 1721. But it’s strangely underrepresented.

  Maybe that’s because most novelists tend to be interested in literary history. The age of Johnson is exciting, and the age of Dickens, but not so much this time, in terms of great writers.

  Well, in this period you’ve got Milton. He’s coming out with “Paradise Lost” at the same time as the plague, the fire, the founding of the Royal Society. You’ve got [John] Bunyan, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” although that’s a hard book for people to take these days. That’s not anyone’s favorite book.

  Also, for a modern readership, the religious disputes of that time are pretty complicated and hard to follow. And people took them so seriously, which is difficult to relate to if you’re secular-minded.

  I think you’re on to something in saying that one off-putting thing to people about this period is the religious aspect of it, and also the politics, which are also pretty closely entwined. Milton and Bunyan are intensely religious people and every word they write comes straight from their religion. This was pre-Enlightenment. There were a few people running around with the secular ideas that we accept as being the norm today, but most of these people were religious and really meant it. Newton was that way; Leibniz was that way. They argued about religion, but they did so from the standpoint of people who really took it seriously. I found that an interesting thing to tackle as a writer because these people were so different from the people who are likely to read this book.

  You’re remarkably sympathetic to the Puritans, too, which is unusual these days.

  I have a perverse weakness for past generations that are universally reviled today. The Victorians have a real bad name, and the word “Puritan” is never used except in a highly pejorative way, despite the fact that there are very strong Victorian and Puritan threads in our society today, and despite the fact that the Victorians and Puritans built the countries that we live in. The other one, by the way, is the ’50s. Someday I’ll have to write a ’50s novel.

  The reason why people are so vituperative about those generations is not because they know anything about the history, but because they’re really talking about splits within our culture today that they’re worried about. In the same spirit that I wrote a Victorian novel earlier in my career, I figured it might be a kick to see what to do with some Puritans. Not hip, jaded, cool Puritans, but honest-to-god, fire-breathing Puritans. Drake [Waterhouse, Daniel’s father] is an arch-Puritan, but by no means exaggerated. There were a million guys like this running around England in those days. He became the patriarch of this family of people who have to respond to his larger-than-life status and extreme commitment to religion.

  What do you admire about the Puritans?

  They were tremendously effective people. They completely took over the country and they created an army pretty much from scratch that kicked everyone’s ass. This is not always a good thing. They were guilty of some very bad behavior in Ireland, for example. But any way you slice it they were very effective. Cromwell was a tremendous military leader. A lot of that effectiveness was rooted in the fact that they had money, in part because persecuted religious minorities, if they’re not persecuted out of existence, often manage to achieve disproportionate wealth. It happened with Jews, Armenians, Huguenots. Earlier in this project, I could have rattled off five more. They have to form private trading networks and lend each other money. They’re unusually education conscious. Puritans—and when we say Puritans, we’re talking about a whole grab bag of religious groups—tended to prize literacy and education. I’m sure they had a higher literacy rate than the general English population.
Literacy and education make people more effective.

  Another answer is that they very early on adopted a set of views on social topics that everyone now takes for granted as being basic tenets of Western civilization. They were heavily for free enterprise. They didn’t want the state interfering in private property. Now our whole system is built on that. We tend to forget that someone had to come up with that idea and fight for it. And those people did. The separation of church and state—in the absence of that separation, Puritans and other religious minorities couldn’t exist. You had to belong to your parish church. Things like registering births, deaths and marriages, which are state functions to us now, were handled solely by the parish churches. If you didn’t belong, you didn’t exist legally. You had no choice, you had to tithe. It’s often said that Cromwell admitted the Jews to England. He disestablished the church and made it possible for churches other than the established one to legally exist. That’s what enabled Jews to come back and start living there. Opposition to slavery got its start among different Puritan sects. To be fair, there were Catholic theologians who objected to it, too, but in the English-speaking world it started out as a fringe belief among Quakers and some other groups and spread from there to become a tenet of Methodism and Episcopalianism and basically all churches.

  Another thing that some people might find surprising is how religious the scientists are—though they called themselves natural philosophers back then. We tend to think of science and religion as being fundamentally opposed.

  A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That’s applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person.