Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

by Neal Stephenson

  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 truck 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?

  I think my plan was to drive to the West Coast. I had this old pickup truck that I was going to do it in and I got as far as Iowa before I got it into my head that I should overhaul the engine of this pickup truck. It was burning oil. I was having to stop every 150 miles and put in a quart of oil. Now that’s not so bad. It would have made a lot more sense to buy a couple of cases of oil, but I have always had this fatal weakness for getting involved in the physical nitty-gritty of stuff. It seemed like a cool idea that I’d take apart this engine and fix it up with my own two hands. I launched into that and I was doing it in an unheated garage in Iowa in January. I was 21. It was bitterly cold and the engine was all dirty. If you know what you’re doing, you steam-clean the engine first, and I didn’t do that. I did a bunch of things wrong. It turned into a lengthy, grinding, unpleasant process. But I got it done, got the engine to work right, but I’d lost my momentum to go out West and do something there. My sole assets at that point were the value of the gasoline in the tank of this vehicle, in my parents’ garage.

  So I decided to write my second novel. I’d written one in Boston, kind of a starter novel. Kind of a fantasy novel, I guess you could say. “The Big U” is No. 3. The second novel was an epic fantasy.

  Were you inspired by Tolkien?

  I was very consciously trying to do something that was not like Tolkien. This is a novel with a lot of geography in it. It was set on a planet that had a peculiar geography. It was geography-driven, geographical fiction.

  Was that the point that you started to get serious about writing?

  I felt like I was starting to get a little bit of traction as a writer. I wasn’t publishing anything, but I was starting to get the hang of it, and I knew what to do better next time. I got a day job in an office and started working on this third book, which became “The Big U.” The bottom line is that eventually it sold. It needed a lot of work because of the way I’d written it. There’s a theory or a paradigm of how to write that I’d imbibed without knowing that I’d imbibed it. Somewhere out there is the platonic ideal of the thing you’re trying to write and your rough draft is just a shadow of it. You toil through one draft after another trying to make it better. I sort of did that with “The Big U” and then I very consciously tried to do it with the thing I wrote after that, which never got published.

  What happened to that book?

  I had been reading all these accounts by other writers about how they produced their magnum opus and they all followed something I’ll call the distillation narrative. Which was: “I sat down and wrote a manuscript that was a foot thick and it had some good stuff in it, but it was too long. So I rolled up my sleeves and went to work and edited. Toiled. I cut and scraped. I hacked. I shortened and rearranged and got it down to six inches, but it still wasn’t good enough. So I went back and yada yada yada. And eventually I wound up with this trim little manuscript that had all the good parts in it.”

  That was a reassuring theory of how to write because it didn’t require you to sit down every day and turn out good material. Instead it required you to sit down for eight hours a day and produce a huge volume of material and hope that there was something good in it. Then you’d go back later and cut out all the crap. Whatever works, but it failed for me, and it failed kind of expensively in the sense that I spent two or three years on that and produced a miserable, incoherent pile and sort of ruined a decent enough idea. I ended up feeling very anxious when I got to the end of the process and came to terms with the fact that this was not a publishable book. Then I panicked and wrote another book very quickly that got almost immediately accepted for publication and that was “Zodiac.”

  How did you change your writing process after that?

  I did figure out that I tended to write good stuff first thing in the morning. So I had all this free time in the rest of the day that I had to occupy with something other than writing. Because if I sat and wrote, I’d just bury the good stuff I’d written in crap and have to excavate it later. I did some construction work with a friend of mine. Basically the work habit I developed out of all that was of setting things up so I could write in the morning and then stop and exercise my penchant for getting into the nitty-gritty details of physical things. Not because that was productive in any way but because it kept me from screwing up whatever I happened to be writing. I tried to pattern things that way ever since. That’s worked fairly well.

  One of things you like to do on the side is dabble in programming. Do you see similarities between writing code and writing fiction?

  I think there are common threads between writing and programming. That’s a really easy statement for people to misunderstand and twist around so I’m a little leery of making it. All I’m saying is that the thing you’re making—the novel or the computer program—has got a very complicated and finely wrought hierarchical structure to it. The structure has to work right or the whole thing fails. But the only way you can work on it is by hitting one character at a time
. You’re building this thing one character at a time while having to maintain the whole structure in your head. That description applies equally well to programming and novel writing even though they’re very different activities.

  I agree that comparing the two could raise hackles in some quarters. People like to believe that one activity is entirely aesthetic and emotional and the other is entirely rational.

  That’s a misconception. I justify say that by referring to the work of Antonio Damasio, who’s a friend of mine. He’s written a few books about the brain, and the one that’s most relevant to this discussion is “Descartes’ Error.” The error he’s complaining about is the idea that reason and emotion are different things. He tells a story about a patient who suffered a very specific localized kind of brain damage that was blocking a certain kind of interaction between how he thought and how he felt. In certain situations, this guy was better than other people at certain things. When driving on ice he didn’t panic and he knew all the rules, how to turn the steering wheel and keep his car under control, and he was able to drive when other people were skidding off the road. But if you asked him to schedule an appointment and gave him two dates to choose between, this guy could sit there for an hour, dithering over this simple choice. Every possible contingency or scenario that could play out would flash up in his head, and he didn’t know how to choose between them.

  Damasio is arguing that one of the innate faculties of our brain is that we can envision a wide range of possible scenarios and then sort through them very quickly not by logic but through a kind of process of the emotions. Emotions associated with a particular scenario cause us to prune off whole sets of options. He claims that chess masters work that way. Part of the time it’s this very logical, rational thing, but part of the time it’s “This gives me the willies. I’m not going there.” Damasio quotes in this book scientists like Einstein who quite explicitly say that their process of sifting through ideas and deciding where to go with their research has a very strong emotional component to it. I don’t buy the idea of a split between a rational and an emotional mind. I suspect that idea is a lot more common among nonscientists. I think there’s a whole complex of factors behind scientists being pegged as emotionally remote or out of touch with their feelings.

  I was amazed to discover that you wrote these three 1,000-page books by hand, but some writers do say that writing by hand puts them in better touch with that kind of intuition.

  I do it all on paper. I started that with the “Baroque Cycle.” “Cryptonomicon” is the last book I wrote typing it into a computer. I use a fountain pen. The entire thing is in longhand.

  Is that your method from now on?

  I think so. It’s hard to say, because I tend to invent a whole different system for writing each book. This may turn out to be something just for these books.

  Considering the period you’re writing about, maybe you should have tried writing it with a quill.

  I thought about it. But that seemed a little over the top. What I figured out a long time ago is that, while I don’t get blocked that much, when I got really blocked and couldn’t get going on something, what always worked was to get away from the computer and sit down somewhere with a piece of paper and a pen and just start writing. So I thought, if this works so well to get the juices flowing, is there any reason why I shouldn’t try to write more that way? This was around the same time I was discarding the whole notion that one had to produce tons of material every day. The fact that it’s slower is not a problem because I wasn’t worried anymore about producing a lot fast. I like the fact that it never crashes, you can’t lose your work. Occasionally after I’ve typed it and I’m editing it onscreen, I may add a paragraph at the keyboard but that’s probably not more than a few pages out of the entire “Cycle.” Basically, every word was written with a fountain pen.

  It’s incredible how much you’ve produced in the past few years while only writing in the morning. What do you do with the rest of the day?

  Ever since about ’85 or ’86 I’ve indulged my penchant for getting into physical stuff. A lot of the time I’d do projects, whatever interested me. I’d build a model rocket or work on an electronic circuit or write a little computer program or work on the house or the car. There was a long series of things like that I would do.

  Then I started skewing towards things that were really impractical, because if I got into practical things, I’d get into trouble. I’d work on a computer program and then I’d think, “Hey, there’s a business opportunity here.” And then I’d get distracted. Or I’d start a house remodeling project, wiring some outlets or something like that, and something would happen and I’d run afoul of the inspector and get into some kind of situation-comedy tangle that would make it hard for me to work in the morning. I ended up doing a lot of rocket building, large model rockets. That turned into me being on the advisory board of this space company in Seattle, Blue Origin.

  Is it a research outfit, or do they actually make things?

  It’s intended to be very much a making-things kind of operation, but right now it’s in a hiring and getting-ready stage.

  Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t building rockets cost a fortune?

  It does cost a fortune, but that’s not my department. I’m a member of the advisory board with machine shop privileges. I go in there and try to make myself useful in an advisory capacity inasmuch as a science fiction writer can. Time will tell. Here I have to get really vague because it’s not my company and I don’t have an ownership stake in it, and so we’re no longer talking about my intellectual property, as it were. I tend to rapidly become bored with the more abstract parts of it. I want to go off and lift heavy objects and operate a plate grinder.

  Blind Secularism (1993)

  Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation 10 days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.

  —REVELATION 2:10

  In 870, the Danes assaulted a community of nuns at Coldingham, Scotland, and were flabbergasted to discover that, following the example of one Ebbe (later St. Ebbe the Younger), they had gashed their lips and noses with razors, rendering themselves so gruesome as to put to flight any lustful thoughts.

  The nonplused invaders ended up burning the place down, and its inhabitants with it, and thus joined a long series of practical-minded sorts who have failed to understand the faithful. The roster of baffled infidels includes many Romans, at Masada and when they were martyring early Christians, and missionary-killing aborigines the world over. Now we can add the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and much of the news media.

  The day after the Branch Davidians immolated themselves, I happened to drive past Boeing Field in Seattle. The spot where the E-4B airborne nuclear command post used to appear, surrounded by fences, lights and guards, is now occupied by shiny new 737’s and 757’s waiting to be delivered to customers around the world. The prospect of nuclear war has faded with astonishing suddenness. Even the ozone hole is shrinking, another apocalypse to scratch off the list. Yet the Branch Davidians got just the apocalypse they were looking for.

  Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us to new cities and cultures, where we become foreigners to our parents. Synthetic cultures are nimbler than old ones, often imprudently so. They have scattered so widely that they can no longer hear each other and now some have gone so far afield that they have passed through the apocalypse while the rest of us are watching it on TV.

  The smorgasbord of new cultures is probably a good thing, and for every person it makes crazy, there are probably a hundred it keeps sane. But new cultures lead to new forms of culture shock, and new ways for us to misunderstand each other.

  No three cu
ltures could be more mutually incomprehensible than the trinity at Waco: Branch Davidians, G-men and the media. This is not because they came from different places; on the contrary, it is easy to imagine members of all three groups growing up in the same small town in the Middle West, starting out as schoolmates and winding up on opposite sides of barricades shouting gibberish at one another.

  Waves of police, each more heavily armed and psychologically refined than the last, were dispatched to Waco, but came no closer to understanding the cultists than did local cops. Still, they came closer than the news media. Before the flames had even died out, journalists were complaining about the lack of on-the-scene fire engines—as if the trigger-happy cultists, dodging the battering rams and tear gas to slosh lantern fuel across the floors of their own home, amounted to just another predictable public health hazard, like cryptosporidium in Milwaukee.

  . . . and God shall will wipe away all tears from their eyes.

  —REVELATION 7:17

  Tear gas hurts, even if you have a gas mask, and the Branch Davidians withstood it with the same fortitude as the razor-wielding nuns of Coldingham. Looking out their windows at the weird tanks sent to assault them, the cultists could not have failed to notice their resemblance to the hellish tormentors prophesied in their favorite book of the Bible: “and they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron [Revelation 9: 9–10] . . . and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone [Revelation 9:18].”