Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque.
Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephenson
October 31, 1959
Fort Meade, Maryland, U.S.
Stephen Bury
(with J. Frederick George)
- Novelist
- short story writer
- essayist
1984–present
Stephenson's work explores mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired. He has written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.
Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (founded by Jeff Bezos) developing a spacecraft and a space launch system,[1] and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He was Magic Leap's Chief Futurist from 2014 to 2020.[2]
Early life[edit]
Born on October 31, 1959, in Fort Meade, Maryland,[3] Stephenson came from a family of engineers and scientists; his father is a professor of electrical engineering while his paternal grandfather was a physics professor. His mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, and her father was a biochemistry professor. Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1960, and then in 1966 to Ames, Iowa. He graduated from Ames High School in 1977.[4]
Stephenson studied at Boston University,[4] first specializing in physics, then switching to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe.[5] He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in geography and a minor in physics.[4] Since 1984, Stephenson has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Seattle with his family.[4]
Writing style[edit]
Stephenson's books tend to have elaborate plots drawing on numerous technological and sociological ideas at the same time. The discursive nature of his writing, together with significant plot and character complexity and an abundance of detail suggests a baroque writing style, which Stephenson brought fully to bear in the three-volume Baroque Cycle.[23]
Influence[edit]
Stephenson's writing is influential in technology circles. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Carmack, and Peter Thiel are all fans of his work.[34] In Snow Crash Stephenson coined the term Metaverse[35] and popularized the term avatar in a computing context.[36] The Metaverse inspired the inventors of Google Earth[34] and Snow Crash was required reading on the Xbox development team under Microsoft executive J Allard.[16] According to academic Paul Youngquist, Snow Crash also dealt the cyberpunk genre a "killer blow".[37] According to Publishers Weekly, Cryptonomicon is "often credited with sketching the basis for cryptocurrency."[38]
