Good evening. I'm Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation. It is so great to be back with old friends, and old is coming to the stage. A while back, one of our speakers, Jim Click of Chaos and All That, did a book called Time Travel. It's a book about time travel, and he made the point that it doesn't ever work, it doesn't happen, but that doesn't matter because thinking about it and talking about it and telling stories about it is one of the ways that we think about time and history and such things. And science fiction writers like Neal Stephenson are professional time travelers. Some of them do only the future, certain kinds of such writers do only the past, and the engineering mentality of Neal Stephenson, he likes to take both to the future and, as I gather with the current book, Polostan, to the past. We're also having on the stage Charles C. Mann, who wrote the book 1491 and then the later book 1493, and then he stopped, wrote many other books like, you know, The Wizard and the Prophet and so on. But he's a great student of how the world changes with things like Europeans showing up suddenly on the east coast of the Americas and how that contrasted with the gradual arrival of Asians on the west coast over previous millennia. So they are not put together accidentally on this stage. They travel together a lot, they travel to exotic places, and with any luck we may hear some of the stories from Neal Stephenson and Charles C. Mann. And I hope you're backstage.
So I should say that a couple hours ago I decided to walk from the hotel here, and I wasn't quite sure if I remembered the name of the venue right. And so I Googled the name, you know, my name and Neal's name to see if where we were talking. And Google very helpfully gave me an AI overview of tonight. And it said, journalist and author Charles C. Mann and author Neal Stephenson have been involved in multiple events together, which made it sound like a kind of a comedy duo. But my favorite one is the first one was the Long Now talk, this talk, and it says, in January 2018, Mann interviewed Stephenson at the Long Now Foundation about Stephenson's book Polostan. And so I first had two thoughts, I guess I had two thoughts. The first was that my wife is accurately constantly accusing me of being late, but six years is something of a record. And the second is that, speaking of travel, I think it was in 2017, in other words, just a few months before this talk in 2018, that Neal and I were in Utah, and Neal expressed a desire to ride a horse, which surprised me a bit. And I said, why? And you said you had this idea for an in your head, and that horses in the West and so forth were involved. And amazingly, this novel's now out four months later. But I also wanted to know, you've obviously had this idea for a really long time. What does it mean that you have a novel in your head for a really long time, particularly a cycle of novels of uncertain length?
Yeah, this one actually started in 2013 when I heard from my friend Seamus Blackley, who is a physicist who was the father of the Xbox and has done a lot of other interesting things in his career, but he had become aware of a particular story dating to the early, the years prior to the beginning of the Manhattan Project that was a really interesting story, both on a physics level and on a kind of human drama level. And so ever since then we've been kind of kept in touch on this topic. And so I've been kind of developing this idea for that long and kind of talked my publisher into publishing the book that long ago. But then one thing after another kept happening, and I said, well, okay, I'm still working on the Bomb Light series, but you know, I do have this other idea that I think I could write quicker. So how about if I just do that, and then we'll get that out, and then I can turn my attention back to Bomb Light. And Bomb Light is the overall name of the series of books. So that was Seveneves. And then I turned back to this, I did some more work on it, and then the same thing happened with two other books, The Rise and Fall of Dodo, and well, three other books, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, and Termination Shock. And finally, after Termination Shock, they were like, we signed a contract ten years ago for you to write these books, you know, you have to write these books. So I did. So I went back to the notes that I had started back in 2013 and started organizing them and pulled them together into the first volume. I've got more stuff that's going to go into a second volume, but sometimes this style of writing books actually works out pretty well if you let something percolate for a long time. So the idea for Seveneves came to me in 2004, and I would go and poke at it from time to time and write bits of it, but I didn't actually write it for, I think it came out in 2017, and some parts of Reamde were also kind of percolating for that long. So I think it can actually lead to good results to kind of let these things simmer on a low boil for a really long time.
So I'm not going to go into everything the book is about, but say that among the subjects covered are the strategy of polo, exactly what was in the Chicago World's Fair of the early 1930s, the workings of machine gun smuggling, and, you know, Soviet steel production, you know, a whole bunch of things like this. And as a person who writes nonfiction books, all of these to me say rabbit hole. Yeah, right, yeah. And I know, and I kind of don't want to know the answer to this question, but when I do this, like I have lots and lots of beautifully worked out three-thousand-word, four-thousand-word excerpts that are completely irrelevant and, you know, just die on my computer hard drive. Is this the same for you?
Yeah, I'm trying to get away from that method to be more efficient.
Yeah, good luck. So because like you, I can identify a rabbit hole now when I see one, which takes a while to learn that skill.
But so yeah, so for example, this book takes place during the 1930s mostly, and so one thing that I kept bumping into unexpectedly was polo. I found it very strange that this kept coming up because, of course, to us today, polo is the ultimate sort of fancy, upper-crust niche sport, but it was much more widespread then. And the reason is that they still had horse cavalry, and where you've got active horse cavalry, you've got polo because that is the training technique that you use. So even the Soviet Red Army had a polo team because you had to do that to maintain your abilities. So, you know, it's training for war. And so I started paying attention to that, and I then stumbled upon something that I did not see coming at all, which was that in the vicinity of Gillette, Wyoming, there were polo pony ranches that existed to breed and train these ponies for the worldwide market of people who played polo, a market that was much bigger than it is now. And it's not enough just to breed them, you've got to actually kind of teach them to play the game a little bit, or they're useless. So the staff who worked on these ranches, who were sort of white people, you know, cowboys, black people, Native Americans, Hispanics, they all knew how to play polo because it was part of their job. So you have these incredibly multi-ethnic teams of expert polo players riding around in Wyoming training these animals how to play this upper-crust sport. And fancy people from all over the world would go there on kind of vacation safaris and see what was on the market and go home with expensive horses. So, you know, there was a rabbit hole to end all rabbit holes, and I pride myself on the fact that I did not go there in this book.
So there's not a one-hundred-and-fifty-page section?
No, no, there's not. There could very easily have been, but instead it's just mentioned that this is a fact and that one of our, the main character of the book, a young woman named Dawn, had worked on one of these ranches, which explains why she knows how to play the sport, even though she's definitely not from a social class that would normally be, you know, polo-playing kinds of people.
So you guys should know that in the last, there's been a sort of a review blitz of Neal's book, and they've been extremely favorable and so forth. One of the lines in one of the reviews really struck me, and this is in The Washington Post, and it said, Polostan is a new departure for Stephenson. And I knew that was wrong because you've written historical novels before. But it did make me wonder, do you think of historical novels as being essentially different than science fiction novels in any way?
I do not, because I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid, and I would get these big fat books, these anthologies of science fiction stories from Analog and, you know, the magazines like that. And you'd be reading along, you know, each story is a few pages long, and suddenly you'd come to a historical story. They had no, sometimes they had science fictional elements, and sometimes it was just a historical story that some science fiction writer had decided to toss off. And it's obvious from reading a lot of science fiction that a lot of the people who write this stuff are, at least, you know, speaking of like, you know, sort of the golden age of science fiction writers that I read when I was a kid, they're obviously history geeks. So that has been true for a really long time. And so I think in the science fiction world, there's absolutely nothing surprising or kind of eyebrow-raising about a science fiction writer doing history. It just seems that way. It seems weird if you're living outside of the science fiction world and you see somebody doing it.
So, you know, you're world-building, right? You're building a 1930s America. It's a fantasy creation in a certain way, in the same way as a future society. But I am curious about what are the rules, you know, that in your head when you're doing this? You know, people like Hilary Mantel would claim that, you know, every action they did, and it's only their thoughts that I'm, you know, imagining other people feel, it's okay to mess around with chronology for the sake of story. You see what I mean?
Yeah, to the greatest extent possible, if you actually put these people where they were doing the things that they're known to have done and then sort of weave around that, that's kind of the best way to approach this thing. And then because you're creating fictional characters, you can have them do whatever you want. So it doesn't reduce the amount of leeway that you have significantly to stick to the historical record. And occasionally maybe some situation will arise where, oh man, it would really be cool, it would really solve a problem for me if I have this historical character, you know, do something that's not real. So that's kind of the approach that I take. I wouldn't say I stick to any one rule set in a totally rigorous way.
And similarly, you know, is it important to you to go to these places, to travel around? You and I have been to a couple of places, but I don't know whether that's just coincidence.
Or, you know, I used to do more of that, and what I kind of learned is similar to the rabbit hole conversation, is that in twenty-four hours in a new place, it's possible to absorb a book's worth of research. And then having done that, you feel like it's all got to go into the book, which isn't always in the service of good storytelling. And so the thing is that particularly so like in Reamde, you know, we were in Xian together, and which is where a lot of that book was set, but it was a contemporary book, and so it was really valuable to go there because everything I saw was something I could use. In the case of a historical novel, the farther back in history it is, the more things have changed to the point where things might be just unrecognizable, and you have to go hunting around for the weird little museum or the historical site to get a sense of what it looked like a long time ago. So it just depends on the project and how far back in history it was. And I find that what's better is to find first-person accounts that were written back in the day. You can still go somewhere and get a sense of how things are laid out, but for example, in this case, part of the action takes place in a place called Magnitogorsk, which is a giant Soviet steel mill in the Urals. And there was an American engineer who went there in exactly this time period to work on this project and just wrote a very concrete, simple day-to-day account of what he saw there. There's no abstractions, there's no ideology or politics. It's just, you know, we had to go find a wrench, you know, it was very cold today or what have you. And those kinds of impressions, I think, are really a lot better than just going there today and trying to imagine what it looked like before everything changed.
When they asked me to give this talk, I got out my stack of Neal books and I thought, you know, gee, maybe I could say something sort of profound about them. I obviously can't, but given that story, but I did notice something that, you know, there's this thing that if you are a writer, you encounter at various times books and lectures about how you should write a novel. And they're sort of based on the idea of, you know, like the well-made play, you know, there's a well-made novel. It comes from the nineteenth century, I think. And then I was looking at your books and this is, and so you have, and you know, these things are like, there's this arc. I realized this is sounding like I've hauled you here to insult you, but I'm not actually. But you know, in Seveneves, there's this great moment where you turn the page and it says five thousand years later, which is surely the first time this has been done in literature. And I have to say, when I read that, it threw me right out of the book. And I had a picture of you kind of rubbing your hands in glee at the curve you had just thrown the reader. And then, you know, Reamde is a seven-hundred-page chase scene, right? And Fall is like a book that says, hey, I'm a sort of semi-realistic satire that's going to morph into Paradise Lost and the Greeks. So it's pretty clear to me that you aren't really interested in writing, you know, well-made plays, but you're interested in thinking about, you know, doing different stuff. And I kind of wanted to ask you about that. Is this something that's large in your mind, or you just sort of, I have these ideas and the structure of the book will be whatever it is to contain it?
There's kind of a straight and narrow path that leads to being a writer that I did not go down. And it kind of starts with, you're in a lot of places, you're told, well, if you want to be a writer, start by writing short things and work your way up to long things, which sounds incredibly reasonable. And so, you know, start by keeping a journal and then you can maybe write a short story one day and so on and so forth. And I tried that and became very discouraged for a while because I couldn't write short things. And so I thought, well, okay, this is never going to work. And then one day when I was in college in Boston, I was in this horrific slum apartment where we would hunt cockroaches with vacuum cleaners. And it was spring break, so there was like ten days. I didn't have enough money to go home. So I was just going to be stuck in this apartment for ten days. I had nothing to do, but I had a typewriter and some paper. And so I sat down and I wrote a novel, which I didn't, it was just, it just kind of happened. And the, uh, involuntarily, well, I mean, I just started and, you know, I had nothing else to do and out it came. And so then that, then I twigged to the fact that even though I can't write short stories, I can write novels. So that was one way in which I sort of evaded the usual, you know, trajectory that's laid out for aspiring writers. And then there's kind of a similar thing in science fiction where there's a ladder of sorts that is put in place kind of by helpful people to help encourage people to become writers. And kind of the way it works is, you know, you go to conventions, cons, you volunteer at conventions, you write some short pieces that get published in, you know, fan fiction or whatever. As I was saying before, you kind of climb the ladder over time. You make all these connections in that world and you, you know, one day if all goes well, you know, you finally publish your first novel. I kind of ended up bypassing all of that, not because I have any problem with it, but basically I published, you know, my first two books, The Big U and Zodiac, were not really science fiction, but then Snow Crash was. And so suddenly it kind of appeared out of nowhere from the point of view of people in the science fiction world because I hadn't climbed that ladder. And I think, you know, the vast majority of those people thought that was entirely cool. And then there were some who kind of, you know, were a little miffed. These kind of systematic approaches to how you become a writer were things that just for contingent reasons I bypassed. And so a lot of what has happened to me has happened kind of through some very, very fortunate accidents. And the other writers who've had the biggest impacts on me have been the ones who did stuff I didn't realize you were allowed to do. When Gibson wrote Neuromancer, there's a science fiction book that was absolutely science fiction. There's no question that that's a science fiction book, but it was written with kind of literary-grade prose. And that was new to me. Some other people must have done it, but it was new to me. And it blew my mind, you know, that you could, that you were allowed to do this. And I've had similar reactions to the late David Foster Wallace, to Thomas Pynchon, and some others. So it's that sense of going outside the established, what are perceived as the established limits of the art form and getting away with things. That to me was most energizing when I was getting a start.
Sarah has an extremely light and almost trivial question. Sarah, he's saying that in a really nice way. Yeah, yeah. As a student of humanity in the eternal flow of chaos and order, do you think that humans will be able to avert some of the worst outcomes of our current predicaments? And the S is in predicaments.
Oh, man. I was trying to warn you. Yeah, okay, yeah. I didn't catch the sarcasm in your voice, Sarah. This is a great question. I mean, it's obviously the most important question, so I shouldn't, I'm really not giving you grief. I don't know. I mean, to me, the two biggies are carbon and the fact that we can't agree on what's real. And I don't know what to do about the fact that we can't agree on what's real. It's hard to think of a technical fix for that one. I think that there's technical fixes for carbon and that those fixes are going to be implemented. I was here for Termination Shock a few years ago and I said that, you know, it was going to be the biggest engineering project in history and I still see that. I've seen a lot since then that confirms in my mind that lots of people are now devoting their time and energy to these things. You know, we're clearly in dark times politically and I guess ask me in a month.
So John asks, given generative AI, do you feel the quote book in The Diamond Age is becoming possible now or soon? So maybe we should explain what that is for people who haven't read it. It's a smart book that teaches kids and it changes its content dynamically according to what the kid needs. So it's an interesting question right now because with generative AI, you could ask for a little lesson every day for a kid and say, okay, teach this kid the multiplication tables using a pedagogical approach that would work for them. So in a sense, that can be done right now. I think what's missing is stringing it together with a story and it's that plus kind of the human element. So one of the themes in The Diamond Age is that there is not just the book, the content of the book, but there's also a human connection between the girl who owns the book and a so-called ractor, a performer who's playing the roles of the different characters in the book, and that somehow makes a difference. The combination of that human connection with a plot that actually pulls the story forward makes the kid want to learn as opposed to just being a disorganized set of lessons. So I think those are the areas where progress is going to have to be made to do a primer. You have something a little bit like that in Fall where you have, there's so much garbage on the internet that people hire kind of guides, I forget what you call them, just editors. Yeah, yeah. And you don't interact so much with the net yourself. Yeah, you're reading the feed produced by that editor. Yeah, right. And so in this way, AI which generates the nonsense generates also an entire class of employment for all the people that it throws out of work.
Yeah, well, I mean, that thing you read at the beginning of, at the top of the hour, that's now in the historical record. Right, right. So right now as we speak, AIs are training themselves on the knowledge that you and I talked about Polostan in 2018. Right, right.
So Rich, I think, said several years ago, you talked about an initiative for positive science fiction at a bookstore. I think you talked at the bookstore for positive science fiction. Has anything happened with that or any plans still?
Well, we published a book called Hieroglyph that was an initiative through Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination. And so we did a symposium, an anthology of stories by asking a bunch of science fiction writers to write something in that vein and pulling them together. And my contribution, you can now get in a little skinny book called Atmosphor Incognita. It's about a tall tower. So that did happen. I don't think a lot more has happened. We found it curiously difficult to get science fiction writers to be happy. So in a way, it was almost a negative result in that it was just really hard to get people out of the dystopian groove. But I haven't done further work on it.
You mentioned in one of your essays that there's sort of economic reasons that are part of the reasons that films go that way. Is the same thing true in sort of science fiction writing?
I don't think so. So in movies, it's easier to make shitty-looking futures than nice-looking futures because if you want to make a shitty-looking future, you just take what we have now and throw dirt on it, set fire to it, put graffiti on everything. I mean, this is literally, it's not an exaggeration, it's literally what you see, right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So because that's so cheap and easy, you know, it creates an economic incentive to portray those dystopias on TV. I don't think that's really as true of written science fiction, but I think, you know, although there are dystopian novels, that in general it's a much more varied picture in literature than it is on the screen.
No, this is an anonymous question. Is there a time you feel nostalgia for but haven't actually lived?
Man, I think I'm in the camp of people who think things were really shitty until recently. So I mean, there might be a few situations I want to go back to briefly, but there's places I'm curious about, but I wouldn't say I'm nostalgic about anything.
So you don't want to be in a place pre-antibiotics?
