Welcome everybody and welcome Neal Stephenson. It's great to see you. Um, I just wanted to introduce this new series. So, this is um... this started as a series we were doing internally at Automattic and WordPress, but uh realized that it would be a great series to share with everyone and I'm so glad that Neil can join us for this first public version.
Um we have uh I've just started to book other speakers as well. We have um author Hugh Howey of the Silo series joining us next month. Um and uh we'll continue to have these. They're not necessarily on a monthly schedule, but uh somewhere between monthly and quarterly and um so please stay tuned for more as we do those. Um if you have questions, feel free to put them in the YouTube chat. Um those are going to be monitored and forwarded to uh myself and Neil towards the end of this.
Um and so we're going to be starting today with a short reading and then Neil and I will do a discussion and then we'll do go to questions from you all. Um Neil Stephenson uh was an author that was a favorite author of mine uh long before we had a chance to meet, but through uh through Long Now Foundation and and the Clock Project and Danny Hillis um amazingly we got a chance to meet and then in some ways kind of work together on uh Anathem um or at least uh in parallel when you did Anathem. Um and so it's a great honor to have you and it's always fun to have a conversation and I look forward to it and with that I'll have you start with a reading.
Yeah, uh happy to be back on a stage with you, Xander, albeit virtual this time. Um this one's a little tricky for reading purposes because it's a thriller, it's a it's a spy novel, basically, and so uh you can't pick things from the middle of the book uh cuz there's spoilers. So what I'm going to do is read sort of the introduction to the main character, which is uh pretty spoiler-free. So, um it's set in uh in about 1934.
Um Owen had only ever wanted to be a fop. It did not seem too much to ask of a world that had bestowed much more exorbitant gifts on the sorts of boys he went to school with. Foppery was very much a growth industry. Positions had been made vacant by the Great War, which had killed many and converted more into the most tiresome sort of grimacing stiffs, men whose every look and mannerism said, 'I have seen things you cannot imagine, boy.' Not that the road was easy.
Through no fault of his own, Owen had grown up with more in the way of height and physique than fop implied. That, combined with habits around posture and bearing that had been necessitated by the starched collars of his school uniform and later reinforced by a polo injury, had shouldered him with expectations around manly deportment that he could have done perfectly well without. He was that sort of fellow toward whom heads expectantly turned whenever a lady on a train needed assistance with something heavy.
His father's early exit from this mortal plane, while very sad, had relieved him of the glowering paternal disapproval that was every fop's cross to bear. Certain arrangements that had apparently been set in place by papa between the time he had been called to war and his demise in some godforsaken part of Mesopotamia made it seem quite unlikely that Owen and his brothers should ever have to work for a living. Or at least this seems to be the general drift of what he heard from his father's former partners at the bank during the appallingly tedious semi-annual meetings that he was obliged to attend.
Even after the financial world went pear-shaped in 1929, the remittances kept landing in his bank account. They were smaller, though, and his debts had grown larger thanks to some poor judgment in matters related to wagering on races and polo. Some sort of gainful employment began to seem as if it might be, if not necessary, then prudent. Could such a thing be reconciled with his overarching ambition, though? Could one be a fop with a job?
It all seemed perfectly devilish until a chance meeting at a club put him in touch with Sir Hugh, an old family connection close enough to mean something, not so close as to be downright awkward. Sir Hugh, among other responsibilities, was a trustee of Eton College, where Owen had misspent his pre-Oxford years. Sir Hugh maintained in his head an impressively thorough and precise ledger of the various kinds of trouble Owen had got into during that time. Nearly all of that had been related to unauthorized publication of very nearly libelous stories in the school newspaper, and when Owen had been banned from that, a sort of underground publication that he had literally cranked out on a hijacked mimeograph.
Sir Hugh's primary occupation was some kind of responsible position at the newspaper. He made Owen aware of an opportunity there for which, implausible as this might seem, Owen might be a good fit. The readership, he explained, liked to see the serious bits of the newspaper leavened with something just a bit more fun.
Owen nearly spat out what was left of his gin rickey when he heard the word fun emerging from beneath the steel curtain of Sir Hugh's mustache. In a way, though, it was that very incongruity that got Owen to understand why this made sense. Sir Hugh needed a bit of fun in the pages of the newspaper, but he was perfectly incapable of understanding it or providing it himself. He needed someone like Owen.
They'd been losing readership, not a lot, but enough to be noticeable to an upstart publication. Sir Hugh would not dignify with the term newspaper as there could be only one. Which made the clever move of bringing on Christian Odds Odzley to do nothing more than wander about and send in witty dispatches from various parts of the world.
And the thing of it was that Owen actually knew this Odds, had been adjacent to him in Oxford, had lost money to him in a card game, but easily bested him at polo. Christian Odds Odzley was just the sort of chap whose very existence was a standing affront to Owen. Always one notch higher in the social ranking. He was the fifth Viscount Roxborough. Just a bit better connected, more self-assured, more more condescending, more ironical, and worst of all, a year younger.
Going head-to-head with Odds in writing fun dispatches to the newspaper was therefore a kind of sporting proposition, and one that Owen took up eagerly and in the full confidence that it in no way posed any sort of conflict with his one and only aspiration. He had been doing it for 3 years. In that time, he had traveled 100,000 miles to six of the seven continents and filed over 100 dispatches, nearly all of which had been published in the newspaper with only light mangling from Rupert, his editor.
Whenever possible, he tried to arrange it so that these came from locations with pleasing climate, excellent food, the very best wine, and enjoyable company. The problem being, as Rupert kept banging on about in terse, irritably phrased telegrams, was that it was not actually fun for the readership to read an account of Owen sipping fine vintages in the golden light of Tuscany. Odds, by contrast, understood this. Odds knew that dispatches from terrible places made for better reading. Thus, did Owen find himself in Moscow in winter.
So, that's the setup for for Owen, the main character, the point of view character of the the whole book.
And just to um zoom out a little bit. So, this is um this is part of a series of books. I think you're calling them the Bomb Light series, correct?
And um the first one being Poland Stan um and the the Poland Stan had a was centered around a different character um Aurora or Dawn um and um and this one is at least as as it starts out it seems to be centering around Owen. Um yeah. I'm It seems like you switch back and forth between male and female heroes and um and choose them for different reasons. I'm wondering how how that comes about and and how it came about for this series.
Yeah, in this case um I actually started this book a long time ago. I I started working on this in 2012 and got a certain ways into it and then set it aside um and wrote some some other books instead. And um so uh but it was always going to be uh about the relationship between these two characters, Dawn or Aurora, and Owen. Um and um when I came back to it uh at the beginning when I started to write Poland Stan just a few years ago I looked at what I had and discussed it with my editor and my agent and um uh we decided that from a sort of packaging standpoint, the best way to do it was to divide it up according to the the characters, the point of view characters.
And that's for a few reasons. Um I've habitually in a lot of my other books jump back and forth uh between different point of view characters, sort of interleaving uh sections about one with sections about the other. And that's kind of what I thought I was going to do in this case, but there's reasons why that wasn't going to work. Um chronologically, it didn't match up and so it would have meant a lot of uh jumping back and forth in time, um which I I think would have just been really hard to read.
So, the decision we came to um was to just uh split the books up by character, have the first book, Pola Negri, be all about the female character, Aurora, uh and then save all of the Owen material for book number two. And there's a handoff between them, which takes place uh during a a few days uh in early 1934 in in Moscow. We see it described from Aurora's point of view at the end of Pola Negri, and we're going to see it described from Owen's point of view at the beginning or close to the beginning of D, and then from that point on, the story just uh carries on about Owen.
Got you. And um Oh, I just lost my monitor for some reason.
Um in any case, um just wanted to point out that this uh this is the book today and that's coming out today and um so it's it's called D: Heavy Water. Can you say a little bit more about that?
Yeah, so um D was just the uh uh symbol that um that the chemists and physicists used uh for a while to to to designate deuterium, which is the uh isotope of uh of hydrogen. And so, with H2O is obviously water, but D2O uh was how they would write heavy water. Um and um deuterium uh became really important um unexpectedly uh in the late 1930s.
And uh here's where I could go real real deep on experimental physics in the 1930s, but kind of the the TLDR version of it is um that um uh these people the the neutron was discovered in 1932. Fermi and the Joliot-Curies and others began to do all kinds of experiments where they would use neutrons to bombard various uh elements and see what happened. Um and um uh Fermi uh figured out that slow neutrons were more effective in splitting or or uh interacting with with nuclei than fast neutrons.
Um and so, at that point people got really interested in finding materials that would slow neutrons down without stopping them. And um there's a few things that work, paraffin, uh uh graphite, um but the best for a while the was um was heavy water, D2O. And so, um and it was in about uh 1939 that um uh it became the the physicists became aware that there was this possibility of um of of chain reactions um and uh and then it could be of great military significance.
So, at that point uh suddenly uh it's kind of like the eye of Sauron like, you know, pivoting around to aim at um uh at Frodo when he puts the ring on. If you're uh if you're operating a heavy water production facility, um suddenly uh everyone's very, very interested in you. And so, um uh and so, um there was a lot of drama that happened um around uh around heavy water. It all came from one factory in Norway.
Later, there was a very famous kind of commando raid on that factory. Um but uh so, a lot of people have heard that story. Um a bunch of ski commandos uh got to it and um and blew it up. Uh but um but prior to that, in the spring of 1940, just before the Nazi invasion of Norway, um the uh uh there was another kind of spy drama that happened uh around the heavy water, which is kind of this the central core of the the story of this book.
I It looks like It looks like Xander's having some technical uh difficulties. So, um so, I'm just going to keep talking while while those are revol- resolved. Uh I'm just going to guess that I'm still live. So, the um uh the um there was a uh there was a moment in towards the beginning of um 1940, where um the director of this factory, this fertilizer plant in in Norway received a letter from IG Farben, which is the kind infamous giant German chemical company. Well, it's infamous now. Uh in those days it was uh just a a big German chemical company and in this letter um the IG Farben just basically said, 'We will we want to buy every drop of heavy water that you currently have in in your stocks.' Um and um he, the director of the plant, uh relayed that information to a business associate of his, a French banker named Jacques Allier, uh who's one of the kind of unsung heroes of the the the nuclear um program and of the of the war.
Uh and he uh he relayed that to the Deuxième Bureau, which is the the French MI6. Uh and they got in touch with some physicists to inquire, you know, why would uh big German chemical companies suddenly be so keen on getting heavy water. And the physicists sort of explained to them that this was extremely important and that under no circumstances could the Germans be allowed um to to get their hands on all of this heavy water.
Um so um uh they sent the Deuxième Bureau sent Jacques Allier to Norway just weeks in advance of the uh the German invasion. Um and um uh and he was able to get this stuff out. So, that's kind of the beginning of the saga of the heavy water, which goes on at some length and which I'm trying to to relate uh in in the remainder of of this book.
Thanks. Well, I think I am back. Sorry about that. Um
You are. Yeah, good to see you.
Yes. Thank you for the improv- improvisation. Um can can we talk a little bit about the um how you seem to have bounced back and forth between historical fiction and science fiction and they Yeah, I'm curious um how do you how do you decide which one you're going to do? What what makes these as interesting as doing uh science fiction?
Yeah, so uh it's not a new thing. Uh when I was a kid reading these, you know, anthologies of science fiction stories from Analog or whatever, there would always be a few historical pieces kind of sprinkled in. So, I think that a great many science fiction writers are kind of closet history geeks. And so, they've used characters and incidents from history as the the kernel of of ideas. Um so, that's a well-established pattern um in um uh even in, say, Snow Crash, the Diamond Age, uh some of my earlier books, there's kind of a historical element to those.
Uh in Snow Crash, there's a lot of stuff about Sumer, uh ancient Sumerian religion. In uh Diamond Age, it's kind of the the cultures that are depicted are throwbacks to Victorian and traditional Confucian cultures. Um so, um with uh I guess the the first uh directly historical thing I wrote was Cryptonomicon, which is split it's got a dual timeline thing where half of it takes place during the Second World War, half of it takes place in the present day. Uh you know, I I really enjoyed that um and got way deeper into it with the Baroque Cycle, which is kind of like an extended prequel to Cryptonomicon. Um and um so so I find it very enjoyable.
Um the at the same time I've, you know, continued to write um you know, future science fiction books. Um It's it's uh as time goes by it uh it becomes harder or a little sort of chancier to write science fiction, at least science fiction that's set you know, in the next couple of decades, let's say. Uh because things change so fast and so unpredictably. Um so um you know, it's easy to write historical fiction. It's easy to write fantasy. It's easy to write um far future science fiction or sort of alternate reality fiction. But writing uh anything that's uh trying to project uh a decade or two decades in advance um just gets harder and harder as as time goes by.
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, it seems to be universally true with a lot of science fiction authors that the the now has become increasingly compressed.
And the near future is much more opaque. Um I I do see though that there is a kind of thread through all of your work that's kind of like times of heroic engineering. Yeah. Yeah. Even in your you know, your your science fiction is kind of this way going back to, you know, the earlier works of uh that are kind of in a way predicting a lot of uh cyberspace and um and then Termination Shock with your geoengineering and Seveneves the of planetary exodus. Um what is it about these kind of and now with in this series is obviously kind of precursors to the nuclear age. Um and so I'm curious how how that why is that so attractive to you and what are you what are you looking in for that?
I mean it's it's what I grew up with. I grew up in a engineering family, a science family. Uh the town I grew up in Ames, Iowa was actually a a minor outpost of the Manhattan Project. It's where the uranium came from. Um the uh um and so um uh all my life I guess I've I've been adjacent to um you know big uh what you call heroic engineering projects and um uh so I I guess I I feel uh as I as if I'm on reasonably solid ground writing about those things.
I know people who who do that stuff. Uh you know I have sort of a basic amount of understanding of of how these things work. Um so it's it's comfortable uh territory for me to be working in and it's a um you know it's a reasonably uh popular genre. It gets you um gives you something to build a narrative around. If someone's you know uh trying to build something big and interesting and complicated or they're facing various challenges uh and uh and and just the drama that emerges um from um from the the sort of difficulties that they encounter along the way. Uh so I guess it's just easy and comfortable uh for me.
And I know for a lot of your books you've traveled uh to do a lot of the research, especially you know, Cryptonomicon um um and others is that did you go to Russia and any of the places that are in the series?
I went to Russia in the late 80s. Um haven't been back. Um the uh you know, I went to Bordeaux, went to uh Paris, went to Barcelona for this, Australia. Um the um uh the temptation is to to do a lot of traveling cuz traveling's fun, you know. Uh it it can be uh uh problematic because um uh you end up accumulating a huge amount of of written material, of notes that you so went to a lot of trouble and expense to obtain. And so, then you want to include that all. You don't just want to throw that stuff away. And so, uh it's very easy to end up with uh pages and pages of um of description um that doesn't necessarily advance the story.
And then the other uh complication is just that uh if you're doing historical work, things change. Um And so, you know, going to um going to these places today, you if you're careful, you can find old museums or look at old buildings and get a sense of how things were uh during the era that you're writing about, but a lot is different. And sometimes it's really more effective to find um accounts uh that were written by people who were there during the actual time that you're you're writing about, which is much less romantic and fun. You're just sitting in a chair at home reading a book, but um it's uh a lot a lot of times uh is a better source of of actually usable material.
And I think uh when we talked about Pollux then a while back that um you mentioned that this Owen character is kind of loosely based on Ian Fleming's brother. Is that Did that still come through?
Yeah, Peter Fleming. Yeah. Yeah, I just immediately before this uh podcast I uh I put up a a Substack post about him. Um But he uh um was by far the better writer, a brilliant prose stylist. Uh and um he wrote a number of books, so travel books um that are uh in the main really funny uh witty um pithy easy to read. Um his you know, the the best way to get into Peter Fleming is to read a book that he wrote called Brazilian Adventure where he just on a whim went to Brazil and tried to go up river and find uh a missionary who'd gone missing. Uh and it's just this ridiculous kind of uproarious uh journey.
Uh but he wrote um History of the Boxer Rebellion called The Siege of Peking. He wrote uh a a strangely funny account of Operation Sea Lion, which was the Nazi invasion of Britain that never happened. Um So he's just uh worth checking out just as a pure uh prose stylist.
Yeah, the character seems to kind of have the opposite approach to travel and writing that you do. It's He's kind of writing to travel rather than travel to write.
Yeah, well he uh it's mentioned a few times during the book that um he's in competition with another this guy Odds who I mentioned in the reading, um and um uh the the um the dispatches that these guys send in are much more entertaining when terrible things are happening to them in terrible places. And so uh they get into kind of a one-upmanship game of trying to uh you know, go to places where they're going to get into some kind of trouble or other or at least have some like miserable experience that they can write about in a way that'll be amusing to their the readership back home.
Um and I mean, I think what's interesting about this this series is that, you know, the bomb is this classic case where technology kind of outruns the institutions that govern it. And um I'm wondering if you see any parallels to the the times that we're in now.
Yeah, well, the funny thing is, you know, as I mentioned, I started this in 2012 when you know, the whole AI thing was not even really on the horizon. I mean, people were working on AI. I heard of AI, but nothing like what we have today. And so the um the delay in my getting these books out has uh has has sort of thrust the this the the issue you just mentioned into the forefront of these um these conversations. And um and there are some interesting parallels um you know, the um the the early the mid-1930s work uh that Fermi and the Joliot-Curies and others did um was uh you know, it was interesting science. It was it was great science, but it was very much kind of obscure, you know, tabletop apparatus.
And um uh there's a great story about how Fermi had to hire uh fast graduate students because some of the isotopes they were creating were so short-lived that uh they would decay in the time it took to carry them down the hallway to the lab. And so he would find grad students who could grab the sample and run down the hallway, you know, fast before the thing decayed. Um so um um so it had uh you know, that kind of of gentleman science sort of vibe to it uh you know, through a lot of the '30s and um and then suddenly there's this moment um it's uh it's described in the book but it's not shown in the book where Lise Meitner is out cross-country skiing with her nephew Otto Frisch uh at the end of 1938 and they're discussing some weird results uh from uh Hahn and Strassmann in in Berlin. Nobody can make sense of the results of these
Experiments, and suddenly the whole thing comes together in Lise Meitner's brain, and she understands that what has happened is that the uranium nucleus has split in half. And then, as soon as you have that insight, you start doing the math, the idea of chain reactions sort of falls out of that. Um, so during 1939, the physics world is coming to grips with that, kind of doing some calculations, and um, October 1939, uh, they just, everyone goes dark. This, Hitler's invaded Poland by that point, and everyone has sort of seen that this is coming, and um, so it becomes a national security thing, and uh, the Joliot-Curies lock all their stuff up in a vault, and everyone stops publishing, they stop sending letters to each other. Uh, so everyone on the inside knows kind of what's going to happen or what might happen. Um, and uh, and governments start to get interested.
So, yeah, you can see all kinds of analogies to what's going on with AI, to the idea that, um, uh, you know, we have to keep, we have to build the bomb because our adversaries might build it before we do.
And whoever wins that race, you know, ends up controlling the world. Uh, which is sort of exactly where we are, you know, when people today, you know, go to the, um, OpenAIs and the Anthropics of the world and say, 'Why don't you cool it for a little bit right now, take your foot off the gas?' And the answer is, 'Well, you know, the Chinese are not taking their foot off the gas. We have to keep going.'
It's an interesting kind of moment that that bit of physics started happening at the exact time that World War II starts to break out, and that creates this like highly focusing moment for all these national labs and scientists, which we kind of don't have something as focusing as that now.
Yeah, it's just a complete coincidence, historical coincidence that...
And almost in a way, it probably, I think, probably made the nuclear thing, you know, more contained and safer because it became this national priority and secret, which AI is not really a national priority and secret, right?
Right. Well, yeah, to build the bomb, you know, you've got to build the Manhattan Project. And um...
It's like, well, we're going to need a, you know, to make this plutonium factory, well, to put it near the Grand Coulee Dam because that's how much electricity it's going to take, you know, and uh...
Or and water. Um, and um, uh, uh, you know, many other examples can be cited from the Manhattan Project. So, um, I mean, we do have kind of Manhattan Project scale work going on to build data centers and all of that.
Yeah, I think we're building a Grand Coulee Dam and energy for, you know, every few months at this point, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Um, but uh, but there's also the potential for individual people to work with the models that exist and have been published. Um, that wasn't true at all of, um, you know, I mean, nobody's going to build a nuclear bomb in their garage.
Right.
And one of my favorite, um, you know, essays turned book that you did very early on, I think it's good overlap for kind of this WordPress and Automattic crowd, um, that 'In the Beginning Was the Command Line.' Um, I'm curious, and this kind of laid out not necessarily open source, but certainly being able to grab hold of your computer at a much lower level, um, than the kind of surface operating systems like Mac OS and Windows at the time. And um, I'm curious how you feel that has been playing out as we have more and more siloed ecosystems in the world.
Yeah, so I actually a few years ago, you know, sketched out some notes on a possible follow-up to that that was going to be about graphics, 3D graphics. Um, hm. And I'm still kind of in touch with that world through projects that use, um, Unreal Engine. Um, so I, you know, remain reasonably close to that world over time. But the thing I didn't see coming was that the command line is back. It's back because of, you know, it's how you interact with, uh, Claude Code.
So, if you ask, uh, Claude to do something, you're doing it in the shell, in the, uh, the command line window. Uh, and um, you know, every time you, um, ask it to do something, it'll think for a little bit, and then you'll see an actual command line get, you'll spill out onto the screen that, um, that, uh, Claude has put together, you know, and um, um, people who were really good at using the command line, uh, became incredibly fluent in creating and writing out long strings of commands all packed in a very dense way into a line or a couple lines of code. There'd be a grep and a, you know, a cat and, you know, various other command line tools all piped into each other.
Yeah, I never got to be particularly good at those because I didn't use them frequently enough. Mhm. But, uh, Claude is really good at assembling those commands in a hurry. And so, uh, you see these, uh, things flash by. You know, some of them are like four or five lines long. Uh, uh, and, uh, they go by too fast for you to parse them and make sense of what's happening. So, the command line is definitely back. It's just we're spectators to it in a way now.
Yeah. No, I can never forget the moment that I asked a lot of questions and its answer was, 'Here, copy and paste this into your terminal.'
It's like, 'Oh boy, here we go.'
This is now a different world, for sure.
And um, I think, I mean, what's curious about historic fiction versus science fiction, I mean, I know you've wrestled a lot with kind of dystopic versus what not necessarily utopic, but at least maybe prototopic or more positive futures. Um, with historic fiction, you kind of, I guess, in a way, you kind of know how things are going to play out. But, um...
What's your take on where we are in a world of being able to write more positive views of the future or just positive and more prototopic kind of fiction?
It's, uh, I find that, um, the turn towards dystopian fiction struck very deep and, uh, has really, uh, influenced a couple generations of writers. Um, and there's almost an implicit belief that if you're cool, if you're smart, if you know how things work in this world, um, you're going to write things that are more dark and dystopian. Like, it shows how hard you are, how real you are. Um, and, um, that's a hard thing to shake. And every sort of negative piece of news that comes along, you know, reinforces that. Okay, you watch videos of drone combat in Ukraine and, you know, as a science fiction writer, your mind immediately goes to, okay, what would the future look like where, you know, this was ubiquitous.
Um, and at the same time, as, you know, say Steven Pinker and many others have pointed out, um, objectively the quality of life, um, for most people has gotten much, much better. Um, kind of it's been monotonically increasing for a really long time. Um, and so we see the dark negative things because our brain is tuned to look for that, but, you know, we don't necessarily see the fact that, um, that in many ways our day-to-day lives are more abundant and safe than anything that previous generations got to experience. So, so I don't know, you know, I hear from people all the time who want to support a utopian or protopian, uh, efforts in creating fiction. I was a judge just a month ago, less than that, uh, for an X Prize, um, uh, film competition down in LA where a number of filmmakers were competing to create movies that depict particularly AI in a somewhat more constructive light. Um, and, you know, I've heard from multiple other people who were kind of grappling with this issue of, you know, how can we tell stories about our future that will, you know, put the reader into a somewhat less, you know, depressive state of mind.
Right. Um, well, speaking of which, I mean, I think, and we're going to switch over to some questions coming from the audience in just a few minutes. So get those in if you haven't already. I see we already have quite a few. Um, the, um, your books often kind of present engineering solutions to these massive kind of social problems or just existential problems facing humanity. Um, and what are you kind of most worried about now that we may or may not have a technological solution for? Obviously we have an AI that's changing things, but I'm always curious as to how existential threat really is.
