Welcome to Dedicated. I'm your host, Doug Brunt. Today I am thrilled to be with Neal Stephenson. He is well known for his fiction that explores cryptography, mythology, linguistics, and in his most recent book, Polymath Espionage. He is among the favorite authors of Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel. He advised Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. He was Chief Futurist for the company Magic Leap, where he was developing augmented reality headsets, and he even wrote a novel straight to Audible based on some of the IP that he and his colleagues developed there. His 1992 breakout novel, Snow Crash, became required reading for Xbox developers, and his 1999 novel, Cryptonomicon, which was my first Stephenson read, has been credited with, and I quote, 'sketching the basis of cryptocurrency.' Not only is he pretty good at predicting the future, I think he might be guiding us all to it. Neal, it's great.
Yeah, it's good to be here. Thanks, thanks, Doug.
So the cocktail choice is the Mezcal Margarita, which I'm thrilled about. Great, and I'll get started making that.
Yeah, I like the smoke. It does have a nice smoky flavor.
So, Cryptonomicon, as I mentioned, I have a funny story. A good friend of mine, it's John Hammer, who gave you the book on the swords. When that came out, he called me up and he said, 'Doug, trust me when I tell you, you need to go get this book right now.' So I do, and I call him back and I say, 'Hammer, this thing is 900 pages,' and he says, 'You're going to read it in two days,' which is basically what happened. It's just an awesome, awesome book.
Well, thank you. Thanks. I'm glad you turned out to be a satisfied customer after all that.
Well, you know, it was a heavy thing to carry out of the store. Speaking of which, I appreciate you accepting Hammer's gift because when you're on tour, it is a pain to give people things that they have to put in their bags.
Yes, yeah, no, it can be a problem, but no, the form factor is going to work with my luggage, so we got lucky, and it's a lot skinnier than my books tend to be.
Right, right. So you were born... This is a slightly longer drink to make, so I'm actually squeezing limes into the shaker for the listening-only audience.
Yeah, the one item of bar gear that you don't have here is the tabletop squeezer.
That's right, I have one of those at home actually. By the way, do you salt the rim? No? Okay, we'll get this out of here then. Thank you for considering it.
Yeah, we got to watch our blood pressure these days.
Yeah. All right, we'll get the big rock in.
Okay, I'll use these things so I don't manhandle your ice for you.
It's all right. I'm a petri dish of communicable diseases at this point. My immune system's on red alert. Nothing can touch me.
All right, well then I'll manhandle your lime wedge. Okay, there we go.
All right, we are almost off and running here with a mezcal margarita.
Beautiful. It's got that milky look to it. I love that. The smoky mezcal flavor is awesome.
Yep, yep. All right, well, cheers.
Cheers. Great to see you. Thanks for having me on.
So I read, born in Maryland but raised...
Yeah, you should take a moment. It was good, right?
Very good, very good. Thank you. Strong. I'm very limey at the moment. But born in Maryland and then raised mainly in Illinois and Iowa.
That's right. Yeah, that's right. Champaign, Illinois.
That's where my wife was born, in Champaign, Illinois.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, these are, you know, the midwestern American college towns, you know, Champaign...
Was your dad a professor or your mom?
Yeah, yeah. He was doing his graduate work at Illinois, and then he ended up becoming a prof at Iowa State in Ames. But all those towns have a kind of common culture in a certain way. Ann Arbor, Iowa City, you know, Bloomington-Normal, Champaign. The midwestern American college town sits alone, you know, on the prairie, and there's football, and you know, there's college kids and the whole bit.
Yeah, yeah. And I read there were big brains on both sides of the family there. Your dad was an electrical engineer, and his dad was a physics professor. On your mom's side, biochemists.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's not an uncommon kind of pattern for academic families to mix and match in these kinds of campus town environments, you know. And so we were one of those. You go where there's a job. And so it's kind of like a subculture, I guess, or at least it used to be. I don't think it's quite the same now. I think the academic become-a-professor track isn't the sure thing anymore the way it used to be in terms of being able to get tenure or getting like pushed out of there or what.
What do you mean? More just assuming you avoid doing anything that'll get you kicked out?
It's just that there's less available in the way of positions, and so you get a lot of people who 50 years ago would have gone straight into a tenure-track job. Instead, they're working as contract labor, as adjunct professors, and they kind of bounce around, and they never...
That sort of freelance mentality sort of permeates the entire workforce, not just academics. Code developing is probably where it began, maybe. I don't know.
So you start then, you go to Boston University, where I read, and correct me on Wikipedia if this is not right, but majored in geography and physics.
Yeah, I started with physics, and then I kind of got whipsawed by some charismatic geographers. And that was interesting to me because I like maps. Geography is about why are things where they are in the world, you know. Think of the world as a big machine. How is it hooked up? But they had a... I was taking some cartography classes as part of that, and they had a very early kind of computer graphics monitor that you could get access to for drawing maps. And so I just fell down that rabbit hole and never really climbed out.
I read some book not long ago. It was like 'Seven Maps That Explain the World' or something like that. And it, you know, Russia is this way, and so of course the politics and the populations wound up that way. There's just no way around the Urals and the rivers.
Right, you know, you can't go east and west in Russia because the rivers are north-south, you know, that sort of thing. So until the railroad, it was kind of a different deal.
Yeah, I'm fascinated by that stuff. What kind of fiction were you reading in those days? Who were your sort of...
It's interesting. When I was sort of younger, I was just the classic nerd who sits there inhaling science fiction books, you know, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, the usual suspects of classic Golden Age science fiction. And then I had a great high school, or a couple of great high school English teachers who got me to accept, you know, literature with a capital L. And so I ended up reading, you know, Moby Dick and the stuff that you read when you're studying great literature. And then kind of what happened, I think, post-college, was that the big bang for me was Neuromancer by William Gibson. That's 1984. That's a couple years out of college for me. And he wrote a book that was great science fiction by any standard, but it was written using kind of literary-grade prose, which I didn't think you were allowed to do.
It's like kind of what people say about John le Carré.
Exactly, yeah, yeah. So, you know, it seems so clear in retrospect that that was a great idea, but it just never crossed my mind that you could do that.
So everyone else is writing like L. Ron Hubbard.
Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, it's great. I love pulp, you know, as much as anyone else. But to me, that was a mind-blower that you could cross those two streams.
I haven't read that one yet. I'll get it on your recommendation.
Oh yeah, no, it was a real landmark.
So '84, coincidentally, that was the year of your debut, which is sort of less talked about, The Big U. But you had your debut there with The Big U about sort of college life, and then in '88 was Zodiac.
So how were you... like, these weren't paying the bills in those days. So how were you paying the bills in these '80s, which is sort of like your mid to late 20s?
Well, a combination of things. When I was working as a clerk-typist in a library in Iowa City, when the contract came through for The Big U, and it was a small amount of money, but it was a lot to me then. And of course at that age, you're like, oh well, did it come out in hardcover first? Because that's like a big deal. Very pulpy-looking trade paperback. But at that age, you're kind of like, okay, well, my ticket is punched, you know, like goodbye working for a living. I'm a writer now. Yeah, I'm a writer now. So I quit my job and cashed in my tiny little retirement fund and kind of lived off that for a while. And then the really weird thing that happened, which still, it's strange even to tell this story now, but in 1984, The Big U was optioned by Ridley Scott.
Whoa. Yeah. Wow. Fresh off of Alien or something like that.
Yeah, yeah. Nothing ever came of it, but I think in that era there was a lot more money floating around Hollywood to option things, and you would hear stories of somebody tossing off a spec script or something and getting a million dollars for it. So, but also my wife graduated from medical school and got a job. So between all of those things...
You're married by '84, '85?
Yeah, we're hooked up by '83. We're married in '85.
So what's a big deal? Like you've got mouths to feed and you know.
Yeah, well, I mean, she had an actual job, unlike me. So mid-'80s is kind of living frugally but not worrying much about money. And then, so you know, I had a very high opinion of myself and ended up writing a terrible book that never got published. And about like 1987, I realized that it was never going to get published and it was terrible and shouldn't be published. And I kind of had this moment of panic, and like, you know, I was given this great opportunity and I threw it away by being an idiot and writing a shitty book. So, but I'd been reading some hardboiled mystery novels by James Crumley, which are set in a town in Montana, and they're a classic take on hardboiled detective fiction. So I said, okay, I'm going to write a hardboiled detective book about someone who's like a toxic waste detective, someone who... because I had a friend, Marco, who was kind of doing that. So I wrote this book in two weeks.
Zodiac. The second... you wrote Zodiac in two weeks?
Yeah, I wrote it in two weeks.
Because I was that scared, you know, and so disappointed in myself. And so fever dreams, writing all through the night, that sort of thing.
Yeah, that's amazing. How many... pardon the sort of level of weeds of this, but how many, you know, the word count? What was the number of pages of that?
Well, it's a lot shorter than my other books. I mean, it's a kind of normal-size book. So, but I can write fast when I'm in that mode. Coffee all night long. It's just, I'm not a nighttime guy so much, especially now. I probably was more then, but I'm more of a morning, get-up-and-crank kind of guy. So, but there are people who do this. So, I mean, you can kind of tell sometimes if you're reading a novel, oh, okay, he's one of those guys.
Yeah, you can tell if they're a nighttime all-nighter or morning...
No, just a like sit-down-and-bang-it-out kind of person. So I suspect, I don't know, I suspect Stephen King is one of those. He has some crazy...
It's fun. So we'll get into process later, but yeah, and everyone's totally different. I know Stephen King has sort of a quota that he lives by.
I'm like the anti-quota writer. Sometimes I get 50 words, sometimes I get, you know, a big day would be 500.
Yeah. But anyway, one, I don't want to skip too far ahead, but one quick question that does potentially span ahead: how many books have you bottom-drawered over the course of your entire career? We know one so far.
Yeah, so well, there were two before The Big U, so that's two. And then the one I just mentioned, that's three. And then Zodiac, Snow Crash... I wrote a sequel to Zodiac that was actually not terrible. It just never got published.
Did you show it to an agent or...
I can't remember. But maybe I should dig it out.
Yeah, I was going to say, would you ever resurrect these?
Maybe that one, not the others. And then I think that was the last one, because after that was Diamond Age. I did the two with my uncle, the Stephenson books. From that point, you kind of know how to do it, and so the bottom-drawer thing is less likely to happen. You know, just the process of writing a thing and having it suck is so painful and humiliating that you don't... it's like putting your hand on a hot stove. It's not a thing you repeat.
Yeah, right. You're just like, okay, well, if you've got, you know, your talent... some people do nothing but repeat that. But how did you... well, you never did, you ever take a class in... you don't have an MFA, I don't think. I never saw that in your background. So where did you hone your talents? Just trial and error?
Yeah, I didn't. I mean, like I said, I had some great English teachers. But I'm not a big... let me phrase this carefully for myself. Studying writing in a formal program is not a useful activity. I know for some people it's useful. That's great. You know, fine, sign up for the MFA, you know, whatever works for you. But for me, I just couldn't see what it was going to add. And I was in, you know, I spent like right after college, I lived in Iowa City for two or three years, and I kind of, when I moved there, I had thoughts of trying to apply for the writer... The Writer's Workshop. It was a super famous writing program there. But I talked to some people who were in it, and it sounded like a lot of like, you know, write a few pages of a thing and show it to the others, and everyone reads it.
And you're getting feedback, be like, why would I care what this person thinks? That was my attitude.
Yeah, Doug, it was like, you know, I just had more of a 'I don't care what you think' kind of mentality. I just couldn't... Also, I don't like showing things until they're done. So nobody sees my stuff until the book is done. Like, not my wife, not my agent, not my editor. And so the idea of showing, you know, five pages of something I just started to a bunch of people in a room, I just couldn't deal with that at all.
No, it's fascinating to hear this stuff because there have been a number of people on the show who have done the MFA thing and it worked out. But as you say, it sometimes happens.
Yeah, I mean, I think you can find plenty of examples of both. So there's no one answer, but it is important, I think, for any given person, there is one answer, right? So you need to know which kind of person you are.
Yeah. So '92 comes along, Snow Crash comes out, and as I mentioned in the intro up front, this was a big, big book and really connected with an... I hate to say you have a cult following because I think that doesn't give full appreciation to how big... I mean, you're a number one New York Times bestselling author, so 'cult' feels like a small term. You have a very engaged, passionate audience that a cult following would have. You're just sort of also mainstream on top of all that. And as I mentioned, Xbox developers, it was required reading. So did that change... obviously your profile changed enormously there in terms of how successful and how widely read you were. How did that change your lifestyle too?
So the interesting thing about it is that Snow Crash was a very slow build. So it didn't... it's not like bang, right away it was a big bestseller. The book came out in hardcover and then paperback... no, trade paperback. My editor, Jennifer Hershey, was an incredibly enterprising, clever person. She printed up like a thousand hardcovers because at least at the time, if you sent a hardcover to a reviewer, they were more likely to take it seriously. So she did that, but the release was a trade paperback. So now, like the other day at one of these signings, somebody showed up with like two of those hardcovers and they're all wrapped up.
Oh my gosh, those things must be worth a fortune.
Yeah, yeah. So, but it was a paperback. By the way, I went shopping... you know, there's a couple of these... you know, it used to be 20, 30 years ago, if you wanted to find, you know, for writers I admire, and I got a first edition of Cryptonomicon. I like to get their first, and then when I meet them, I say, please, would you sign this? And so I have a little experience with shopping for Neal Stephenson first editions, and these are not cheap. Cryptonomicon, and that one, if it's limited to a thousand print run, 1,500, something like that.
Yeah, yeah. So, but it was a slow build. So, and it never sold a lot. So, I mean, over 30, 34 years, it has sold a total of, I think, a million copies, which, you know, is great. I'm not complaining. But, you know, those are not huge numbers.
No, and especially you make a smaller split on the paperback. You know, your percentages as an author on the hardcover and on e-book are even better than the paperbacks.
Yeah, yeah. So, again, not to gripe, but it never was like a smash hit. It was a slow build. And I didn't really... another thing is that now you can sit there on Amazon or whatever and you can get live updates on how it's selling. That wasn't true then. It was every, you know, half a year or so, you'd get a statement from the publisher telling you, you know, here's your sales figures. So you couldn't get real-time updates. And I did a group signing when it came out at the University Bookstore in Seattle. And I was sitting next to another writer, a friend of mine, Sean Stewart, who had a book out. And then a year later, we did another group signing, same place, same group of people basically. And he turned to me and he said, 'So what's it like?' And I said, 'What are you talking about?' He said, 'What's it like?' I was like, 'I don't know what you mean.' And so he kind of explained to me that it was a successful book, because I hadn't... he was paying attention, but I wasn't. And so he was getting... it was like he was getting some buzz.
Yeah, that word of mouth, that slow build word of mouth sale thing is just the best. I've known a few writers who have experienced that. For example, Amor Towles had a debut novel, Rules of Civility, and it actually didn't do that well out in hardcover. Did fine, was like okay. Then it came out in paperback and something started to happen. That slow build started to happen, and of course that set him up for the next book. But that often happens, but it takes a while for that to kind of kick in.
Yeah, and you just never know. It's not like the Today Show where suddenly you sell 50,000... or wouldn't be 50,000, 5,000 books that day or something, and then the sort of thing gets kickstarted, you know. And the emphasis now is on trying to get a huge spike of sales in the first week so you can get a better position on a bestseller list. And so there's a big emphasis on getting pre-orders and stacking up the PR and...
Yeah, get your social media accounts all in order, all that.
But back then, you know, none of that existed. I feel like an old man talking this way back in those days, you know. But yeah, the business was just different then.
Before we get into a section on your writing process, I do want to ask you a little bit, sort of this is glancing off Cryptonomicon in some way. And as I mentioned in the intro, it was sketching the basis of cryptocurrency. I don't know how much you agree with that quote, but I have seen that quote. Do you own any cryptocurrency?
Yeah, I do. I mean, I'm not a big... it's a really stressful thing to own. Like if you had a lot of your money...
I'm going to have to top up mine. This is like a very tasty drink here. I can remake all of this.
It would be a big drain on your energy. It was about 10 years ago, so let's see, Bitcoin started in 2013. I think it was probably 2014. I got invited to a conference of people who are excited about Bitcoin, and one of them took me aside and said, 'You know, Neal, do you have any Bitcoin?' And I said, 'No.' He said, 'Oh, well, you should have some.' And so here's, you know, download this app and set up your wallet. And he gave me a Bitcoin, which at the time was worth like $250.
Right. So it's gone up and been down since then. But I love these crazy stories from the early days. Some guy's got a hard drive in a dumpster somewhere with 8 billion dollars worth of... have you seen this? The lawsuits trying to... So the audience knows, this guy has an old computer with cryptocurrency on it. And my next question is going to be, please explain this to me, because I don't own any because I don't understand it, and I'm not going to buy something I don't understand.
But this guy has crypto locked up on the hard drive of his computer. He accidentally has his computer thrown away. It's in a junkyard heap somewhere, and he's suing to get access to it because there's like several billion dollars worth of crypto.
It would be worth it to rake through this dump, you know, miles of a dump.
