There is a particular science fiction approach to the world, and it has nothing to do with the future. It doesn’t have to be in the future at all. I used to read anthologies of science fiction stories when I was a kid — there’d be ten stories about rocket ships and ray guns, and then there’d be some strange Robert Bloch story set in some town in the 1950s that had no science, no traditional SF content, but it was clearly science fiction. It had that SF approach: an awareness that things could have been different, that this is one of many possible worlds; that if you came to this world from some other planet, this would be a science fiction world.
In Cryptonomicon, some of the characters have been going along and they’ve discovered a little crack in the sidewalk; it splits wide open, they fall through it, and they’re in this whole universe that they didn’t imagine. It happens for them in different ways. The clearest case is Bobby Shaftoe, who is minding his own business, having a career in the Marine Corps, and suddenly everything becomes very, very strange for him. It takes him a long time to figure out what’s going on, and he never totally gets the whole story.
Reporter: What did you read to become the writer you’ve become?
Neal Stephenson: I went through a period of reading science fiction exclusively. I joined the Science Fiction Book Club and would just spend days reading. My favorites were always Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein. Particularly the way Norton would mix things up and have them happening in the very far future but with ESP or magic or something. It was really mind-expanding for a kid at that age. I liked The Zero Stone [1968], and the other I really liked that I remember really clearly is Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel [1958]. I read that over and over.
Then I stopped reading SF for a long time, in high school, college. Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t think there was much to be read. Then when [William Gibson’s] Neuromancer came around [1984], it was a real thunderbolt for me, because I had gotten interested in writers who had a really vivid style — Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe — and if I was going to be a writer, that was how I wanted to do it. Then to see that really vivid, literary style of writing in a science fiction book, and not a space opera but something set on the surface of the Earth, and have these noir overtones, to me it was an amazing synthesis of several things I was interested in.
Reporter: What’s your background, particularly in science and computing?
Neal Stephenson: I grew up in a science-oriented family. My father taught engineering as a professor and his father was a physics professor. My mother is a biochemist and the daughter of a biochemist. I had no formal training in the sciences at an advanced level, but I taught myself subjects that interested me.
I don’t have much of a technical background. I started Boston University as a physics major and ended up with a BA in geography, though I did work as a teaching assistant in the physics department. I started writing about halfway through college.
I’m pretty much self-taught in computers. I like to tinker with technical stuff for the fun of it — circuits, computer programs, playing, tinkering, enough to remain semi-aware of what’s going on. A degree in computer science wouldn’t have done me that much good, I think. Computers are changing so fast that it’s always necessary to do more research.
Reporter: How do you write and what are your habits?
Neal Stephenson: A good deal of the work that I do takes place in the background, which is a computerese way of putting it. It is a process that runs quietly at an unconscious level while I am doing other things and that goes on twenty-four hours a day. The actual putting of words on paper might come out to two to three hours a day.
I used to write stuff that was kind of a shambles. I would have to go back and fix it, which was a pain, and it was like a car that’s been in a crash and fixed up in a body shop. It’s just never the same. So over many, many years I started to figure it out. A lot of the better stuff I’d written, the stuff that didn’t need to be fixed, was the stuff I was writing first thing in the morning. And a lot of the absolute crap I was writing that just needed to be overhauled or thrown away was what I was grinding out at two in the afternoon, when I was trying to be a tough-guy writer and I was just exhausted and bored.
So I just stopped. I learned to stop. I’d go down and write for an hour or two in the morning, which is enough to grind out a few pages, and if you do it every day of the year, that’s enough to produce a lot of fiction.
And consequently, I think the quality is higher right off the bat. It doesn’t require that kind of reworking. Another factor in this choice is that writing fiction every day seems to be an essential component in my sustaining good mental health. If I get blocked from writing fiction, I rapidly become depressed, and extremely unpleasant to be around. As long as I keep writing it, though, I am fit to be around other people. So I do that two to three hours of putting words on paper and then I stop and do something as completely different from writing as I possibly can. Specifically, to get it off my conscious mind.
Reporter: Like what?
Neal Stephenson: That can be just about anything. For me, what works is doing something of a practical nature. I recently built and tested a kayak designed by George Dyson, the son of Freeman Dyson — paddled it around Lake Washington and Puget Sound. Playing around with technology is a convenient choice because I know how to do it and I can get the stuff I need pretty easily. Anything to get the hands busy and take the mind off the actual work in progress.
Reporter: Given what you write about, frankly it sounds like an extension of the literary work.
Neal Stephenson: I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you’re focusing on a very specific and particular thing — one word, one line of code, whatever. You have to be conscious of what you’re doing and get it right on that little level. But at the same time, you have to keep this much larger project in your mind and not forget how the particulars tie into the overriding scheme. So I do think that there is a certain kind of parallel there. But I don’t know how meaningful it is.
Reporter: Are you conscious when you write of what you want the result to be in your reader’s reaction? Or, to put it more bluntly, are you trying to change the world?
Neal Stephenson: I think that if you write a novel or create any work of art in the pursuit of a specific end, a specific goal — reaching a particular audience or having a particular impact on the world — the art tends to suffer. And so I kind of avoid doing that. I try to start with some impression or some scenario that I can’t get out of my head, and to kind of build on that. At a certain point, you have this kind of blind hope that you’ll reach some audience. It remains to be seen whether that’s going to happen.
To me, there’s something about crypto during the second half of the twentieth century that is really kind of haunting and interesting. I find it’s a theme that can be taken to some pretty interesting places. It was very important, obviously, in World War II, and it’s very important now.
If you write with goals, they tend to poke out embarrassingly. It’s just that at this point in my career, it’s a matter of following my instincts and writing a few pages every day, trying to preserve my momentum. Having specific goals is just not part of the picture. When I was younger, I had goals, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. So I kind of tried to invent my career as I went along. I had to rationalize it, justify it.
When you could be doing other things to make money, sitting around telling little stories all the time seems irrational. It seems to want justification. Now I’m to a point where I’ve figured out that this is what I do. It doesn’t necessarily make sense, but I’m going to keep doing it.
Reporter: Speaking of keeping doing it, Cryptonomicon is a long book.
Neal Stephenson: If you get into it, for most people it doesn’t seem that long. At least I hear from most people that they get through the book without that much agony. And I know from reading big, long novels like [Thomas
Pynchon’s] Mason & Dixon and [David Foster Wallace’s] Infinite Jest — which was brilliant, amazing — that I was always sad when I got to the end.
There is a kind of cult of brevity that a lot of people subscribe to. I don’t know where it comes from. I’m speculating that maybe people have taken classes in writing where they’ve been trained to be minimalist, to be very pithy, and people who get jobs as writers in a journalistic setting are taught that they’re supposed to write just so much and no more. That, I think, leads to a kind of attitude that when someone writes something very long, they’re engaging in a disgusting show of self-indulgence. So, that’s my attempt to explain an attitude I don’t understand. But my own reaction to that kind of criticism is, emotionally, kind of lukewarm. I’m not, like, angry or bitter about it.
Reporter: How did you go about researching Cryptonomicon?
Neal Stephenson: A lot of it is pretty straight — reading World War II history and crypto history. I wish I could tell you something entertaining or exciting about research, but in the end it’s research. The undersea cable article that I wrote for Wired gave me a chance to visit some interesting parts of the world and meet some interesting people who know about those kinds of topics. To learn more about submarines I went to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, where they have a U-boat in the courtyard. It was captured during the war and towed up the seaway and into Lake Michigan, put on a railway car, and dragged it into the courtyard of this museum. They’ve got a lot of it blocked off, but there’s a little route you can take through it led by a tour guide.
So that did it, plus watching Das Boot, and just reading the German sailors’ accounts — a lot of the people who went through that experience were not shy about explaining what it was like in print.
Reporter: Avi’s business plan is beautiful satire, but it’s also reality-based, isn’t it?
Neal Stephenson: I actually tried to write a couple of business plans. I have this need to do stuff, to tinker with stuff. And for a while the only way I could justify putting time and money into screwing around was to claim that I was trying to start a high-tech business or something. Which in retrospect was ludicrous. But in any event, during the 1980s I actually did attempt to get one or two high-tech businesses going, so that involved writing business plans. It just gives me the cold sweats even thinking about it.
Reporter: Do you relate to any of your characters?
Neal Stephenson: Not particularly. There aren’t that many points in common between us. Writing different characters is not autobiography. It is not an attempt to put oneself in the pages of a book. It’s about trying to see the world from the point of view of someone who may be extremely different than you.
That’s a common trait of novelists: to have that ability to see things from just about anyone’s point of view — which often makes novelists seem sort of pusillanimous. Novelists, for example, tend not to take sides in arguments very readily. As a necessity of what they do for a living they can listen to all sides of an argument and agree with all sides. People are frequently surprised by just how little I have in common with a good many characters in my books.
The classic line we trot out for questions like this is that the characters are composites, which is not a very satisfactory way of explaining how it works. It kind of implies that every feature a character has or anything he does can be traced back to something real, which isn’t the case. At a certain point when you’re going to write novels, you start to realize that your characters are taking off and doing stuff that you don’t necessarily expect or want them to do. After a certain point you kind of have to go with that. So you try and come up with characters who have plausible backgrounds and could have existed in the real world, and then you kind of let them go and see what happens.
That’s true of Waterhouse and most of these other people. Waterhouse’s particular combo of biographical data is unique, but nothing about him is especially outlandish, except that he’s unusually gifted in math. But I think his overall story is fairly typical up to the point where he gets messed up in Detachment 2702.
Reporter: All right, then — do you have a favorite character in Cryptonomicon?
Neal Stephenson: Yes, Bobby Shaftoe. My wife’s uncle was a Marine at Guadalcanal, and I did a lot of reading about Marines; they really had a style about them that I found interesting.
I was reading an anecdote about this guy who was on the Yangtze River patrol in the 1930s. Their gunboat went up the river, way deep into China. When they dropped anchor at a bend in the river, they saw a British Imperial Navy gunboat on the same patrol a short distance away. So they got together, and the British Navy guy takes the American Marine guy over and opens up this locker, and it’s full of polo mallets and saddles and stuff. And he said, “You provide the ponies, we’ll provide everything else.”
So these American Marines went ashore and somehow arranged to buy or rent a string of Mongolian ponies, and they set up a polo field, and had their chukker, or pitch, whatever you call it, and played polo. By modern standards, they were kind of rough-edged characters, but they did have a certain style about them.
Reporter: Whereas, for Randy’s crowd, donning business suits is a big deal. And I don’t make that observation just in the sense of style — but by shucking what they perceive to be their “rough edges” (e.g., blue jeans), and pulling on slacks, Randy’s crowd feel they’re making some kind of monumental sacrifice. The absurdity of this, and the juxtaposition with the Waterhouse crowd, is not lost on this reader.
Neal Stephenson: It’s obvious that modern folks, crypto-entrepreneurs and otherwise, lack heroic purpose. It is obvious to us and it is obvious to Randy. Randy ruminates in several places about how he and his comrades all seem like wimps and losers compared to the WWII generation.
You didn’t have a lot of time to spend gazing at your navel back in the ’40s — no hang-ups about “Am I doing the right thing?” And even if you did have hang-ups, chances are that someone was giving you direct orders and not leaving you much choice in the matter. So, yeah, it’s amazing to read about that era and see these people decisively going off and putting everything into accomplishing certain goals.
Whereas now the fashionable way to be is to have a kind of cool, jaded sort of ennui. Which is understandable, but it does make a lot of people now seem kind of pallid compared to the people who lived in the ‘40s. And it’s almost worse for us that that generation is so cool about it, so matter-of-fact: “Oh, yeah, well, we had to, you know, defeat evil. So we went and did that. Not much to say, really.”
On the other hand, in World War II, or one of those wars, they had a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think the modern equivalent of that is that there are no jaded, bored people in the high-tech industry, in the land of really good hardcore geeks. They all have a kind of intensity about what they’re doing that makes it impossible for them to be bored or passionless. They are pretty driven, and they get a lot of joy from what they do, and it comes through, I think.
Reporter: So to return to the original question, “Why crypto?” and to your point about not trying to set an agenda, the fact is that the reader is aware in Cryptonomicon of some very large things at stake involving science and technology, and that there’s also some significant history here. And we are talking about a book, after all, that has some equations in it.
Neal Stephenson: To me it seems like there is a kind of a strange denial in a lot of our culture about just how important science and technology have been this century. There’s just an unwillingness to come to grips with it at all. I don’t deprecate people who feel that way, but I do think that at the end of a century like this one it’s not the end of the world if you toss an equation into a work of art.
As to history, the more I thought about the future of computing the more interesting it was to consider the history of it. This is true not only in computing but in a lot of areas. Maybe we could have known more about what was going to happen in the Balkans
if we’d paid more attention to the history there. I started feeling the need to put things in a longer historical context, and to find the people whom today we’d call hackers.
It is not difficult to find hacker-types in history — Archimedes; and even in mythology — Daedalus. Certain ancient cities, such as Alexandria and Syracuse, seemed to attract them. But in previous centuries, hackers had to build physical contraptions in order to realize their ideas. Computers changed this by making it possible for hackers to build functioning mechanisms (i.e., computer programs) out of words.
Reporter: And central to Cryptonomicon is the protection of those mechanisms and their products — while also distributing the mechanism and the product.
Neal Stephenson: That’s the basic contradiction I’m trying to deal with here. There’s always been this duality between secrecy and openness. The digital computer as we have it today was born in the attempt to deal with codes, to go into these impenetrable messages and bring back the information. In that time the codes that we were breaking were to us a sinister force. We had to break these codes or the bad guys were going to take everything over. Now, the computer is all about openness and spreading information to every corner of the world. But at the same time, we’re finding that the more we do that, the more we are perceiving a need to encrypt our stuff, to keep it out of the hands of the bad guys.
Reporter: Are there any hidden messages in the novel itself?