Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephensonis an American writer and game designer known for his works of speculative fiction...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth31 October 1959
CountryUnited States of America
frustration boredom mask
Boredom is a mask frustration wears.
oxygen atmosphere trying
For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.
clutter basements universe
A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
technology failing cases
It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.
talent ability
Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.
html world paper
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
our-world mind stories
The mind knows...that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story.
operating-systems unix oral-history
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
hypocrisy republic virtue
If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.
supposing-that ordinary relation
Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?
saws add assumption
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
dragons nerves worried
So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?
badass self numbers
Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.
not-afraid
She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.