Novelist Neal Stephenson

ONE of the smartest, as well as the toughest, writers I've ever encountered in Neal Stephenson, who is somewhere between a cyberpunk writer, a science-fiction novelist and a cultural historian.

I met Stephenson, who has a new novel out, in his hometown of Seattle just before the publication of Anathem. HERE is my interview with the author of Snow Crash and The Baroque Triology.

One of Anathem's observations seems more and more true to me as we move into the future.

"That idea kept coming back to me, because it still seemed fresh," Stephenson said, "the idea that book-reading people were more and more diverging from the mainstream, that they're a separate culture invisible to media culture."


And here is a Salon review of his new thriller, Readme.