Neal Stephenson became a hero to the science-fiction world in 1992 with Snow Crash, a jazzy, funny, prescient dystopic novel about a Mafia pizza-delivery boy caught up in a plot that crossed ancient cultures with virtual reality. It wasn't Stephenson's first novel, but it made him an instant name among the William Gibson crowd, drawing attention to his previous books—the collegiate send-up The Big U and the eco-thriller Zodiac—and guaranteeing an instant audience for his follow-up, The Diamond Age. Over the past decade, Stephenson's bestselling novels have gotten progressively denser, more ambitious, and more celebrated, from the monster techno-thriller Cryptonomicon to the three-volume historical series known as the Baroque Cycle to his new 937-page science-fiction outing Anathem. His books tend to range broadly across theoretical and intellectual topics, while delving deeply into one or two concepts: Anathem, for instance, takes place on a world where scientist-philosophers dwelling in monastery-like strongholds (small ones are "maths," large ones are "concents") avoid the secular world for periods marked and enforced by giant clocks, and devote themselves to logic and thought experiments, which Stephenson explores at length while building to a series of events that disrupt their system. Stephenson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about the soundtrack for Anathem, making up words, and reading philosophy so you don't have to.
The A.V. Club: What started you writing Anathem?
Neal Stephenson: It comes out of conversations I've been having with Danny Hillis, Stewart Brand, Alexander Rose, and others at the Long Now Foundation going all the way back to the mid-1990s on the subject of the Millennium Clock, a.k.a. the Clock Of The Long Now. In 1999, I sketched out an idea for a tall clock tower surrounded by a system of walls, with gates in the walls that would be opened by the clock mechanism at regular intervals, and "clock monks" who might live inside the walls, insulated from the distractions of the outside world. This was just me doodling for the hell of it—not a serious proposal. The Long Now Foundation guys have their own ideas as to what they want to build, and it looks nothing like what I'm talking about.
At that time, I wasn't conceiving of this as a book idea, but in 2005, when I was looking for a next project, I found that I couldn't get this idea out of my mind, so I set to work on it.
AVC: What sort of topics did you wind up researching before writing it? How organized or results-driven are you about research?
NS: Depends on the book. For the Baroque Cycle, I just read lots of books and took notes without having much of a plan. In the case of Anathem, most of the research had to do with philosophy and metaphysics. Reading this sort of thing has never been my strong suit, so I actually had to be somewhat more "organized and results-driven" than is my habit. I just made up my mind that I was going to have to read some of these philosophy tomes, and I forced myself to read something like 10 pages a day until I had bashed my way through them.
AVC: Why base a book in part on topics that you yourself aren't passionately interested in reading about?
NS: I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics. Later I learned that some eminent 20th-century thinkers, including Bertrand Russell and Kurt Gödel, had been interested in Leibniz's work, and that Leibniz had been adopted as a sort of patron saint by some of the people working on Loop Quantum Gravity. When I finished the Baroque Cycle, I still felt as though this was a loose end. In part, Anathem is an attempt to tie up that loose end. To do this, I had to read Kant and Husserl and some other stuff that Kurt Gödel apparently thought of as light reading.
AVC: Has this happened before with any of your books, where you had to fight your way through source material on some specific topic to get what you wanted for the book?
NS: All the time. I read this so you don't have to. It's all part of the service.
AVC: Do you tend to try to do all your research up front before starting to write a book?
NS: No in general, and especially in the case of Anathem. At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.
AVC: Do you enjoy the actual process of research? Do books tend to be inspired by your reading, or do you start with the idea for a book and then do the reading to supplement the idea?
NS: The story is everything, so it always begins with a story. Research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.
AVC: With that in mind, do you wind up with other ideas for books as you're researching or plotting? Are you the kind of writer who ends up with notebooks full of "maybe someday" plots and ideas as you're working?
NS: No, I'd find that extremely distracting. I'm strictly a one-project-at-a-time kind of guy. If I came up with a compelling idea for a different book while working on a project, I'd probably abandon the first project and go with the new idea.
AVC: Has that ever happened? Or, in keeping with your comment about starting Anathem before you knew there was a story there, have you ever gotten significantly into a project and decided not to pursue it?
NS: I think it has happened so early in certain projects that I have long since forgotten about the originals. It would be quite unusual for me to get deep into a project and then shitcan it. One of the advantages of having done this for a while is that I have a better sense than I used to of when something is or isn't working. Until I developed that sense, this was a pretty dicey career for me, both in terms of paying the rent, and emotional wear and tear.
AVC: You've addressed in other interviews the way some people have complain that Anathem starts slowly, that it's hard going at first for the first 100 or 200 pages, before the actual plot begins. What went into deciding where to begin it, and figuring out how much readers needed to know about the world before they could absorb the story?
NS: It's easy to imagine writing a 250-page version of Anathem that ends before what you call "the actual plot" even begins. If I'd done that, it would have been more of a small literary novel, meant to be read as a statement about the relationship between the bookish and non-bookish parts of our society. But I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote.
AVC: Was the way you put the story together influenced by the fact that this was a first-person narrative? Was it more difficult getting exposition and description of the world into this book than others?
NS: Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world. As it is, we see everything from the narrator's point of view, so exposition about the world is limited to what impinges directly on him and the story he's telling. Considering how old the world is, we learn very little about its history, which I think is a good thing.
AVC: There are a lot of neologisms in your books in general—in Anathem, largely iterations of or plays on existing words, in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, invented words for invented futuristic concepts. Do you have a method for making made-up words sound sensible, for avoiding the terrible-made-up-word disease that hits so much science fiction and fantasy?
NS: "Method" is an awfully dignified word for it, but here goes: In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots. Whenever I get distracted or bored, my eyes wander over to that chalkboard and I read the words. Some of them grow on me, and others annoy me. I attack the latter with eraser and chalk, and keep nudging at them until I like the way they look and sound. Others never make the cut at all and simply get erased. Perhaps one day I will sell these on eBay to RPG players who need names for characters or alien races.
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