Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson (b. October 31, 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland) is primarily a science fiction writer in the postcyberpunk genre. He also writes nonfiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired Magazine.

Although he wrote earlier novels such as the eco-thriller Zodiac, he came to fame in the early 1990s with the novel Snow Crash (1992) which fuses memetics, computer viruses, and other high-tech themes with Sumerian mythology. Averaging one novel every four years, he has written these subsequent novels: The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995) which deals with a future with extensive nanotechnology; Cryptonomicon (1999), a novel concerned with computing and codebreaking from the Second World War codebreakers to a modern attempt to set up a data haven; and Quicksilver (2003), a historical novel that is in some respects a prequel to Cryptonomicon.

With the 2003 publication of Quicksilver, Stephenson debuted The Metaweb, a wiki (using the same software as Wikipedia) annotating the ideas and historical period explored in the novel.

Works

• Fiction:
  • The Big U (1984)
  • Zodiac (1988)
  • Snow Crash (1992)
  • Short story: "Spew" (1994)
  • The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)
  • Cryptonomicon (1999)
  • Quicksilver (2003)

• Non-fiction:
  • In the Beginning...was the Command Line (1999)

He has also written fiction as Stephen Bury together with J. Frederick George - at least two novels, Interface and The Cobweb.