| Thanks to Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson enjoys cult status among science fiction fans and techie types. With this novel Neal Stephenson so completely redefined conventional notions of the high-tech future that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.Born on Halloween, 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland--home of the National Security Agency--Neal Town Stephenson comes from a long line of what he calls "propeller heads." His father is a professor of electrical engineering whose father was a physics professor. His mother worked in a biochemistry lab and her father was a biochemistry professor. Author of the cyberpunk classic SNOW CRASH, the Hugo Award-winning THE DIAMOND AGE, and ZODIAC: THE ECO-THRILLER, Neal Stephenson has written for Wired (also featured on thecover of the 12/96 issue) and is one of three authors ever to write a fiction piece for Time magazine. Last fall, Avon Books Trade Paperbacks published his essay on operating systems, "In the Beginning . . . was the Command Line," which The Washington Post called "a new generation's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."Stephenson has been praised for having an almost prophetic vision of the future, and as a respected thinker in this area, is one of six visiting fellows at Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stephenson admits that he runs into people who tell him there are companies in Silicon Valley who are basically throwing his novel Snow Crash on the table and saying "this is our business plan." MIT Media Lab Professor Michael Hawley says, "what Arthur C. Clarke was to a previous generation, Neal Stephenson is to ours. Neal is the kind of genius who puts one jarring idea on every page." Growing up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois and Ames, Iowa, Stephenson decided he never wanted to work in an occupation that forced him to wear hard shoes. He began college as physics major at Boston University but later entered the geography department because "they were using the coolest computers." A capable programmer and acclaimed writer, he finds it hard to work unless he's listening to music on headphones. Since 1984, he has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and has made a living out of writing novels and the occasional magazine article. He lives in the Seattle area with his family where he is writing his next novel, Quicksilver, with a fountain pen. |
