Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, and baroque. His Snow Crash (1992) was included on Time's list of the 100 best novels since 1923.
Stephenson has explored mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science in Cryptonomicon (1999) and The Baroque Cycle (2003-2004). He also writes nonfiction essays about technology in publications such as Wired. He has written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.
Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (founded by Jeff Bezos) developing a spacecraft and a space launch system, and also co-founded the Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. His work for the Long Now Foundation inspired his novel Anathem (2008). He was Magic Leap's chief futurist from 2014 to 2020. A collection of his essays and lectures was published as Some Remarks (2012).
Born on October 31, 1959, in Fort Meade, Maryland, Stephenson came from a family of engineers and scientists; his father is a professor of electrical engineering and his paternal grandfather was a physics professor. His mother worked in a biochemistry lab and her father was a biochemistry professor. Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1960, and to Ames, Iowa, in 1966. He graduated from Ames High School in 1977.
Stephenson studied at Boston University, first specializing in physics, then switching to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe. He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in geography and a minor in physics.
Since 1984, Stephenson has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and as of 2012 lived in Seattle with his family.
Stephenson's debut novel, The Big U, (1984), is a satirical take on life at American Megaversity, a vast, bland, and alienating research university beset by chaotic riots. Zodiac (1988), is a thriller following a radical environmentalist in his struggle against corporate polluters. Neither novel attracted much critical attention on first publication, but both explored themes that Stephenson developed in his later work.
Stephenson's breakthrough was Snow Crash (1992), a cyberpunk or postcyberpunk novel fusing memetics, computer viruses, and other high-tech themes with Sumerian mythology and a sociological extrapolation of extreme laissez-faire capitalism and collectivism. Mike Godwin described Stephenson at this time as "a slight, unassuming grad-student type whose soft-spoken demeanor gave no obvious indication that he had written the manic apotheosis of cyberpunk science fiction." Snow Crash was named one of Time's 100 best English-language novels since 1923.
In 1994, Stephenson and his uncle, J. Frederick George, published a political thriller, Interface, under the pen name "Stephen Bury"; they followed this in 1996 with The Cobweb.
Stephenson's next solo novel was The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995). The plot involves a weapon implanted in a character's skull, near-limitless replicators for everything from mattresses to foods, smartpaper, and air and blood-sanitizing nanobots. It is set in a world with a neo- Victorian social structure.
Cryptonomicon (1999) is a novel including concepts ranging from Alan Turing's research into codebreaking and cryptography during World War II, to a modern attempt to set up a data haven. Cryptonomicon won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 2013.
The Baroque Cycle is a series of historical novels set in the 17th and 18th centuries, and in some respects a prequel to Cryptonomicon. Characters include Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It was originally published in three volumes of two or three books each—Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004), and The System of the World (2004)—but was subsequently republished as eight separate books: Quicksilver, King of the Vagabonds, Odalisque, Bonanza, Juncto, Solomon's Gold, Currency, and System of the World. (The titles and exact breakdown vary in different markets.) The System of the World won the Prometheus Award in 2005.
Anathem (2008) is a long, detailed work of speculative fiction. It is set in an Earthlike world, deals with mathematics and metaphysics, and draws heavily on Platonism. Anathem won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2009. The book was partly inspied by the Long Now Foundation's Clock of the Long Now.
In 2010, the Subutai Corporation, of which Stephenson was named chairman, announced the production of an experimental multimedia fiction project, The Mongoliad, which centered on a narrative by Stephenson and other speculative fiction authors.
Reamde (2011) is a thriller set in the present, it centers around a group of MMORPG developers caught in the middle of Chinese cyber-criminals, Islamic terrorists, and Russian mafia. The title is a play on the common filename README.
Stephenson released a collection of essays and lectures, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing (2012). It also includes a new essay and a short story written specifically for this volume.
In 2013, Stephenson said he was working on a multi-volume work of historical novels that would "have a lot to do with scientific and technological themes and how those interact with the characters and civilisation during a particular span of history". He expected the first two volumes to be released in 2014. But at about the same time, he shifted his attention to a science fiction novel, Seveneves, which was completed about a year later and published in May 2015. On June 8, 2016, plans were announced to adapt Seveneves for the screen.
Seveneves won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2016.