Neal Stephenson on Polostan, Rabbit Holes, and Writing History Like Science Fiction
The Long Now Foundation
At a Long Now Foundation event marking the launch of Polostan, the first volume of his Bomb Light series, Neal Stephenson talked with journalist and author Charles C. Mann about how the book took shape over more than a decade. Polostan is a historical novel set mostly in the 1930s, in the years before the Manhattan Project. Their conversation, and the audience questions that followed, covered how Stephenson handles research that threatens to take over a book, why he doesn't see historical fiction as a departure from science fiction, how he came to write novels outside the usual path for aspiring writers, and what he thinks about carbon, AI tutors, dystopian fiction, and adaptations of his work.
An Introduction About Time Travel
Stewart Brand opened the evening by recalling an earlier Long Now speaker, James Gleick, who wrote a book about time travel. Brand summarized Gleick's point this way: time travel never actually happens, but thinking, talking, and telling stories about it is one of the ways people think about time and history. Brand called science fiction writers "professional time travelers." Some go only to the future and some only to the past. He said Stephenson, with what Brand called an engineering mentality, likes to go in both directions, and with Polostan he goes into the past.
Brand introduced Mann as the author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet, and as a student of how the world changes when, for example, Europeans suddenly appeared on the east coast of the Americas, in contrast to the gradual arrival of Asians on the west coast over earlier millennia. He noted that the two men travel together a lot, often to exotic places, so their pairing on stage was not accidental.
A Novel Six Years "Late"
Mann began with a story. On his walk to the venue, he had Googled his own name and Stephenson's to confirm where they were speaking. Google's AI overview said the two had "been involved in multiple events together," which Mann joked made them sound like a comedy duo. The first event it listed was this very Long Now talk, dated January 2018, in which Mann supposedly interviewed Stephenson about Polostan. Mann said his wife often accuses him of being late, but six years would be a record.
The error still pointed to something real. Mann recalled that around 2017 the two were in Utah and Stephenson unexpectedly said he wanted to ride a horse. When Mann asked why, Stephenson said he had an idea for a book involving horses and the West. So the novel had clearly been in his head a long time, and Mann asked what it means to carry a novel, or an open-ended cycle of novels, for that long.
Stephenson traced the project to 2013. That year his friend Seamus Blackley, a physicist whom Stephenson described as the father of the Xbox, told him about a particular story from the years just before the Manhattan Project. Stephenson found it compelling both as physics and as human drama. The two kept in touch about it, and Stephenson persuaded his publisher to sign a contract for the books.
Then other books kept getting in the way. He told the publisher he had another idea he could write faster, which became Seveneves. The same thing happened again with The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, and Termination Shock. After Termination Shock, he said, the publisher reminded him that they had signed a contract ten years earlier and he needed to write these books. He went back to his 2013 notes, organized them, and assembled the first volume. He has more material that will go into a second.
Stephenson argued that letting ideas percolate for years can work well. The idea for Seveneves came to him in 2004. He poked at it and wrote bits of it over the years, and the book came out much later. Parts of Reamde simmered for a similar length of time. He said letting projects sit "on a low boil" for a long time can lead to good results.
Rabbit Holes and the Polo Ponies of Wyoming
Mann listed some of the book's subjects: polo strategy, the contents of the Chicago World's Fair of the early 1930s, machine-gun smuggling, and Soviet steel production. As a nonfiction writer, Mann said, each of these looked to him like a rabbit hole. He admitted his own computer is full of carefully worked-out excerpts of three or four thousand words that turned out to be irrelevant. Was it the same for Stephenson? Stephenson said he is trying to move away from that method to be more efficient. Mann replied, "good luck."
Stephenson said that, like Mann, he can now recognize a rabbit hole when he sees one, a skill that takes time to learn. Polo was his main example. While researching the 1930s he kept running into polo, which surprised him because today the sport seems like a niche pastime for the wealthy. Back then it was far more widespread, he explained, because armies still had horse cavalry, and wherever there was active cavalry there was polo, since it was used as training. Even the Soviet Red Army had a polo team.
Following that thread, he found something he "did not see coming at all": around Gillette, Wyoming, there were ranches that bred and trained polo ponies for a worldwide market much larger than today's. Breeding alone was not enough. The horses had to be taught to play the game a little, or they were useless. So the ranch staff, whom Stephenson described as white cowboys, Black people, Native Americans, and Hispanics, all knew how to play polo as part of their jobs. The result was highly multiethnic teams of expert players riding around Wyoming to train horses for an upper-crust sport. Wealthy buyers came from all over the world on something like safari vacations and went home with expensive horses.
Stephenson called this "a rabbit hole to end all rabbit holes" and said he was proud that he did not go down it. There is no 150-page polo section, though there easily could have been. The fact is simply mentioned, and it explains why the main character, a young woman who had worked on one of these ranches, can play polo even though she comes from a class that normally would not.
Historical Fiction Is Not a Departure
Mann noted that reviews of the book had been very favorable. One, in The Washington Post, called Polostan a new departure for Stephenson. Mann knew that was wrong, since Stephenson had written historical novels before, but it made him ask whether Stephenson sees historical novels as fundamentally different from science fiction.
Stephenson said he does not. As a child he read thick science fiction anthologies drawn from magazines like Analog. Among the short stories he would sometimes come across one that was simply historical, occasionally with science-fictional elements and sometimes with none, tossed off by a science fiction writer. Reading a lot of the genre, especially the golden-age writers he grew up on, made it obvious to him that many of them were "history geeks." In his view, nobody inside the science fiction world finds it surprising when a science fiction writer does history. It only looks strange from outside.
Rules for Handling the Historical Record
Mann suggested that writing historical fiction is also world-building: a 1930s America is in some ways as much a fantasy creation as a future society. He asked what rules Stephenson follows. He contrasted writers like Hilary Mantel, who would claim that her characters' actions are documented and only their thoughts are imagined, with others who feel free to rearrange chronology for the sake of the story.
Stephenson said his general approach is to place historical figures, as far as possible, where they actually were, doing what they are known to have done, and to weave the story around that. Because he also invents fictional characters who can do whatever he likes, sticking to the record does not significantly limit his freedom. Occasionally a situation comes up where having a historical figure do something that did not happen would be "really cool" or would solve a problem. He said he does not follow any one rule set with total rigor.
Travel Versus First-Person Accounts
Mann asked whether traveling to his settings matters. Stephenson said he used to do more of that, and what he learned resembles the rabbit-hole problem: in 24 hours in a new place you can absorb a book's worth of research, and then you feel it all has to go into the book, which does not always serve the storytelling.
It depends on the project. For Reamde, much of which is set in Xiamen, where the two traveled together, the trip was very valuable because the book was contemporary and everything he saw was usable. The further back a historical novel goes, the more a place has changed, sometimes beyond recognition, and you end up hunting for an odd little museum or historic site to get a sense of how it once looked.
He said first-person accounts from the period are often better. You can still visit a place to understand its layout, but written testimony gives more. Part of Polostan takes place in Magnitogorsk, a giant Soviet steel mill in the Urals. An American engineer went there in exactly that period to work on the project and wrote a concrete, simple, day-to-day account. Stephenson noted it contained no abstraction, ideology, or politics, just details like needing to go find a wrench or that it was very cold that day. He considers impressions like these much more useful than visiting today and trying to imagine what it looked like before everything changed.
Breaking the "Well-Made Novel"
Mann said that when he reread his stack of Stephenson's books to prepare, he noticed something. Writers constantly meet books and lectures on how to write a novel, built around something like the nineteenth-century idea of the well-made play, with a proper arc. Stephenson's books ignore that model. In Seveneves, you turn a page and read "5,000 years later," which Mann thought might be a first in literature. He said it threw him out of the book, and he pictured Stephenson rubbing his hands in glee at the curveball. Reamde, Mann said, is a 700-page chase scene. Fall presents itself as a semi-realistic satire and then turns into something like Paradise Lost and Greek myth. Was this deliberate, or does Stephenson simply let each book's structure follow its ideas?
Stephenson answered by describing the conventional path to becoming a writer and how he missed it. Aspiring writers are often told to start short and work up to long forms, beginning with a journal and then a short story. He tried that and got discouraged because he could not write short pieces, and he concluded it was never going to work for him.
Then, as a college student in Boston, he was living in what he called a horrific slum apartment where they hunted cockroaches with vacuum cleaners. Over a roughly ten-day spring break, with no money to go home and nothing to do, he sat down at a typewriter and wrote a novel. He said it "just kind of happened." That was when he realized that although he could not write short stories, he could write novels.
He described a similar ladder in science fiction. Aspiring writers go to conventions, volunteer at them, publish short pieces in fanzines and similar venues, build connections, and eventually publish a first novel. He bypassed this too. His first two books, The Big U and Zodiac, were not really science fiction, so when Snow Crash came out, it appeared from nowhere as far as the science fiction world was concerned. He said most people there thought that was cool, though some were a little miffed. He stressed that he has no problem with these systematic paths. He skipped them for contingent reasons, and much of what has happened to him came through "very, very fortunate accidents."
He said the writers who influenced him most were the ones who did things he had not realized were allowed. William Gibson's Neuromancer was unmistakably science fiction but written in what Stephenson called literary-grade prose. Others may have done that before, but it was new to him and it blew his mind. He had similar reactions to David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and others. Seeing writers go beyond the perceived limits of the art form and get away with it was what energized him most when he was starting out.
Carbon and the Inability to Agree on What's Real
The audience questions began with what Mann described as an "extremely light and almost trivial" one. A listener named Sarah asked whether, as a student of humanity in the flow of chaos and order, Stephenson thinks humans can avert the worst outcomes of our current predicaments. Stephenson missed the sarcasm at first, then said it is obviously the most important question.
He named two big problems: carbon, and the fact that "we can't agree on what's real." He said he does not know what to do about the second and finds it hard to imagine a technical fix. For carbon, he thinks technical fixes exist and will be implemented. He recalled saying at an earlier Long Now talk for Termination Shock that it would be the biggest engineering project in history, and said much of what he has seen since confirms that many people are now putting their time and energy into it. Politically, though, he said we are clearly in dark times, and he closed with "ask me in a month," which drew applause.
Can Generative AI Build the Primer from The Diamond Age?
A listener asked whether generative AI makes the "Primer" from The Diamond Age possible now or soon. Mann explained that it is a smart book that teaches children and dynamically changes its content according to what the child needs.
Stephenson said that in one sense this can be done now. You could ask generative AI for a daily lesson, for example teaching a particular child the multiplication tables with a pedagogical approach suited to them. What is missing, he said, is weaving the lessons into a story, plus the human element. In the novel, the Primer's content is not the whole thing: there is a human connection between the girl who owns the book and a "ractor," a performer who plays the characters in it. Stephenson suggested that this human connection, combined with a plot that pulls the story forward, is what makes a child want to learn, rather than receiving a disorganized set of lessons. Those are the areas where he thinks progress is needed before a true Primer exists.
Mann pointed to a related idea in Fall. The internet is so full of garbage that people hire editors to curate it for them, and they read the editor's feed instead of engaging with the net directly. Mann joked that AI, which generates the nonsense, would also create a new class of jobs for the people it puts out of work. Stephenson returned to the AI overview from the start of the evening: it is now part of the record, and even as they spoke, AIs were presumably training on the "knowledge" that the two had discussed Polostan in 2018.
The Difficulty of Making Science Fiction Writers Happy
Another listener asked about Stephenson's earlier call for more positive science fiction. He said it led to Hieroglyph, an anthology produced through Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination, for which science fiction writers were asked to write in that spirit. His own contribution, about a tall tower, is now available as a slim standalone book, Atmosphæra Incognita.
He said not much more has happened since, and he has not done further work on it. They found it "curiously difficult to get science fiction writers to be happy," which made the project almost a negative result: it was very hard to get people out of the dystopian groove.
Mann recalled that one of Stephenson's essays gave an economic reason films lean dystopian, and asked whether the same applies to written science fiction. Stephenson explained the film argument: it is cheaper to depict a bad-looking future than a good-looking one, because you can take the present, throw dirt on it, set fire to it, and cover everything in graffiti. He said this is literally what you see on screen, and the low cost creates an incentive for dystopias in film and TV. He does not think the same holds for written science fiction. Although there are dystopian novels, he sees the literary landscape as much more varied than the screen's.
No Nostalgia for the Past
An anonymous question asked whether there is a time Stephenson feels nostalgic for without having lived in it. He said he is in the camp that thinks things were "really shitty" until fairly recently. There are periods he would like to visit briefly and places he is curious about, but he is not nostalgic for any of them.
Mann asked whether he would want to live before antibiotics ("no way"), and brought up Our World in Data, Max Roser's Oxford-based project that charts data on the human condition over time. One of its most striking charts, Mann said, is maternal mortality, along with childhood death. The figures fall off a cliff in a good way. Mann added that combined with the lack of birth control, this pushes the change to around the 1960s. Stephenson summarized the situation of women in earlier societies: unless a woman took extreme measures to isolate herself, she would almost certainly become pregnant, and she knew there was a high chance she would die from it.
Dawn, the Women's Death Battalions, and Machine Guns
Mann connected this to Polostan. The protagonist is a young woman who is acutely aware of how men look at her, at a time when rules against sexual assault were vague and the consequences for her could be severe.
Stephenson explained that the protagonist, called Dawn or Aurora, had an early relationship with an older Russian woman named Veronica, a soldier in one of the women's death battalions. He called this another "can't make it up" fact. These battalions were very hardcore female fighting units. He said they initially fought, he believed, for Kerensky's side, but some went over to the Bolsheviks, becoming something like an elite squad of Soviet Amazon warriors.
He also described a trope in Soviet culture of the period: the female machine gunner. According to Stephenson, the Soviets of the time held strong and sincere feminist ideas and took it for granted that women would serve in the military. But integrating women into standard infantry formations in 1917 was unlikely to work. He described infantry life as a never-ending nightmare Boy Scout camping trip: marching in formation with a ten-pound rifle, ammunition, and camping gear, pitching tents, and living in the middle of nowhere for months.
The machine gun, a comparatively new weapon, created an opening for a new kind of unit. The gun was too heavy for one person, so it was split into about four parts, each carried by a different squad member, who then assembled it and got it working on arrival. Stephenson said it was complicated and delicate and had to be kept clean, "more like a sewing machine" than a bolt-action rifle. As he described the reasoning of the time, women were good at operating sewing machines, could carry a quarter of a machine gun, and in a separate unit would not have to live cheek by jowl with the infantrymen.
Meeting such a woman at an impressionable age makes a strong impression on Dawn and teaches her to look out for herself. Later she ends up in the United States during the heyday of the public-enemy era: Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and above all Bonnie and Clyde. Stephenson mentioned the famous photo of Bonnie sitting on the fender of a getaway car, smoking a cigar and holding a Tommy gun. All of this combines in the character's mind into a fascination with high-powered automatic weapons, which helps drive part of the plot.
Is the Enlightenment Over?
Another listener asked whether the Enlightenment is over. Stephenson said no. He thinks it is deeply entrenched and ubiquitous, to the point where people do not realize how much of what they do and think came from Enlightenment thinking. He drew a parallel with historian Tom Holland's argument about Christianity: even Westerners who do not consider themselves Christian in any way have many implicitly Christian reactions and beliefs. Mann added the environmental movement as an example, since it constantly seeks to regain an Edenic paradise of the past, and noted with some embarrassment that he had written about this in The Wizard and the Prophet.
Learning About the Eastern Bloc by Reading
A listener named Florin, who grew up in the Eastern Bloc, complimented Stephenson's characters from that background and asked what sources let him understand the culture so well. Mann paraphrased it as "why are you so great."
Stephenson called his answer prosaic: he reads books. As a child, a grandfather of "somewhat gloomy disposition" insisted he read The Gulag Archipelago. Stephenson thinks his grandfather wanted to make the point that communism was bad, and said the point landed, since it is hard to avoid that conclusion after all three volumes. Beyond that, he said, it is simply reading the available material and trying to learn some history.
The Scope of Bomb Light
Asked how extensive the series will be, Stephenson compared it to the Baroque Cycle, which he described as roughly eight books the length of Polostan, grouped into three volumes. For Bomb Light he has at least three volumes in mind and thinks a fourth is fairly likely. He expects the series to be shorter overall but of comparable heft or scope. He explained that the Baroque Cycle required a lot of description of what that world looked like, and a book set in the more recent past needs less of that. He can mention an automobile without explaining it.
Mann noted that Stephenson had written on his Substack that each book would center on a single character, and asked who leads volume two. Stephenson said it is a British journalist, introduced at the very end of Polostan, loosely modeled on Peter Fleming.
A Fan Detour on Peter Fleming
Mann, calling Fleming one of his favorite writers, briefly "fanboyed." Peter Fleming was the brother of Ian Fleming. Mann described Peter as the far better writer and the golden boy at the school they both attended, destined for greatness, while Ian was expected to end up in a ditch, which Mann said he nearly did. Mann called Peter's journalism and travel writing some of the finest there is, and singled out Brazilian Adventure as one of the best books ever written about Brazil.
Mann explained its setup by comparing it to The Lost City of Z, the book about Percy Fawcett's disappearance and attempts to trace him. Mann said Fleming had written about the same subject decades earlier. Unlike David Grann, Mann said, Fleming actually went there, and he chronicled his total failure to find anything. The expedition began with a harebrained newspaper ad along the lines of "I'm going to Brazil, anyone want to come?", and Fleming had no idea what he was doing. Mann said it is still a wonderful book that teaches a lot about Brazil at the time, in a dry, deadpan voice. Fleming's recurring persona is someone traveling through extremely dangerous places and being saved by luck time after time, which Mann suspects was partly an act but a very good one. Mann also praised Fleming's book on the Boxer Rebellion and noted that most of his work is out of print and has to be found secondhand.
Stephenson pointed to something he is not sure writers can do anymore. Fleming, a correspondent for The Times of London, was writing for a small circle of highly educated, clever English men, so he could drop in witticisms and dry humor that would land with them but not necessarily with a wider audience. Fleming also mocked nearly everyone he met and could be scathing, and Stephenson said the Boxer Rebellion book "is not a highly sensitive document." Mann countered that stupidity is an underappreciated factor in human life and history, and that Fleming was a rich appreciator of it. Stephenson added that although the besiegers of the legations were the villains of the Boxer Rebellion, every national embassy, European and Japanese, had its own set of fools, and Fleming treated them all with uniformly scathing contempt.
What He Learned About the Period: The Ukrainian Famine
A listener named David asked what Stephenson learned about the period that differs from the standard interpretation. He pointed to his understanding of the famine in Ukraine, which occurs during the book's timeframe and which he came to understand only between starting the book and finishing it last year. He had heard there was a famine, but history is full of famines. Then he read Anne Applebaum's Red Famine, which explains it as a systematic, man-made famine imposed on Ukraine by Russia as an act of violence. He called it a completely horrifying, depressing book, with many descriptions of the process of starving to death.
He was careful to add that this was not a clever discovery of an obscure fact on his part. It was just him bothering to read the book and learn what is "horrifically obvious" to people who live in that region. He does not credit himself with discovering anything new about the period. So much history is fascinating that simply telling the story almost as it happened can make for a very interesting novel.
The Soviet Union Before It Became the Enemy
Mann observed that while Stephenson does not need to explain what a car is, the Soviet Union may need explaining, since 1989 is long past and even well-read young people may not grasp the place it held in the American imagination.
Stephenson noted that the book is set in 1933, before the purges. Stalin was in power and, in Stephenson's words, had murdered millions of Ukrainians and gotten away with it, because the Western press reporting from Moscow either did not bother to learn the truth or willfully turned a blind eye. As a result, a reasonably well-read person in the United States or Britain at the time had not yet formed the view of the Soviet Union that people would hold decades later. Many were still flocking there with idealistic notions of helping out. Capitalists saw it as an enemy, but most people did not. Dawn's father was one of those who went to help.
Asked how many such people there were, Stephenson said he did not remember the total. Mann added that people had been going since right after the revolution, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, to be part of history, and many became disillusioned and returned. Stephenson recommended Emma Goldman's writing on this and, for a truly scathing account, Malcolm Muggeridge's Winter in Moscow, which describes Western expats in Moscow with the same contempt Peter Fleming aimed at, say, the Belgian ambassador. Mann mentioned Langston Hughes, who toured a little later and wrote a book about it. Mann called it wonderful but "a complete fantasy," given the gap between what Hughes thought he saw and what we now know. Unlike Muggeridge, Hughes bought it.
The Wobblies and the Two Lefts
Mann noted that the left was a much stronger force throughout the developed world at the time and asked whether groups like the Wobblies would play a role. Stephenson said there is a lot of Wobbly material in the book. He described the IWW as a comparatively intense labor union that was a big deal in Seattle, which is how he first learned about it.
He described a cultural split in the American left, while saying he was grossly simplifying. In the East, immigrant factory workers took orders from Moscow. In the West, miners with a heavily anarchic, libertarian mindset were slugging it out with corporate thugs. The two produced very different approaches to labor relations, and that becomes a driving element of the story. Mann noted that Dawn comes from Montana but moves East. Stephenson explained that her father is of the Eastern, Moscow-oriented type and her mother is a woman of the West. He doubts there will be much more of that thread, because the story needs to move on to the middle and late 1930s. There will be some Spanish Civil War material, for example, but less about American labor.
Hollywood: Nothing to Announce
Finally, Mann asked about the adaptations he keeps hearing about. Stephenson said work is currently being done on Snow Crash, Seveneves, and The Diamond Age, which he called the biggies at the moment. They had pushed hard on D.O.D.O. for a while and might try to revive it. He explained that you do not announce anything until certain documents are signed. Before then, rumors spread easily, and you often see reports that someone will star in some movie, only to realize five years later that it never happened. All these projects are being worked on with varying intensity, he said, but there is nothing concrete he can talk about. Mann's closing remark was that those people are certainly very good at generating cycles of activity when they want to.
[Music]
Good evening, I'm Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation. It is so great to be back with old friends, and old is coming to the stage.
A while back one of our speakers, James Gleick, Jim Gleick of Chaos and all that, did a book called Time Travel. It's a book about time travel, and he made the point that it doesn't ever work, it doesn't happen, but that doesn't matter, because thinking about it and talking about it and telling stories about it is one of the ways that we think about time and history and such things.
And science fiction writers like Neal Stephenson are professional time travelers. Some of them do only the future; certain kinds of such writers do only the past. And the engineering mentality of Neal Stephenson, he likes to take both, to the future and, as I gather with the current book Polostan, to the past.
We're also having on the stage Charles C. Mann, who wrote the book 1491 and then the later book 1493, and then he stopped. Wrote many other books, like The Wizard and the Prophet and so on, but he's a great student of how the world changes, with things like Europeans showing up suddenly on the east coast of the Americas, and how that contrasted with the gradual arrival of Asians on the west coast over previous millennia.
So they are not put together accidentally on this stage. They travel together a lot, they travel to exotic places, and with any luck we may hear some of the stories from Neal Stephenson and Charles C. Mann, and I hope you're backstage.
[Applause]
So I should say that a couple hours ago I decided to walk from the hotel here, and I wasn't quite sure if I remembered the name of the venue right, and so I Googled my name and Neal's name to see where we were talking. And Google very helpfully gave me an AI overview of tonight, and it said, "Journalist and author Charles C. Mann and author Neal Stephenson have been involved in multiple events together," which made it sound like a kind of a comedy duo. But my favorite one is the first one, the Long Now talk, this talk, and it says, "In January 2018, Mann interviewed Stephenson at the Long Now Foundation about Stephenson's book Polostan."
And so I had two thoughts. The first was that my wife is accurately, constantly accusing me of being late, but six years is something of a record. And the second is that, speaking of travel, I think it was in 2017, in other words just a few months before this talk in 2018, that Neal and I were in Utah, and Neal expressed a desire to ride a horse, which surprised me a bit. And I said why, and you said you had this idea for a novel in your head, and that horses in the West and so forth were involved. And amazingly this novel's now out four months later.
But I also wanted to know: you've obviously had this idea for a really long time. What does it mean that you have a novel in your head for a really long time, particularly a cycle of novels of uncertain length?
Yeah, this one actually started in 2013, when I heard from my friend Seamus Blackley, who is a physicist who was the father of the Xbox and has done a lot of other interesting things in his career. But he had become aware of a particular story dating to the years prior to the beginning of the Manhattan Project that was a really interesting story, both on a physics level and on a kind of human drama level. And so ever since then we've kind of kept in touch on this topic, and so I've been developing this idea for that long.
And I kind of talked my publisher into publishing the book that long ago, but then one thing after another kept happening, and I said, well, okay, I'm still working on the Bomb Light series, but I do have this other idea that I think I could write quicker, so how about if I just do that, and then we'll get that out, and then I can turn my attention back to Bomb Light. And Bomb Light is the overall name of the series of books. So that was Seveneves.
And then I turned back to this, I did some more work on it, and then the same thing happened with two other books: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., and, well, three other books: Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, and Termination Shock. And finally after Termination Shock they were like, "We signed a contract ten years ago for you to write these books. You have to write these books." So I did.
So I went back to the notes that I had started back in 2013 and started organizing them and pulled them together into the first volume. I've got more stuff; it's going to go into a second volume. But sometimes this style of writing books actually works out pretty well, if you let something percolate for a long time.
So the idea for Seveneves came to me in 2004, and I would go and poke at it from time to time and write bits of it, but I didn't actually write it; I think it came out in 2017. And some parts of Reamde were also kind of percolating for that long. So I think it can actually lead to good results to kind of let these things simmer on a low boil for a really long time.
So I'm not going to go into everything the book is about, but say that among the subjects covered are the strategy of polo, exactly what was in the Chicago World's Fair of the early 1930s, the workings of machine gun smuggling, and Soviet steel production, a whole bunch of things like this. And as a person who writes nonfiction books, all of these to me say rabbit hole.
Yeah, right.
And I kind of don't want to know the answer to this question, but when I do this, I have lots and lots of beautifully worked out 3,000-word, 4,000-word excerpts that are completely irrelevant and just die on my computer hard drive. Is this the same for you?
Yeah, I'm trying to get away from that method, to be more efficient.
Good luck.
Because like you, I can identify a rabbit hole now when I see one, which takes a while to learn, that skill. So for example, this book takes place during the 1930s mostly, and so one thing that I kept bumping into unexpectedly was polo. I found it very strange that this kept coming up, because of course to us today polo is the ultimate sort of fancy upper-crust people niche sport.
But it was much more widespread then, and the reason is that they still had horse cavalry, and where you've got active horse cavalry, you've got polo, because that is the training technique that you use. So even the Soviet Red Army had a polo team, because you had to do that to maintain your abilities. So it's training for war.
And so I started paying attention to that, and I then stumbled upon something that I did not see coming at all, which was that in the vicinity of Gillette, Wyoming, there were polo pony ranches that existed to breed and train these ponies for the worldwide market of people who played polo, a market that was much bigger than it is now.
And it's not enough just to breed them; you've got to actually kind of teach them to play the game a little bit or they're useless. So the staff who worked on these ranches, who were sort of white people, cowboys, black people, Native Americans, Hispanics, they all knew how to play polo, because it was part of their job. So you'd have these incredibly multi-ethnic teams of expert polo players riding around in Wyoming, training these animals how to play this upper-crust sport. And fancy people from all over the world would go there on kind of vacation safaris and see what was on the market and go home with expensive horses.
So there was a rabbit hole to end all rabbit holes, and I pride myself on the fact that I did not go there in this book.
So there's not a 150-page section?
No, there's not. There could very easily have been, but instead it's just mentioned that this is a fact, and that the main character of the book, a young woman named Dawn, had worked on one of these ranches, which explains why she knows how to play the sport, even though she's definitely not from a social class that would normally be polo-playing kinds of people.
So you guys should know that in the last while there's been a sort of a review blitz of Neal's book, and they've been extremely favorable and so forth. One of the lines in one of the reviews really struck me, and this is in the Washington Post, and it said, "Polostan is a new departure for Stephenson." And I knew that was wrong, because you've written historical novels before. But it did make me wonder: do you think of historical novels as being essentially different than science fiction novels in any way?
I do not, because I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid, and I would get these big fat books, these anthologies of science fiction stories from Analog and the magazines like that. And you'd be reading along, each story is a few pages long, and suddenly you'd come to a historical story. Sometimes they had science fictional elements, and sometimes it was just a historical story that some science fiction writer had decided to toss off.
And it's obvious from reading a lot of science fiction that a lot of the people who write this stuff, at least speaking of the golden age science fiction writers that I read when I was a kid, they're obviously history geeks. So that has been true for a really long time. And so I think in the science fiction world there's absolutely nothing surprising or kind of eyebrow-raising about a science fiction writer doing history. It just seems weird if you're living outside of the science fiction world and you see somebody doing it.
So you're world-building, right? You're building a 1930s America; it's a fantasy creation in a certain way, in the same way as a future society. But I am curious about what are the rules in your head when you're doing this. People like Hilary Mantel would claim that every action they did is real and it's only their thoughts that I'm imagining; other people feel it's okay to mess around with chronology for the sake of story. You see what I mean?
Yeah. To the greatest extent possible, if you actually put these people where they were, doing the things that they're known to have done, and then sort of weave around that, that's kind of the best way to approach this thing. And then, because you're creating fictional characters, you can have them do whatever you want, so it doesn't reduce the amount of leeway that you have significantly to stick to the historical record. And occasionally maybe some situation will arise where, oh man, it would really be cool, it would really solve a problem for me, if I have this historical character do something that's not real. So that's kind of the approach that I take. I wouldn't say I stick to any one rule set in a totally rigorous way.
And similarly, is it important to you to go to these places, to travel around? You and I have been to a couple of places, but I don't know whether that's just coincidence or...
[Music]
I used to do more of that, and what I kind of learned is similar to the rabbit hole conversation, which is that in 24 hours in a new place it's possible to absorb a book's worth of research, and then having done that, you feel like it's all got to go into the book, which is not always in the service of good storytelling.
And so the thing is that, particularly, like in Reamde, we were in Xiamen together, which is where a lot of that book was set, but it was a contemporary book, and so it was really valuable to go there, because everything I saw was something I could use. In the case of a historical novel, the farther back in history it is, the more things have changed, to the point where things might be just unrecognizable, and you have to go hunting around for the weird little museum or the historical site to get a sense of what it looked like a long time ago. So it just depends on the project and how far back in history it was.
And I find that what's better is to find first-person accounts that were written back in the day. You can still go somewhere and get a sense of how things are laid out, but for example, in this case, part of the action takes place in a place called Magnitogorsk, which is a giant Soviet steel mill in the Urals. And there was an American engineer who went there in exactly this time period to work on this project and just wrote a very concrete, simple, day-to-day account of what he saw there. There's no abstractions, there's no ideology or politics; it's just, we had to go find a wrench, it was very cold today, or what have you. And those kinds of impressions I think are really a lot better than just going there today and trying to imagine what it looked like before everything changed.
When they asked me to give this talk, I got out my stack of Neal books, and I thought, gee, maybe I could say something sort of profound about them. I obviously can't, given that story, but I did notice something. There's this thing that, if you are a writer, you encounter at various times books and lectures about how you should write a novel, right? And they're sort of based on the idea of, like, the well-made play; there's a well-made novel. It comes from the 19th century, I think. And then I was looking at your books, and these things are like, there's this arc... I realize this is sounding like I've hauled you here to insult you, but I'm not, actually.
But in Seveneves there's this great moment where you turn the page and it says "5,000 years later," which is surely the first time this has been done in literature. And I have to say, when I read that, it threw me right out of the book, and I had a picture of you kind of rubbing your hands in glee at the curve you had just thrown the reader. And then Reamde is a 700-page chase scene, right? And Fall is like a book that says, hey, I'm a sort of semi-realistic satire that's going to morph into Paradise Lost and the Greek. So it's pretty clear to me that you aren't really interested in writing well-made plays, but you're interested in doing different stuff. And I kind of wanted to ask you about that. Is this something that's large in your mind, or do you just sort of have these ideas, and the structure of the book will be whatever it is to contain it?
There's kind of a straight and narrow path that leads to being a writer that I did not go down. And it kind of starts with, in a lot of places you're told, well, if you want to be a writer, start by writing short things and work your way up to long things, which sounds incredibly reasonable. And so start by keeping a journal, and then you can maybe write a short story one day, and so on and so forth. And I tried that and became very discouraged for a while, because I couldn't write short things. And so I thought, well, okay, this is never going to work.
And then one day, when I was in college in Boston, I was in this horrific slum apartment where we would hunt cockroaches with vacuum cleaners, and it was spring break, so there was like ten days. I didn't have enough money to go home, so I was just going to be stuck in this apartment for ten days. I had nothing to do, but I had a typewriter and some paper, and so I sat down and I wrote a novel. It just kind of happened.
Involuntarily?
Well, I mean, I just started, and I had nothing else to do, and out it came. And so then I twigged to the fact that even though I can't write short stories, I can write novels. So that was one way in which I sort of evaded the usual trajectory that's laid out for aspiring writers.
And then there's kind of a similar thing in science fiction, where there's a ladder of sorts that is put in place kind of by helpful
people to help encourage people to become writers, and kind of the way it works is you go to conventions, cons, you volunteer at conventions, you write some short pieces that get published in fan fiction or whatever. As I was saying before, you kind of climb the ladder over time, you make all these connections in that world, and one day, if all goes well, you finally publish your first novel.
I kind of ended up bypassing all of that, not because I have any problem with it, but basically I published my first two books, The Big U and Zodiac, which were not really science fiction, but then Snow Crash was. And so suddenly it kind of appeared out of nowhere from the point of view of people in the science fiction world, because I hadn't climbed that ladder. And I think the vast majority of those people thought that was entirely cool, and then there were some who were a little miffed. These kind of systematic approaches to how you become a writer were things that, just for contingent reasons, I bypassed. And so a lot of what has happened to me has happened through some very, very fortunate accidents.
And the other writers who've had the biggest impacts on me have been the ones who did stuff I didn't realize you were allowed to do. When Gibson wrote Neuromancer, there's a science fiction book that was absolutely science fiction, there's no question that that's a science fiction book, but it was written with kind of literary-grade prose. And that was new to me. Some other people must have done it, but it was new to me, and it blew my mind that you were allowed to do this. And I've had similar reactions to the late David Foster Wallace, to Thomas Pynchon, and some others. So it's that sense of going outside what are perceived as the established limits of the art form, and getting away with things, that to me was most energizing when I was getting a start.
Sarah has an extremely light and almost trivial question.
Sarah, he's saying that in a really nice way.
Yeah. "As a student of humanity in the eternal flow of chaos and order, do you think that humans will be able to avert some of the worst outcomes of our current predicaments?" And the S is in predicaments, say.
Oh man.
I was trying to warn you.
Okay, yeah, I didn't catch the sarcasm in your voice, Sarah. This is a great question. I mean, it's obviously the most important question, so I'm really not giving you grief. I don't know. I mean, to me the two biggies are carbon and the fact that we can't agree on what's real. And I don't know what to do about the fact that we can't agree on what's real. It's hard to think of a technical fix for that one.
I think that there's technical fixes for carbon, and that those fixes are going to be implemented. I was here for Termination Shock a few years ago, and I said that it was going to be the biggest engineering project in history, and I still see that. I've seen a lot since then that confirms in my mind that lots of people are now devoting their time and energy to these things. We're clearly in dark times politically, and I guess ask me in a month.
[Applause]
So John asks: "Given generative AI, do you feel the book in The Diamond Age is becoming possible now or soon?"
So maybe we should explain what that is for people who haven't read it. It's a smart book that teaches kids, and it changes its content dynamically according to what the kid needs. So it's an interesting question right now, because with generative AI you could ask for a little lesson every day for a kid and say, okay, teach this kid the multiplication tables using a pedagogical approach that would work for them. So in a sense that can be done right now.
I think what's missing is stringing it together with a story, and it's that plus kind of the human element. So one of the themes in The Diamond Age is that there is not just the book, the content of the book, but there's also a human connection between the girl who owns the book and a so-called ractor, a performer who's playing the roles of the different characters in the book. And that somehow makes a difference. The combination of that human connection with a plot that actually pulls the story forward makes the kid want to learn, as opposed to just being a disorganized set of lessons. So I think those are the areas where progress is going to have to be made to do a Primer.
You have something a little bit like that in Fall, where there's so much garbage on the internet that people hire kind of guides. I forget what you call them.
Just editors, yeah.
Yeah, and you don't interact so much with the net yourself.
Yeah, you're reading the feed produced by that editor.
Yeah, right. And so in this way AI, which generates the nonsense, generates also an entire class of employment for all the people that it throws out of work.
Yeah. Well, I mean, that thing you read at the top of the hour, that's now in the historical record, right? So right now, as we speak, AIs are training themselves on the knowledge that you and I talked about Polostan in 2018.
Right, right.
So Enrich, I think, said: "Several years ago you talked about an initiative for positive science fiction at a bookstore." I think you talked at the bookstore. "For positive science fiction, has anything happened with that, or any plans still?"
Well, we published a book called Hieroglyph. That was an initiative through Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination, and so we did an anthology of stories by asking a bunch of science fiction writers to write something in that vein and pulling them together. And my contribution you can now get in a little skinny book called Atmosphæra Incognita. It's about a tall tower. So that did happen. I don't think a lot more has happened. We found it curiously difficult to get science fiction writers to be happy.
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So in a way it was almost a negative result, in that it was just really hard to get people out of the dystopian groove. But I haven't done further work on it.
I mean, you mentioned in one of your essays that there's sort of economic reasons that are part of the reasons that films go that way.
Yeah, yeah.
Is the same thing true in science fiction writing?
I don't think so. So in movies it's easier to make shitty-looking futures than nice-looking futures, because if you want to make a shitty-looking future, you just take what we have now and throw dirt on it, set fire to it, put graffiti on everything. I mean, this is literally, it's not an exaggeration, it's literally what you see.
Right. Oh yeah, yeah.
So because that's so cheap and easy, it creates an economic incentive to portray those dystopias on TV. I don't think that's really as true of written science fiction. But I think, although there are dystopian novels, in general it's a much more varied picture in literature than it is on the screen.
This is an anonymous question: "Is there a time you feel nostalgia for but haven't actually lived?"
Man. I think I'm in the camp of people who think things were really shitty until recently. So there might be a few situations I want to go back to briefly, there's places I'm curious about, but I wouldn't say I'm nostalgic about anything.
So you don't want to be in a place pre-antibiotics?
No way. Yeah, I mean, you know that Max Roser outfit in Oxford, Our World in Data? It's a thing that collects all kinds of data about the human condition and maps them out over time, and one of the more striking things you can see is maternal mortality.
Oh man, yeah, and it's just unbelievable.
Yeah, yeah, that is. Childhood death, all those things, and they just fall off a cliff, in a good way. But that combined with no birth control.
Yeah, so that pushes it right up to the '60s.
Yeah, right. So you're a woman in that kind of society, you know that unless you take extreme measures to isolate yourself, you will end up getting pregnant, and you know that there's a really high chance that you're going to die.
So one of the things that's really quite interesting actually about Polostan is you have a young woman, and she's kind of acutely conscious of the way that the men around her are looking at her, in a time when rules against sexual assault are pretty vague, I guess, and the consequences for her are incredibly negative.
I mean, this, well, she knows that. She's had an early relationship with an older woman named Veronica, who is a Russian woman who is a soldier in one of the women's death battalions. This is another one of these can't-make-it-up things, but the women's death battalions were these incredibly hardcore female warriors in the First World War, and I think initially they were in the cause of Kerensky, but some of them went over to the Bolsheviks. So they were like this elite squad of Soviet warrior Amazons.
And there's also another trope in Soviet culture at the time, which is the woman machine gunner. So machine guns are a comparatively new weapon, and in the doctrine of the time, the Soviets did have really strong and sincere feminist ideas: okay, of course we're going to have women in the military. But to integrate women into a standard infantry formation wasn't likely to work. I mean, it's basically like a nightmare Boy Scout camping trip that never ends. You're just marching around, everyone's carrying like a 10-lb rifle, ammunition, camping gear, you're trudging along in formation and pitching tents and living out in the middle of nowhere for months on end. It's just hard to blend women into that in 1917.
But the advent of the machine gun kind of created an opportunity to make a new kind of military unit around the gun, because the gun is too big for one person to carry, so you have to break it up into about four parts. Each part is carried by a different member of the squad, and when they get there, they have to put the thing together and get it to work. And it's delicate, it's complicated, it's got to be kept clean, so it's more like a sewing machine than a bolt-action rifle. And so there was kind of this thought of, well, women are great at operating sewing machines, and if you split the machine gun up into four parts, they can carry that, and it's a separate unit, so they don't have to live cheek by jowl with the dudes in the infantry. So we'll have female machine gunners.
So Dawn, or Aurora, the main character in the book, is exposed at an impressionable age to such a person. It makes a huge impression on her and kind of teaches her that she needs to look out for herself and be careful. And later on she ends up in the United States, and it happens to be during the heyday of the Public Enemy era. So you've got Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and the most famous of them all is Bonnie and Clyde, and there's this famous picture of Bonnie sitting on the fender of a getaway car, smoking a cigar and holding a Tommy gun. So all of these things kind of combine together in the mind of this character to give her a fascination with high-powered automatic weapons that helps drive some of the plot of the book forward.
Noise of Knowing asks: "Is the Enlightenment over?" Another light question.
No, I think it's really deeply entrenched everywhere. So it's ubiquitous, to the point where people don't realize that a lot of what we do and think has emerged from Enlightenment thinking. There's kind of a parallel thing from Tom Holland, who's a historian who talks about Christianity, and about the fact that even people who do not in any way consider themselves to be Christian in the West have all kinds of implicitly Christian reactions to things and beliefs about things.
Yeah, the environmental movement, which is constantly going after, to regain the paradise, the Edenic paradise of the past. And The Wizard and the Prophet, I guess I'm touting my own stuff, so I'll show...
No, no, no, I mean, it's your turn.
No. So here's a complimentary question from Floren. Floren says: "I grew up in the Eastern Bloc. You have several characters of that background, very well written. What is your inspiration? What are your sources that enable you to understand that culture so well?" In other words, why are you so great?
Well, I mean, it's just reading books. That's really all there is. It's a pretty prosaic answer, but when I was a kid, I had a grandfather of a somewhat gloomy disposition who insisted I read The Gulag Archipelago. I think he just wanted to make the point that communism was bad, which really landed. It's hard to elude that conclusion reading all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. So it's really just a matter of reading the available materials and trying to learn a little bit of history.
So Jay, I think, asks, basically he's, I mean, I'll quote, but he's basically asking you to talk about what's coming next in this: "How extensive will the Bomb Light series be? Like the Baroque Cycle?"
Yeah, I mean, it should be comparable to the Baroque Cycle. The Baroque Cycle is basically eight books as long as Polostan, and they're clumped together in three volumes. So I've got certainly three of those in mind, and I think it's fairly likely there will be a fourth. And so I suspect it'll be shorter, but maybe of comparable heft or scope. I'm not sure how to explain it, but with the Baroque Cycle there was a lot of just describing things, here's what this world looked like, and I think we need a little bit less of that for a book that's set in the more recent past. I can say what an automobile is, and I don't have to explain that, for example.
I think in your Graphomane Substack you said that each book would be centered on a single character. So who's the main character for volume 2?
He's introduced at the very end of this. It's a British journalist who's sort of modeled after Peter Fleming.
Oh really? The brother of... No, he's one of my favorite writers.
Yeah, no, he's...
So okay, so let's fanboy.
Yeah, so Peter's the brother of Ian, and a much, much better writer, and everybody knows that. They go to the same school, and Ian's a complete up. Peter is the golden boy, everyone knows he's destined for greatness, that Ian's just going to end up in a ditch. And he almost does, Ian. But Peter writes some of the finest kind of journalistic and sort of travel prose.
Right, Brazilian Adventure, one of the best books about Brazil ever written.
So explain the setup for Brazilian Adventure.
So do you guys know about the book The Lost City of Z? Yeah, so that was about what happened to Percy Fawcett and his attempt to retrace... Well, Peter Fleming actually wrote that book 30 years ago, 40 years ago, I don't know, it's in the '50s or '40s, and he, unlike David Grann, actually went out there, and he chronicled his total failure to find anything, and it's a complete catastrophe.
He just puts an ad in the paper, right? It's harebrained. "I'm going to Brazil, anyone want to come?"
And he has no idea what he's doing. But the amazing thing is it's a wonderful book, where you actually learn a lot about Brazil at the time.
He's just got this wry, deadpan...
And so he's got this whole thing that he does where I'm a complete, you know, traveling in these incredibly dangerous
places and saved by luck time after time after time, which gives you some idea that maybe this is a bit of a persona, but it's a really good persona. Yeah, he's got a great book about the Boxer Rebellion. I don't know if you've read that, but it's an incredible account of the Boxer Rebellion. And so anyway, Peter Fleming, great. Most of his stuff is out of print, so you have to get it on, you know, AbeBooks and so forth, but they're just great.
There's a thing that those guys do really well that I don't know if we can do anymore, which is that he's writing for a pretty small circle of people who are highly, highly educated, clever English dudes. He was a Times correspondent for the London Times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's all kinds of witticisms and wry, you know, humor that you can drop into your writing if that's who you're writing for, that will land with those people, but it doesn't necessarily work, right?
And the other thing is that he feels, you know, he's making fun of pretty much everyone, and so he can be pretty scathing, you know, about people he encounters. The Boxer Rebellion book is not a highly sensitive document. No, but you know, stupidity is a much unappreciated factor in human life and history, and Peter Fleming is a real rich appreciator. Yeah, and in his defense, of course the bad guys in the Boxer Rebellion are the Chinese people who besieged the embassies, yeah, but each national embassy, you know, of all the different European countries and the Japanese, has its own set of fools, yeah, you know, which he treats with, you know, sort of uniformly scathing contempt. It's great.
So David writes: what are a few things you learned about the period, which I think we're talking about Polostan, that are different from the standard interpretation, and how should that change our understanding?
You know, one thing that changed between when I started and when I kind of polished it off last year was understanding the famine in Ukraine, which happens to take place during the time of this book. I mean, I had heard that there was a famine in Ukraine, but you know, you read history, there's always famines, you know. But another reason not to be nostalgic. Yeah. But along the way I read Anne Applebaum's book Red Famine, which explains how this was a systematic man-made famine imposed as an act of violence on Ukraine by Russia. And it's a completely horrifying, depressing book. There's lots of descriptions of, you know, the process of starving to death.
To address the question, that's not me sort of cleverly discovering, you know, some little-known historical fact. That's just me, you know, bothering to read the book and learn what is, you know, horrifically obvious to people who live in that area. So no, I don't credit myself with having really learned anything or discovered anything new about this time. It's more just reading what's out there, and, you know, there's just all of this history that is so fascinating that all one needs to do is to kind of tell the story almost as it happened, and, you know, it can make for a really interesting story.
One of the things that struck me is you were saying that you don't have to explain what a car is, you know, but do you feel like you kind of have to explain what the Soviet Union was? I mean, since it's been a long time since 1989. I mean, I'm not sure. My kids, who are, you know, pretty literate, sort of know about it, but the kind of role that it occupied in the American imagination, and, you know, the specter of communism, you know what I mean, the whole...
But it's interesting because at this time, this is 1933, it's pre-purges, right? Right. It's pre... I mean, Stalin's in power, and he's, you know, murdered millions of Ukrainians and gotten away with it because the Western press that's reporting from Moscow is either just... they don't bother to go learn the truth, or they're kind of willfully turning a blind eye to it.
This point being that if you're just a reasonably well-read person back in the States or in the UK, you haven't yet formed the knowledge, the opinion of the Soviet Union that people would have decades later. And there's still a lot of people flocking to the Soviet Union with idealistic notions of, oh, you know, we're going to help. They don't see the Soviet Union as an enemy yet. If you're a capitalist, you do see it as an enemy, but most people don't. So Dawn's father was one of those people who goes to the Soviet Union to help out.
And how many were there? Thousands of people like that? I actually don't remember. I don't know the total number who went. But you're talking, these are people who went right after the revolution, so late teens, early '20s, to be part of what was happening and part of history. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. And so, and a lot of them became disillusioned and went home.
So Emma Goldman, you know, writes really well about this era, you know, what they found, how it clashed with their hopes, their dreams. The really scathing one is the book by Malcolm Muggeridge called Winter in Moscow. He's describing Western expats in Moscow with, you know, the same degree of absolutely scarifying contempt as Peter Fleming, you know, talking about the Belgian ambassador. So that's quite a read, you know, if you want a picture of, you know, how that scene looked, at least to Muggeridge, in that era.
Yeah, right. Langston Hughes also wrote a book on that. He took a tour a little bit later than that, traveling through, and just the comparison between what he thought he saw and what we now know we saw... It's a wonderful book, but it's a complete fantasy. Oh, okay, so unlike Muggeridge, he's buying it. Yeah, he totally buys it, pretty much.
There's also these other forces. I mean, the left was a much more powerful, you know, force, actually, you know, throughout the developed world. You have the Wobblies. Is that going to play a role, these different threads or strains or whatever the right word would be?
Yeah, there's a lot of Wobbly content in this book. It's a name for the International Workers of the World, which was a comparatively intense labor union that was a big deal in Seattle, which is kind of how I started learning about it. There was a big cultural split in the left between the western United States and the eastern, where the eastern United States has immigrant factory workers taking their orders from Moscow. I'm grossly simplifying things here. And in the West, it's like miners of a heavily anarchic, libertarian mindset, basically slugging it out with corporate thugs. So you get two very different approaches to labor relations out of those two kinds of people, and that becomes a kind of driving element in the story.
Yeah, no, I was a little surprised when Dawn Aurora is from Montana, but she... I mean, you move her back East. Yeah, yeah, her dad is more of the East taking orders from Moscow; her mom's a woman of the West. So will we see more of that?
I doubt it, because I'm trying to set up her story. From here we kind of need to move on to what happens in the middle and late '30s, and so there's still a lot of... for example, there's going to be some Spanish Civil War stuff, you know, but it's not so much about kind of labor in the United States.
So at various points I hear from you that various people are interested in adapting your books for Hollywood. Is there actually anything to report on this front that is of interest or you can talk about?
I mean, people take different approaches to talking about these things, right? The active projects now, I mean, there's work being done on Snow Crash, there's work being done on Seveneves, The Diamond Age. I think those are kind of the biggies at the moment. We were pushing hard on D.O.D.O. for a while; we might try to revive that. You sort of don't announce anything until certain documents have been signed. Until then, it's easy to get into a lot of rumors, and, you know, you see this stuff all the time on the internet: so-and-so is going to star in such-and-such movie, and then, you know, five years later you realize that never happened. So I mean, yeah, all of those are being worked on with various levels of intensity, but there's nothing I can really talk about.
It definitely seems like those people are very, very good at generating, you know, cycles of activity when they want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you very much for coming. Okay, yeah, thanks.
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