Neal Stephenson, "Seveneves"

I'm a geek and I like to learn from books I read even if they're fiction and I've learned more from Neal Stephenson's books that I ever did in any class I learned about smearing culture from Snow Crash I learned about the war in the Pacific from Krypton Omikron I learned about the beginnings of banking from the Baroque cycle and they were also diamond Age zodiac anetha more m.d essays articles and a number of transmedia projects and now there's his latest book seven Eve's but much like learning from the young ladies Illustrated primary in Dimond age learning from Neil's books was never boring because they had great stories great characters and great humor Neil's books expanded and challenged my mind I've been a bookseller for four years now and yet almost every week I put a copy of Snow Crash into someone's hands because I want them to read these books and to enjoy them as much as I have which is why it is my immense honor and pleasure to ask you to please join me in welcoming Neil Stevenson thanks for that warm welcome and thanks Anton for that very generous introduction my voice is trashed because I have a cold and I did 21 radio interviews today so bear with me the moment of silence Maine extends beyond its original plan when I was a kid growing up in Iowa I used to ride my bike to the bookmobile every week and check out whatever the latest science fiction book was and at some point I read a book whose title and author I've unfortunately forgotten there was a space art book it we can talk to by the global catastrophe that obliged the people of Earth to make a Ark and go into space and a giant rocket and try to preserve civilization and it must have made a big impression on me because now I have written one and it just came out a week ago today the it took me a while to make my contribution to the space Ark sub-genre because it turns out that to write one of these you have to come up with an incredibly finely calibrated disastrous scenario so if a asteroid comes out of nowhere tomorrow and destroys the world I can't make a space art book out of that because there's not enough time to build an ark but if it's a slow-rolling kind of disaster that takes hundreds of years to materialize then we probably wouldn't build an ark we'd do something else to to solve the problem so so it's going to be a disaster that kills everyone predictably in a fixed period of time that's pretty fairly short time scale and the my opportunity came about ten years ago when I was working at Blue Origin which is a space private space company in Seattle and happened to read a paper about the problem of space junk or space debris so we've been going into space for long enough now that we've littered low-earth orbit with spent boosters and are not boosters but spent upper stages and dead satellites and things that astronauts dropped on their spacewalks and they're all zooming around up there incredibly high velocities and from time to time two of them at random will bang into each other and when that happens they'll shatter and produce more fragments that will go spraying out in different orbits and some of them enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up and most of them stay up there and are eligible for more collisions so the spectre has been raised by space scientists that this could snowball it could produce a chain reaction in which so many pieces of fine debris were generated over a short period of time that space would be closed to us we wouldn't be able to safely go up there in the way that we've grown accustomed to so as far as the company was concerned that was a purely academic point but the novelist in me thought okay well this this might be something I could use but it would have to be on a much bigger scale if it's gonna kill everyone so I was finally figured out a way to use it by by blowing up the Moon which is what happens on the first sentence of the first page of this book so the moon for some reason that's never explained breaks up into seven large pieces and the there's a character in the book one of the main characters is a guy named Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris who's astrophysicist at Caltech but he's also a science popularizer he's one of these guys who goes on to the Today Show to explain things that are happening in science and so his phone rings when the moon blows up and he Dube is his sort of informal nickname but dr. Harris is what he's called in academic settings he gets busy trying to kind of explain this to the extent it can be explained and to try to calm people down and get people interested in and more as a scientific phenomenon and less as a terrifying disaster so one of the things he does is to give the seven pieces of the moon kind of funny names so he calls them he doesn't want to call them nemesis or Thor or anything like that so he calls them potato head mister spinning a corn peach-pit scoop big boy and kidney bean and that works for a while until about a week later one of the two of the pieces collide and kidney bean breaks in half so now there's eight pieces instead of seven and the scientist in him asks if we can go from seven to eight could we go from eight to nine and nine to ten and how long would it take and what would be the consequences so we rejoined the action a few days after that after he's had time to make some calculations he's at Camp David with the president and some other important people and the so my friend and colleague Bruce Sterling once said that thriller is a science fiction novel that includes the President of the United States so so this is where it turns into a thriller we need to stop asking ourselves what happened and start talking about what is going to happen dr. Harris said to the President of the United States her science advisor the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and about half of the cabinet you can see that the president didn't like that Julia bliss clarity currently nearing the end of her first year on that job the chairman of the JCS was nodding but president Flaherty was giving him a hard squinting look and not just because of the light coming in the window from the skies over Camp David she thought he was up to something trying to shift blame trying to push some kind of new agenda go on she said then remembering her manners dr. Harris four days ago I watched kidney bean break in half Dube said the Seven Sisters became eight since then we've seen a near-miss that could have fractured mr. Spinney I would almost welcome it said the president if we could get rid of those ridiculous names it'll happen Dube said the question is how long does mr. Spinney have to live and what does that tell us he clicked a small remote in his hand and brought up a slide on the big screen heads turned toward it and he filled a mild sense of relief and not being stared at anymore by the president the slide was a montage of a snowball rolling down a hill of fuzzy bacterial culture growing in a petri dish a mushroom cloud and other seemingly unrelated phenomena what do all these have in common their exponential he said the word gets tossed around a lot by people who use it to mean anything that's getting big fast but it has a specific mathematical meaning it means any process where the more it happens the more it happens the population explosion a nuclear chain reaction a snowball rolling down a hill whose speed of growth is pegged to how much it's grown he clicked through another slide showing plots of exponential curves on a graph then to an image of the moon's eight pieces when the moon had only one piece probability of a collision was zero he said because there was nothing to collide with Pete's darling the president's science adviser explained the president nodded thank you doctor Starling when you have two pieces why then yes they can collide the more pieces you get the higher the chances of any two pieces banging into each other but what happens when they bang into each other he clicked to the control again and showed a little movie of kidney beans breakup well sometimes but not always they break in half which means you have more pieces eight instead of seven nine instead of eight and that increase in number means an increase in the odds of further collisions it's an exponential said the Chairman it occurred to me four days ago that it did have all the earmarks of an exponential process do Balad and we know what happens to those president clarity had been watching him intently but she now flicked her eyes over at Pete Starling who made a dramatic upward zooming gesture with one hand tracing the profile of a hockey stick when an exponential hits the bend and the hockey stick curve Dube said the result can be indistinguishable from a detonation or it can look like a slow steady increase it all depends on the time constant the inherent speed with which the exponential thing happens and on how we perceive it as humans so it might be nothing said the Chairman it could be that a hundred years will pass before we go from eight chunks to nine chunks Dube said nodding at him but four days ago I got worried that it might be one of those things that looks more like an explosion so my grad students and I have been crunching some numbers building a mathematical model of the process that we can use to get a handle on the time scale and what are your results dr. Harris I assume you have some or else you wouldn't be here the good news is that the earth is one day going to have a beautiful system of rings just like Saturn the bad news is that it's going to be messy in other words said Pete's darling the chunks of the moon are going to keep banging into each other indefinitely and breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces spreading out into a system of rings but some rocks are going to fall on the ground and break things and can you tell me dr. Harris when this is going to and over what period of time the president had asked we're still gathering data tuning the models parameters Dube said so my estimates could all be off by a factor of two maybe three Exponential's are tricky that way but what it looks like to me is this he clicked through to a new graph a blue curve showing a slow steady climb over time the timescale at the bottom is something like one to three years during that time the number of collisions and the number of new fragments are going to grow steadily what is bf are asked Pete start Starling for the graphs vertical scale was labeled des bolide fragmentation rate Dube said the rate at which new rocks are being produced is that a standard term Pete wanted to know his tone was not so much hostile as unnerved no tube said I made it up yesterday on the plane he was tempted to add something like I am allowed to coin terms but didn't want things to get snarky this early in the meeting the seeing that Pete had been silenced at least for a moment Dube tried to get back into his rhythm will see an increasing number of meteorite impacts some will cause great damage but overall life is not going to change that much but then he clicked again and the plot bent sharply upward turning white we're going to witness an event and I'm calling the white sky it'll happen over hours or days the system of discrete planetoids that we can see up there now is going to grind itself up into a vast number of much smaller fragments they're going to turn into a white cloud in the sky and that cloud is going to spread out click the graph continued shooting upward rocketing up into a new domain and turning red a day or two after the white sky event will begin a thing I am calling the hard rain because not all of those rocks are going to stay up there some of them are going to fall into the Earth's atmosphere he turned the projector off this was an unusual move but it snapped them all out of PowerPoint hypnosis and forced them to look at the aides in the back of the room were still thumbing their phones but they didn't matter by some Dube said I mean trillions the room remained silent it is going to be a meteorite bombardment such as the earth has not seen since the primordial age when the solar system was formed Dube said those fiery trails we've been seeing in the sky lately as the meteorites come in and burn up there will be so many of those that they will merge into a dome of fire that will set a flame anything that can see it the entire surface of the earth is going to be sterilized glaciers will boil the only way to survive is to get away from the atmosphere go underground or go into space well obviously that is very hard news if it is true the president said they all sat and thought about it silently for a period of time that might have been one minute or five we will have to do both the president said and go into space and underground obviously the latter is easier yes we can get to work building underground bunkers for and she caught herself before saying something in politic for people to take refuge in Dube didn't say anything the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said dr. Harris I'm an old logistics guy I deal in stuff how much stuff do we need to get underground how many sacks of potatoes and rolls of toilet paper per occupant I guess what I'm asking is just how long is the hard rain going to last Dube said my best estimate is that it will last somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 years so that's the basic setup of the book thank you I don't know if any of you saw any of the dashboard cam footage that came out of the Chile events the meteorite impact a couple of years ago in Russia but the interesting thing about it was how bright it was it was obviously the light was obviously much much brighter than the direct light of the Sun and the thing I found out later is that some of the people who are on the ground and looked up at the delight as it came over were sunburned so this is an event that lasted only a few moments but during that time they were exposed to enough UV to get sunburns so badly that a few days later they peeled so what that tells you on a physics level is that the heat was such that the light coming out of that meteor I was more like the light of an arc welder as compared to that of a candle flame so if you can imagine that happening all over the place it's it's not hard to extrapolate what the results would be so the I'm not going to try to tell the whole story here this kind of gives you an idea of how it begins and I'll mention that we went when I was that kid in the bookmobile I always liked science fiction books to add cool illustrations in them and to a large extent that is kind of fallen by the wayside but the in this case my publisher and I decided to kind of go the extra mile and so we co-funded Wetty workshop to the special effects and concept art people down in New Zealand to produce some some concept art for the book so we've got a front-end paper and a back-end paper and we've got a color insert in the middle around page 600 with a two-sided full-color illustration on it that helped to illustrate some of the space architecture that in the long run emerges from from this story and in addition to that I like that so much that I had them do a additional kind of bonus illustration which was too late for the book but we got it up on the web a week ago it was up on io9 and in Gizmodo and i think it's up on the site now so we have we have nice pictures is all I'm saying so other than that I want say more to avoid spoilers but I think we could go ahead and start a queue for for questions if people have questions and and Tom will kind of manage that that process so nice to see you thank you for coming and speaking um tell me did the math serve the story per se or did you have independent it did the math did you set up the math now story no so they so I depends on what you mean actually so the basic scenario that I've described there's no math behind there's there's a kind of conceptual thing that you just heard in the in his little talk but no effort was made to actually model the fragmentation and the time scale and all that but once the basic scenario is in place I did try to do everything else in the book on the basis of legitimate so astrodynamics calculations so that there's a whole lot of orbital mechanics it shows up later in the book where these people are trying to figure out a way to boost their the orbit of their are can get up to a safe place and so I'm responsible for the numbers so if they're wrong it's my fault but for the scenario I got some help from from people at at planetary resources which is an asteroid mining company in Seattle and from tethers unlimited which is a another company in Seattle that does advanced space technology concepts so I'm indebted to them for for providing some of the basic some of the basic ideas so I don't know if that so the first part no the rest of it yes it's it's all supposed to be kind of legit from a mathematical standpoint hi thanks for this so policy in the way society can do big engineering projects you've been advocating thinking more about how science fiction can inform our imaginations society about what we do mm-hmm so specifically with NASA and how its developing new systems for exploration what advice would you give from this book that NASA should be thinking about what takeaway should NASA take from this this new work that you've done well it's not a super policy oriented kind of book but I think that so we've got to kind of limit ourselves to almost kind of impressionistic takeaways from it and and you know one of those is just the sheer magnitude of the the forces that we're exposed to by virtue of being an object in in the solar system and and how those can be used for for bad and good so it's bad when an asteroid we don't know about plows in and kills people and it's but it's good when we can go out and make use of in situ resources asteroids that are right out there for the taking not out well you know we were all taught as kids that there's this thing called the asteroid belt which is between Mars and Jupiter where there and indeed there is that and it's huge and there's way more stuff out there than we could ever use but even if that didn't exist the number of asteroids that are in earth-like orbits much easier to reach than the moon let's say yeah is is huge and provides us with more stuff than than we then we need to build things so I think for me if there were going to be a like a policy takeaway you would have to do with the desirability of making use of near-earth asteroids Thanks I'd love to know if during the revision process you had other ways of destroying the earth and if so what were they now this was always a one-trick pony I never had it's a good question do I have a backup a back-up plan no in this case it was all pretty tightly knit together I could not have swapped in a different disaster good question though your books are filled with big and little ideas my favorite little idea of yours is that little Captain Crunch eating spoon and crypt amano gone I love it I want it I want to patent it I just want curious what is your favorite little idea that you've had oh that's one of these things were I'm tongue-tied now but at 3:00 in the morning I'll wake up and and I tell you what when I when I when I wake up at 3:00 in the morning and know the answer I'll tweet it so one thing I've always really enjoyed about your books that guy Caylor kind of puts them and I don't know if you want to go with a label of hard science fiction but more tending towards as the meticulous research that's clearly involved and I'm really curious about when you get these ideas how you get started it you know do you had the library and start doing work do you have friends in the scientific community or do you kind of reach out and see who out there is intriguing talking to you it's always different with each book so in the case of of this one first of all there was a really long gestation period so I mean this book has been rattling around in my head for something like ten years and so during that time I was able to I would return to it every so often and think about it and add little bits of stuff to it not not to the book but to the kind of grab bag of little files and notes that I had had accumulated and I pitched it to various people and the process of doing that kind of helped refine it and when I would see little bits of info stuff about Space Flight or whatever I would kind of work that in so by the time I actually sat down and started to write it it was pretty fully baked and then I was able to get pretty far in writing it without having to stop and do a lot of research because I've been just hopeless space dork since I was like three years old and so I've accumulated just way too much detailed information about rockets and spaceflight and that kind of thing and so I was able to kind of wing it to a certain point and when I felt myself reaching a point where I thought maybe a little bit of professional advice would be useful I was able to reach out to people at at places like planetary resources and tethers unlimited and get get some ideas from from those guys that were they were super helpful so hope that kind of gives a picture of the process Thanks I have a very simple question the 70s take place in the same literary universe is some of your other books I mean are we gonna see some familiar names like Waterhouse sorption and if so are you going to go back to that universe at some point or do you plan to the yeah it's a reasonable question but this isn't an effort this is a standalone thing the the shaft Oh Waterhouse universe is one of those things that if I you know I need to stay above that event horizon or I'll never do anything else you know and that's that's because I really like that universe and I understand why it would be fun to spend the rest of my life you know working on things they're so not in this case I can't rule out that something might happen in the future that meshes with that universe but there's not a planned there's not a master plan several years ago there was news that you were going to be working with I believe it was George Clooney's production company to make a diamond Dage miniseries and I think if memory serves that was about the time of the writers strike is anything going to happen with that or did was that one of the many projects that fell victim to that I I don't know if this had anything to do with the writers strike I kind of suspect not but that particular option expired and there's no further work on it so I think there is another option in place now was a different outfit to to try to develop that idea but you know the way it works in that business is that there's always projects like this in play in development and and they they sometimes go on for well Snow Crash has been it in one stage of development or another for for over 20 years right so so so that's that's where we are with with that the smoke-house the smokehouses clooney's production company that that that didn't yield any results yeah thanks I have two questions one specific and one kind of a little bit more general I guess the first is I've already read a bit of the book enjoyable parts of reading your books is I always learned something I would say I noticed in this book it might be even a little bit more technically dense than a lot of the other books you've written I'm just wondering if that was on purpose if you kind of went into it or if it just kind of the complexity of the whole space travel and moving between things and kind of the unfamiliar idea that caused you to explain more than you otherwise intended so that's part one that's part one the second part was just what your favorite book was and that's a little bit more generic okay okay the you have to walk a little bit of a tightrope in terms of level of technical detail so if if you just wing it and write whatever you feel like writing in a way it's more difficult because you have more choices and I think that even non technically minded readers can sense at some level that hey something's up this guy's just making stuff up there's no there's no hard constraints here that are governing what goes on and then the other end of the spectrum is to be super technical and explain everything which you know has it has its own drawbacks so when I'm shooting for is kind of a nice in-between place where there enough faithfulness to technical detail that it imposes some restrictions on what I can do and on what the characters can do so they have they can't teleport they can't use hyperspace or anything like that they have to deal with facts on the ground and associated with that there's some little passages of technical explanation which I've tried to make as entertaining and painless as possible but but people have different pain thresholds for these things but I've tried to hit the medium the medium place where you could skip over all that and and you wouldn't really miss too much and then favorite but no I don't have a fit it's too general I can't I can't get any traction on it yes hi hi on behalf of nerds everywere I just want to say thank you for your work okay it's a little booming here so I have to wait until all the echoes that reach my ear before I know what you said thank you one question for you how would you like to talk to the next generation of science fiction writers do you have any words of advice for teenagers who might be reading you now who are starting their first science fiction stories hmm well I guess I have a pretty simple piece of advice to writers of science fiction or any other kind of literature which is to just keep writing because it's a I think sometimes people are led to believe that it's a kind of fine art where some mysterious inspiration strikes and magic happens but I think it's more like cabinetmaking or soccer playing where if you do it a whole lot you get good at it and if you stop doing it you you either stop getting good at it or you actually lose ability and so like a classic mistake that I see people making is that those they'll write a book they'll put a lot of effort into writing their first book and then they'll stop and spend two years trying to sell their book we're trying to improve their book by tiny little increments or both and the whole time that they're doing that they're they're wasting time that they could be spending writing their second book what they should do is write their second book and then when that fails to sell some write their third book and and you you know one does actually get better and I think that the improvement is noticeable and that eventually it pays off but I would say don't fall prey to the belief that it's a it's magic okay it's just a craft thank you yeah you're welcome I had a question the commonality of your books especially the earlier ones is the ending that they tend to end as soon as the action stops without the more typical resolution chapter I was just wondering why you made that decision well I don't know if I did make a decision so I don't know what our resolution chapter is I guess to me the the if you go there there's kind of a meme that that Stevenson can't write endings which which I I I do take issue with I think I think if you look at the I think it got started more with with the diamond age which does have a kind of hanging ending and and then I've seen people retro actively map it on to Snow Crash which I find amazing because I can't imagine any ending more decisive than the ending of Snow Crash and the in the case of system in the world or the whole baroque cycle put a lot of effort into bringing that to a to a big kind of thunderous ending so the I s I'm I'm afflicted by a kind of mental block in in conversations like this one which is that I simply don't understand what people mean when they when they talk about it so I've always just sort of tried to bring things to what I see is a reasonable resolution I guess I guess maybe REME D hasn't what you'd call a resolution chapter and they all get back to it the farm and they have a little too so but others are different so it's not it's certainly not a systemic decision or anything like that it's just me doing different things at different times and perhaps early in my career becoming bored and walking away as soon as I could could could get away with it yeah thanks hi thank you for speaking tonight and thanks for being accessible to obviously a lot of fans oh sure since I'm not on Twitter I'm recalibrating I'm not gonna ask you what your favorite book is but no pressure or no undue pressure just what are some good books that you've read the last several years well one that I would recommend is is hilde by Nicola Griffith s.h.i.e.l.d which is a reads like a fantasy novel it's a historical novel set in Britain in I think the 7th century and it's about the woman who became st. hild so she was born a pagan and later became Christian and actually was was turned into a saint it's a really interesting book because she's a seer and you're reading it at first expecting some supernatural crap to break out your you thinking okay she's a seer this is a fantasy novel she's gonna like blow somebody up or you know and that never happens and was slowly becomes clear is that there is no fantasy element to the book whatsoever she's just really perceptive and she sees things other people don't see and puts things together and and knows what's going on in a way that other people find weird and creepy and so they map supernatural powers onto her and she develops a kind of reputation and an aura about her based on that so it's a really cool book it's written largely with words that are pre Norman words so the diction is very anglo-saxon it's a big book so I like that quite a bit Austen Grossman has one coming out pretty soon called or maybe out now called I'm on a book tourists I'm not responsible for knowing what day it is it's called crooked so it's a retelling of the life of Richard Nixon but it's it's got a kind of completely insane supernatural backstory so so I'm really looking forward to that and then a lot of what I read isn't so much contemporary stuff as it is older works by people who I think are incredibly good at writing English prose so I'm reading a Dickens book right now he's incredibly good Peter Fleming the brother of Ian Fleming was fantastic he wrote a bunch of travel books that are amazingly funny and witty there's a guy named Patrick Lee firmer fer mor who was also a 30s travel writer super gifted at writing good prose so I tend to read those people there's a way of kind of reminding me of my own how much improvement I could do let's say thank you yeah thanks thanks again for being here um one of the types of humor I enjoy most in your books is kind of subtle commentary on modern corporate culture trying to manage emails with lots of people on them conference calls contacts and sort of the challenges of trying to get something done in an organization in the way that that can apply to even end-of-the-world scenarios people worrying about how a meeting is going and so I wonder if you and I love that having had to deal with that myself so I wonder if there's any particular personal experience that you draw on when you make these little asides and sort of what your impressions are trying to survive in a martyr well yeah I mean it would be awkward for me too answer that directly but also I'll tell you a story to divert attention from your I had I was approached once by a big company that wanted me to work on a game and I couldn't I couldn't do it so I I suggested they talked to another a friend of mine who's a novelist was very gifted because I thought he could he could nail it and so he got involved with this company and he went to a certain city to meet in a certain conference room with a certain company to have his first it was in his life it was his first meeting right and because he had always just been a solo novelist until then and he called me up right after the meeting and he was in a state of like existential horror he was just like almost ready to kill himself and it was hard to calm him down but he was babbling on and on about something called power plus or plus point or some something that he had never seen until that moment and you know he was he I said well it's called power point he said yes that's it you know what you know I explained to him that it was for people who can't communicate it's what a dialysis machine is for people who don't have kidneys and and then he can't oh okay and then that totally calmed him down and everything was fine after that so it I would say it doesn't take a lot of exposure to that to get the idea and to be able to make fun of it you know thanks I Neal thanks for coming and talking with us sure the top amazon review for your book right now is titled Elan musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson save the world what a new Elan musk and kneeled the gross world and I think that must be somewhat deliberate as you have two characters and seven teams who resemble these two to a degree I think dr. Bois is is ahead on Neil deGrasse Tyson Shawn Probst maybe maybe not as much but I was wondering is there anyone else in your book who was inspired by someone we might know anybody you want to vote up to no I try to avoid direct knock-offs you know as much as possible so there's no like hidden and the reason is that it leads to people like trying to figure out the secret key which you know I don't think is a super productive way to read a book so no it's there there's no there's there's nothing like that going on to the contrary I try to pretty much avoid it thank you yeah thanks I adore your endings I love the rest of the books I have a thousand questions but I'll confined myself to one kind of complicated one okay a lot of novelists talk about characters kind of growing in the process of writing and changing you seem like a you you seem like always in control so to speak and I'm interested in the context of of seven teams especially because the personalities and characteristics of seven of those characters are so important those stories if it happened in that book if and by it I mean kind of process where a character kind of diverges from what you might have planned or changes like the many characters get the IMP of the perverse on them and I guess lastly it's kind of somewhat related without giving too much away what tribe in seven teams would novelists belong to oh cool question I want to make sure I got the first part of your question I think you're asking were there instances in seven Eve's where a character went a direction I hadn't expected okay yeah I mean it sounds to me like you've read the book okay I would say the julia becomes more interesting than we expect her to be I would say other people sort of came out of nowhere I either came out of nowhere but that's that's all good I mean there's you sort of need I think a mix of characters who do what you expect them to do and ones who suddenly veer off and turn into someone else and ones who just show up on unbidden and make themselves at home in your book and the I think a big part of the process of learning to write books and you know getting better at writing books is learning how to accommodate those events and not night from not fight back against them because normally normally it's something good and so that's one of the reasons I tend to avoid doing really strict outlining of books ahead of time or deciding how it's all going to come out because that doesn't allow wiggle room for those kinds of things to happen so okay second part was what tribe would with novelists belong to this is going to make no sense to people who haven't read the book but probably Julian's and Moira pnes the morons because he sort of turned into a different person with each project thanks so you may have heard that the Museum of science fiction is planned to open here in DC over the next few years no I hadn't heard they're doing I think a preview this year and then a full Museum I think 2018 does that have any connection with the ones that the one in Seattle or no okay yeah so one of their goals is to support a revival of science fiction that inspires positive imagination hmm so when you're writing your novels do you put any thought into how you will influence or inspire future technology you know hieroglyph is a special case because it was consciously designed to do exactly that so I have to set that one aside but in general I think writing a book with a gender in mind is probably a mistake it usually doesn't work and people can sense at some level that it's an axe grinder and and when they sense that there's a tendency to tune it out so I think that like the there is an indirect way of going about that which is to just bring to light interesting things that the reader may not have been exposed to and to to sort of make that interesting by putting it into a good story and and so I think that can indirectly lead to some of the good effects that you're talking about but it's got to be organic it's got to emerge from from things that happen in the story that that feel like they belong there and decisions made by the characters that seem like decisions that real people would make and and I think that if that's all done right it can so you can have those effects but it's not in a positive so point A to point B kind of manner okay thanks question with no pressure to me yeah as a novelist do you go back Andrea come of your previous work just in your imagination I was wondering if you do where do you set yourself where do you imagine yourself and you're in your books do you see yourself as a character do you see yourself in any of the universes are you Victorian oh well that's an interesting question I sort of generally don't but I mean on one level I'm kind of in all of those characters so you know if I had to pick one of those eras that was most fascinating it would be the hero of the baroque cycle which is unbelievably complex and vulgar and fascinating in a bunch of different ways but no there's not like a direct mapping of me into those into those spaces good question now thank you so there's going to be a there's two things that are gonna happen now one is that I'm gonna go somewhere else and sign books and there will be a system set up to allow for personalizations within reason and and not my department but I'm gonna stand somewhere in sign books and then the other activity that we're going to have is going to be a raffle of some swag that the publisher supplied so maybe I'll let Anton stick around for a moment and then you can go out to the lobby and we'll form an organized line and you'll sign some books thank you so much thank you very much yep thanks you you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 36,400

Keywords: P&P TV, Washington DC, Politics and Prose, Authors, Books, Events, Seveneves, Neal Stephenson (Author), Literature (Media Genre)

Id: rIHF6vDv8AE

Length: 49min 35sec (2975 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2015