Neal Stephenson Interview

I've been reading Neal Stephenson ever since being gobsmacked by his first novel, Snowcrash. It's been an interesting ride. His books are mostly interesting and almost always infuriating, because even after more than 25 years, he still hasn't learned how to end a novel.

He has a new novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, which is sort of a sequel to Reamde, and which I'm probably not going to read (based on reviews by reviewers whose opinions I trust).

More interesting is this long interview with him in Reason magazine.

Is Dickens an influence on you?

Oh yeah. He's totally an influence, as a prose stylist and as someone who's—I mean, we think of Victorian novels as a kind of stodgy old-school way of writing, but he was all over the map in terms of nutty, random things that he would put into his books.

The novels of Robert Heinlein. Are they still readable today, or are they simply of their time?

Well, they're certainly of their time, but I find that, of all of the science fiction writers that I read when I was a kid, his stuff has stayed with me more than others. He had this knack for capturing little moments, little human interactions, and images that produced really vivid memories in my head that are still with me.