Breaking The Code With Neal Stephenson, Page 5
Breaking The Code With Neal Stephenson, Page 5
ATN: So you think it's just the times and coincidence?
Stephenson: Oh yeah. I have the sense that Virtual Light was probably being written about the time that Snow Crash was in the pipeline.
ATN: What about the whole slacker thing? Y. T. is like that, even though at the time you were writing the book, slackers hadn't really been in the media.
Stephenson: I don't really think of her as a slacker exactly. She's a little too intense. She has a very ambitious and driven personality. The minute she sees Hero in the first chapter of the book, she's looking for an angle and proposing a business partnership with him.
ATN: That's true, yeah. I guess I was thinking more of this free spirit skateboard thing.
Stephenson: She hangs out with a lot of those people but I think that she's different from the rest. She's got ambitions and she's got things she wants to do with her life.
ATN: How is it, developing leading female characters?
Stephenson: I think in many ways female characters are inherently more interesting because there's more going on with them. Pulp fiction, science fiction, and technothriller-type fiction are full of rugged loner male characters who are completely disconnected from any sort of social or familial web of relationships. The reality is, there aren't many men like that. One is even less likely to find women like that, so I think that a lot of times women characters are more interesting.
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ATN: But to create those characters and have them be believable, particularly for a man to do, seems like a real challenge, in the sense that you really have to get outside yourself and your own ways of experiencing the world.
Stephenson: You're always getting outside yourself. I think most of the male characters I write about are at least as different from me as the female characters. I'm not sure if women are inherently that much more different from me than anyone else.
ATN: When you sat down to start writing The Diamond Age, was it difficult given the success of Snow Crash?
Stephenson: At the time I wrote Diamond Age, it seemed likely that Snow Crash was going to do pretty well, do better than my other books. But it still hadn't hit as big as it eventually hit. So that wasn't too much of a factor. It is sort of on my mind now.
ATN: In terms of the writing you're doing?
Stephenson: Just anything that I may undertake in the near future. I think it makes one less willing to take risks.
ATN: How do you feel about that?
Stephenson: It doesn't bother me too much. All it means is that I'm inclined now to be methodical and careful about what I undertake, and not try to rush into anything before I feel ready to do it. Diamond Age was in a way an attempt to write something weirder and less accessible than Snow Crash. Just to see how people would react. Snow Crash has all kinds of hooks in it that make it immediately attractive to a lot of readers. Diamond Age is farther into the future and not quite the joyride that Snow Crash is.
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