AmA Request: Neal Stephenson, Godfather of Post Cyberpunk and Science Fiction Author

Five Questions:

1. Do you believe that the universe could be reduced to a (long) series of equations, which in theory would replicate all activity in the universe perfectly?

2. Anyone who has read at least a few of your books can clearly see a change in style and subject over the course of your career, while at the same time you retain a certain thematic core in your texts. Could you elaborate on this experience? How exactly did your stories get more baroque in style? What themes if any would you say bind most or all of your books together?

3. In the previous question I mentioned a thematic core in your novels. I would identify it loosely as a consciousness on your part of the relationship between thinker, language, thought, and the creation of new ideas informing physical changes in the real world (such as Lawrence Waterhouse playing the organ in Brisbane, being suddenly struck with the vision of how to physically build a Turing machine... or across the entire Baroque Cycle, where words are introduced into the text only as they are discovered by the characters as new scientific principles, only to be turned into new sociological concepts in the political world (such as Revolution, Currency, Pressure, or thinking in terms of derivatives/rates of change)) Epistemologically speaking, how is this relationship between language, thinker, and invention effecting us now, today, in 2011 (soon to be 2012)? Do we have any control over it or are we absolutely subjective to the change it inflicts?

4. Julian Jaynes and his theory of the bicameral mind was explicitly the foundation for the language/theory stuff that goes on in Snowcrash. That material is usually either taught or showcased in conjunction with other myth/language theory, such as Jung or Barfield. Have you read into myth theory at all? Is it something that has ever interested you?

5. When I first read Anathem I thought that your insertion of platonic forms was just a working philosophical model you used for one single story, but a line in Cryptonomicon recently grabbed my attention. Randy, boarding a plane, notices dark splotches by the turbine which were clearly left by vortices participating in the exact mathematical motions as the ones in his hometown, which fascinated him as a child. He briefly recalls Charlene and his friends teasing him for being a platonist, but he still simply holds on to the fact that as a mathematician and natural observer of the universe, he sees the same forms appearing again and again. Is this an experience you yourself share? What intellectual relationship do you have with plato's philosophy (in so far as it influences your stories or your understanding of mathematics)?

6. Is there anything you would want to tell yourself if you were 20?

7. What is in the future for Neal Stephenson?

I feel like some of those got a little wordy... tldr: I'm a huge fanboy