Neal Stephenson Sees the Light

"'Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?'
'Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded. They are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.'"
---Neal Stephenson, "The Diamond Age."

Stephenson has been tagged as a science fiction writer, and is known outside hard-core SF fan circles mostly for his definitive treatments of certain buzzy pop-tech subjects: environmental direct action in Zodiac (1988), virtual reality in Snow Crash (1992), nanotechnology in The Diamond Age (1995), and the vexed fields of data cryptography and e-cash in his new epic of modern techno history, Cryptonomicon. But Stephenson's ambition, and his reach, are a lot bigger than the pigeonhole he's been squeezed into. He writes fiction that seems to be designed not so much to change the world, as to quietly shift the way a lot of people think about the world, and about the strong forces that keep it moving right along---or could bring it grinding to a halt.

His big project carries over systematically from book to book, and continues in the intervals between them: A lot of the spade work of research for Cryptonomicon, for instance, was done while researching and writing two big stories for Wired magazine, "In the Kingdom of Mao Bell" and "Mother Earth Mother Board.," essayistic romps that are almost as enetrtaining as his fiction. Stephenson seems to relish every phase of the journey. He is fully prepared to be surprised and delighted and at times horrified by the stuff he comes across. That's what makes his writing so zestfully entertaining; there's a report of some breathless new discovery on almost every page. And like the big SF hits of the 1960s, Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune, Stephenson's work attempts to smuggle a few new concepts into the popular forebrain, to download a relentless thought-virus.

Stephenson's breakthrough novel, Snow Crash, is most famous for its depiction of an computer generated alternative landscape called the Metaverse ---a three-dimensional shared virtual reality environment with a lot of the tactility of real life. The novel has been highly influential on this level: movies like Dark City and The Matrix would have been unimaginable without Snow Crash. But the truly distinctive environments of the novel's near future landscape aren't virtual at all. They are franchised semi-autonomous nation states, the Burbclaves and Franchulates, distributed world governments like Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong whose piecemeal sovereign territories dot strip malls around the world. Above all there is the Raft, a sprawling, lawless, ad hoc island nation, the Sargasso Sea of shantytowns, created by accretion in the middle of the North Pacific, as refugee craft of all shapes and sizes organize spontaneously around the rusted hulk of the junked aircraft carrier Enterprise.

The trick in the book is that it as big as it gets in terms of its action and its settings, it is finally about something even bigger: A conspiracy aimed at downloading viruses not just into computers and the VR realm, but into human brains. The chief conspirator, Stephenson suggests, is "like a cracker who breaks into a computer system, bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core, enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine." The intrigue in Snow Crash centers upon tracking down and deploying an ancient Sumerian incantation, "the nam-shub of Enki," that allows minds to be reprogrammed and civilization restructured. The central character, a punk pizza jockey and high-level VR designer named Hiro Protagonist (whose function and moniker are one), describes this succinctly as "the operating system of society." In context the Metaverse is a really a flashy sub-plot, a fictional Trojan horse, a sneaky vehicle for Stephenson's more significant concerns---the ones he's been elaborating ever since.

In his next book, The Diamond Age Stephenson seemed to step out from behind the neon curtain. The skateboard/hacker/speed-metal trapping are gone, the tone is much more earnest and analytical. This is a big fat mock-Victorian science fiction novel that extrapolates the Burbclave and Franchulate concepts into an even more radically evolved future. The agent of social mutation here is pervasive nanotechnology, the material-world analog of the hacker viruses in Snow Crash, sub-microscopic fabricating machines that can transform matter from within, rebuilding it atom by atom. Pride of place among the 'Claves belongs to the Neo-Victorians, sober, honorable and at times ponderous fellows who have reclaimed some of the most fruitful (and unjustly discredited) attitudes of the past. In the process they may have latched onto something fundamental. "Nell realized," Stephenson writes, "that it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes. Such was also the strength of the Nipponese."

This is a hell of a note, coming from a guy who claims to have written Snow Crash "as (he) listened to a great deal of loud, relentless, depressing music." The soundtrack of The Diamond Age would sound more like Edward Elgar.

The Diamond Age is a thoughtful and serious book, but by its very nature it can only be taken seriously up to a point. When you call something science fiction you still seem to holding it conceptually at arms length, shoving it into the future as if into a realm of fantasy or metephor. Its ideas may be fun to play with, and may suggest allegorical apllications to The Way We Live Now, but no-one expects to run right out and apply them. The huge new Cryptonomicon, however, is something else entirely. It isn't "speculative" in the same sense. As a work of "alternate history" rather than science fiction per sae it is set in a diffracted version of what is clearly this world, as it is now and as it was in the not very distant past. And I think Stephenson means every last word of it.

In the foreground, Cryptonomicon traces the growth of cryptography and code breaking from WW2 to the present. The supporting cast includes key figures from the development of crypto systems and the digital computers that made them practical, notably Alan Turing, the computer pioneer who ran Britain's famed Enigma project and broke the Nazi's devilish codes. The heroes of the code wars of the 1940s are exactly that: war heroes, men who bound their skills to a world-saving cause. In alternating chapters set in the present, a new generation of techno-magi pursues a goal that is not so disinterested: creating a datahaven in Austronesia for encrypted financial transactions. This technology would enable a system of truly untraceable e-cash, making it all but impossible for governments to control the flow of money and collect taxes. The crypto-rebels acknowledge, sadly, that awful people will exploit this resource to commit crimes, and some of these spoilsports make memorably horrid guest appearances in the novel. But the datahaven movement could also help to midwife a new world into existance that would never again need saving in the old sense, because no single private or governmental force could ever hope to control it. The fractal political landscape of Snow Crash seems to be just over the event horizon.

For Cryptonomicon's Randy Waterhouse the hacker-favorite computer system UNIX has become the "fundamental metaphor for just about everything." Stephenson's own dedication to the metaphor is evident in his longest non-fiction piece to date, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line." This expansive essay is built around a distinction between the two dominant conventions for interacting with computers, the CLI or Command Line Interface (like DOS and Linux) and the Graphic User Interface, or GUI (like the Mac OS and Windows). For Stephenson the distinction is technological but also moral and perhaps even metaphysical. The CLI requires a lot more knowledge and a lot more time and effort to master, but it also offers direct control over the things our machines are really doing down at the primary, binary level, where it's all just a mess of ones and zeroes. As the machines grow more complex we seem to know less and less about them, and to hand over to those who do know more and more control of the operations of daily life. The so-called "blinking 12 syndrome" (a reference to the eternally throbbing clock face on your VCR) expresses a truism of modern engineering: it is impossible to underestimate the cluelessness of the consumer.

"Once people ceased to understand how the machines around them actually functioned, the world they inhabited began to dissolve into an incomprehensible dreamscape."
---Greg Egan, "Distress."

It would be stretching a point to dub Cryptonomicon the Atlas Shrugged of cyberpunk. But the book does embody a comparable conviction that a mere handful of people now control "the motor of the world." They just aren't the same people, anymore. As Stephenson notes in "Command Line," "The richest man in the world made his fortune from-what? Railways? Shipping? Oil? No, operating systems." And once we get past the immediate, practical consequences of these ideas, the implications are downright cosmic. The Morlocks of Silicon Valley may be plugged into larger forces than they realize. In "Command Line," pondering the mind-bending theories of physicist Lee Smolin (The Life of the Cosmos), Stephenson observes, "It's beginning to look as if, once you get below a certain size--way below the level of quarks, down into the realm of string theory--the universe can't be described very well by physics as it has been practiced since the days of Newton. If you look at a small enough scale, you see processes that look almost computational in nature."

Laying out a couple of big themes from several thick works of fiction end-to-end is inherently misleading. These are intricate novels, full of colorful smart characters and humor and an almost endless flood of precisely rendered concrete detail. The big themes have been woven inextricably through the fabric like (to borrow an image from The Diamond Age) so many glimmering gold threads. Stephenson makes us work hard to keep track of all their sparkly twists and turns, and that's as it should be. If the stuff is to carry conviction at all we practically have to be forced to tease it out for ourselves. It's almost as if the books themselves are designed to teach us how to read them, to inculcate the needed ability to think rationally about their propositions. Packed with information, they prove themselves as you absorb them.

Is there hope? Probably not much, unless the percentage of human beings are who "good at math" can somehow be magically increased. The alternative is grim. Although Neal Stephenson seems to relish the detritus of modern global pop culture, often making it both the subject and the raw material of his cascading fiction, he is clearly no fan of its effects on human beings. In "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" he declares: "The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. ...

"If you don't like having choices made for you," he concludes, "you should start making your own."

SIDEBAR: E-SOURCES:

Neal Stephenson's personal home page: http://www.well.com/user/neal/ (includes "Why I am a Bad Correspondant")

Official Cryptonomicon page: . http://www.cryptonomicon.com/ (Includes "In the Beginning Was the Command Line")

Addicted to Noise interview: http://www.addict.com/ATN/issues/1.07/Features/Neal_Stephenson

Dominion interview: http://www.scifi.com/pulp/fw/stephenson/interview.html

TIME short story "The Simolean Caper" (about e-cash): http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Outlaws/SimoleonCaper.html

Wired short story "Spew": http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/spew_pr.html

Wired article "In the Kingdom of Mao Bell" on the Shenzen Special Economic Zone: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/mao.bell_pr.html

Wired article "Mother Earth Mother Board" on (among other things) laying fiber data optic cables in the Pacific: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

TIME magazine essay "Dreams and Nightmares of the Digital Age": http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/1997/int/970203/special.dreams_.html

A page on the Solitaire encryption algorithm based on playing cards, created for Cryptonomicon: http://www.counterpane.com/solitaire.html

A fan page with some cool ideas about viruses: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~chaser/snowcrash/index.html

And finally, an actual datahaven project: http://www.dhp.com )

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