Salon has a wide-ranging interview with author Neal Stephenson. The emphasis is on his most recent work, The Baroque Cycle. I’m reading The Confusion, the second volume in the trilogy (my notes on Quicksilver, the first volume). A few quotes from the interview.
On the 17th century version of establishing authorship in the science realm:
Hooke, for example, when he figured out how arches work, published it as an anagram. He condensed the idea into this pithy statement: “The ideal form of an arch is the form of a chain hanging, flipped upside down.” Then he scrambled the letters to make an anagram and published it. That way, he wasn’t giving away the secret, but if somebody came along a few years later and claimed that they’d invented it, he could just unscramble what he’d published. He was establishing precedence.
On 17th century medical issues:
People get kidney stones still, but they don’t seem to get bladder stones anymore. I asked a couple of people why, and you get a vague answer like “changes in diet” or what have you. I think they rarely drank water. They were just drinking alcoholic beverages all the time. Nobody in the world drank water, except maybe Indians and people who lived in really pristine places. That’s kind of my pet theory: Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it’s tea. In Africa it’s milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer.
On the overlap of science fiction and history:
There was a review of “Cryptonomicon” with a line in it that struck me as interesting. The guy said, “This is a book for geeks and the history buffs that they turn into.” I’m turning into one. I’m in this history book club, which is not all geeks but it’s definitely got some serious geeks in it. It’s been going for four or five years maybe. We’re all consistently dumbfounded by how interesting history is when you read it yourself compared to how dull it was when they made you study it in school. We can’t figure out why there’s that gap. I think they try to cover too broad a sweep at once so you never get down to the individual people and their stories. It’s all generalities.
On his writing process:
I was amazed to discover that you wrote these three 1,000-page books by hand, but some writers do say that writing by hand puts them in better touch with that kind of intuition.
I do it all on paper. I started that with the “Baroque Cycle.” “Cryptonomicon” is the last book I wrote typing it into a computer. I use a fountain pen. The entire thing is in longhand.
I’ve linked to the print/single-page version of the lengthy back-and-forth. I printed it. Also, requires either Salon subscription or sitting through one of the long ads. Worth the wait. Now I have to get back to The Confusion.