Neal Town Stephenson was born on October 31,1959 and is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction.
23 Facts About Neal Stephenson
2.
Neal Stephenson's novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque.
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Neal Stephenson writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired.
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Neal Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company developing a spacecraft and a space launch system, and is a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad.
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Neal Stephenson was Magic Leap's Chief Futurist from 2014 to 2020.
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Neal Stephenson's mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, and her father was a biochemistry professor.
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Neal Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1960 and then in 1966 to Ames, Iowa.
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Neal Stephenson studied at Boston University, first specializing in physics, then switching to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe.
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Since 1984, Neal Stephenson has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Seattle with his family.
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Neal Stephenson's first novel, The Big U, published in 1984, is a satirical take on life at American Megaversity, a vast, bland, and alienating research university beset by chaotic riots.
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Neal Stephenson's next novel, Zodiac, is a thriller following a radical environmentalist in his struggle against corporate polluters.
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Neal Stephenson's breakthrough came in 1992 with Snow Crash, a cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk novel fusing memetics, computer viruses, and other high-tech themes with Sumerian mythology, along with a sociological extrapolation of extreme laissez-faire capitalism and collectivism.
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In May 2010, the Subutai Corporation, of which Neal Stephenson was named chairman, announced the production of an experimental multimedia fiction project called The Mongoliad, which centered upon a narrative written by Neal Stephenson and other speculative fiction authors.
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In late 2013, Neal Stephenson stated that he was working on a multi-volume work of historical novels that would "have a lot to do with scientific and technological themes and how those interact with the characters and civilisation during a particular span of history".
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Neal Stephenson expected the first two volumes to be released in mid-to-late 2014.
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Neal Stephenson's books tend to have elaborate plots drawing on numerous technological and sociological ideas at the same time.
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The discursive nature of his writing, together with significant plot and character complexity and an abundance of detail suggests a baroque writing style, which Neal Stephenson brought fully to bear in the three-volume Baroque Cycle.
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In 2012, Neal Stephenson launched a Kickstarter campaign for CLANG, a realistic sword-fighting fantasy game.
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Neal Stephenson took part of the responsibility for the project's failure, stating, "I probably focused too much on historical accuracy and not enough on making it sufficiently fun to attract additional investment".
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In 2014, Neal Stephenson was hired as Chief Futurist by the Florida-based augmented reality company Magic Leap.
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Neal Stephenson left the company in April 2020 as part of a layoff.
22.
In 2022, Neal Stephenson launched Lamina1 to build an open source metaverse that would utilize smart contracts on a blockchain.
23.
In Snow Crash Neal Stephenson coined the term Metaverse and popularized the term avatar in a computing context.