Bad Mr Stephenson

[tamaranth]

From the Guardian online. (It took me some time to find this, as apparently 'sci fi' authors come under IT, not Books.)

Online: Do you have any idea of what your next novel will be about? Have you started it? Will it be connected to The Baroque Cycle in the same way that there are links between those novels and Cryptonomicon?

NS: No, no, and no. I have not settled on what my next project will be. Some day I might write more in the vein of Baroque Cycle/Cryptonomicon, but at the moment I need to get away from these characters and these themes and---to paraphrase Monty Python---do something completely different for some years.

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On Writing and Programming:
"The more prosaic side of the job---the "data set management" and so on---is just a kind of busy work that I do in my spare time while waiting for the Muse to swoop down and thrust her tongue in my ear. [T: thanks for that image, I didn't really want it in my brain!]
"I have said elsewhere that there are similarities between what computer programmers do and what novelists do. In both cases one is trying to build a great big system of words. It is highly structured. The structure has many layers of hierarchy. And there are many links that bind different parts of the structure together, and those links must all be sorted out. It all amounts to a quite elaborate thing. But one can't work directly on the structure itself; the only way actually to build it is by writing one letter at a time. Sort of like trying to construct a city by placing grains of sand, one at a time, with tweezers. All of this applies equally to novelists and computer programmers. Obviously the content and the intent are quite different between those two groups, but I believe that they do have to cultivate similar habits of work."

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On Pleasing One's Readers:
Online: The books in The Baroque Cycle are incredibly detailed when it comes to conjuring up the minutiae of the period. Do you worry that it's overwhelming for some readers?
NS: Anything one might put into a book will be objectionable to "some readers" and so if one were to take the approach of not writing anything that some readers might not like, one would never write a single word. Of course, some readers would object to that too.

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Yes, but is it artSF?
"People who are in the habit of reading SF will pick up The Baroque Cycle novels and, I suspect, recognize them as having coming out of an SF sensibility. People who aren't will probably find them to be historical novels, albeit with some quirks and twists they might not have seen before."

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That's a phrase, not a single word, of course.