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October 20, 2004

Neal Stephenson

Slashdot just posted an amazing interview with Neal Stephenson, with subjects ranging from art criticism to the Vingean singularity to travel tips. The whole thing shows what a true wit Stephenson is, with the full power of both geekiness and social awareness at his disposal.

I'm posting the entirety of the interview here, because there's no way of telling how permanent the Slashdot link is.

1) right to keep and bear code - by arashiakari

Do you think that hacking tools should be protected (in the United
States) under the second amendment?

Neal:

Such is the intensity of issues like this that I can't tell whether
this is a troll. I'm going to assume it's not, and answer the question
seriously.

I'm no constitutional scholar but I'm pretty sure that the Founding
Fathers were thinking of flintlocks, not perl scripts, when they wrote
the Second Amendment. Now you can dispute that and say "No, anything
that enables citizens to defend themselves against an oppressive
government is covered by the Second Amendment." There might be
something to such an argument. But pragmatically, the question is
whether you can get nine (or at least five) non-hacker Supreme Court
Justices to see it that way. I suspect the answer is no. It's just too
easy for them to say "it is not a weapon." To me it seems a lot easier
simply to invoke the First Amendment.

Also, remember that there might be unwanted side effects to classifying
code as weapons. In the U.S., where the right to bear certain weapons
is written into the Constitution, it might seem like a clever way to
secure access to such code. But authorities in other countries might
say "look, even the U.S. Government defines this string of bits as a
weapon---so we are going to outlaw it."

It's difficult to form an intelligent opinion on issues like this
without doing a lot of work. One has to learn a lot about the issues
and then think about them pretty hard. I haven't really done so, and so
I'm inclined to trust people who have, like Matt Blaze. At crypto.com
he has posted some interesting material that is germane to this topic.

See http://www.crypto.com/masterkey.html

and especially

http://www.crypto.com/hobbs.html

To make a long argument short, what I have learned from Matt's writings
on the topic is that (1) it's not a new issue, (2) it's a First
Amendment issue, and (3) it's best in the long run, for all concerned,
if vulnerabilities are exposed in public.

2) The lack of respect... - by MosesJones

Science Fiction is normally relegated to the specialist publications
rather than having reviews in the main stream press. Seen as "fringe"
and a bit sad its seldom reviewed with anything more than condescension
by the "quality" press.

Does it bother you that people like Jeffery Archer or Jackie Collins
seem to get more respect for their writing than you ?

Neal:

OUCH!

(removes mirrorshades, wipes tears, blows nose, composes self)

Let me just come at this one from sort of a big picture point of view.

(the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the "back" button...)

First of all, I don't think that the condescending "quality" press look
too kindly on Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer. So I disagree with the
premise of the last sentence of this question and I'm not going to
address it. Instead I'm going to answer what I think MosesJones is
really getting at, which is why SF and other genre and popular writers
don't seem to get a lot of respect from the literary world.

To set it up, a brief anecdote: a while back, I went to a writers'
conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically
acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never
heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me
"And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would
ask another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say,
since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered
it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make
money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She
wasn't snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the
sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely
different creature from the sort she generally associated with.

And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation,
I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify
artists is by to whom they are accountable.

The great artists of the Italian Renaissance were accountable to
wealthy entities who became their patrons or gave them commissions. In
many cases there was no other way to arrange it. There is only one
Sistine Chapel. Not just anyone could walk in and start daubing paint
on the ceiling. Someone had to be the gatekeeper---to hire an artist
and give him a set of more or less restrictive limits within which he
was allowed to be creative. So the artist was, in the end, accountable
to the Church. The Church's goal was to build a magnificent structure
that would stand there forever and provide inspiration to the
Christians who walked into it, and they had to make sure that
Michelangelo would carry out his work accordingly.

Similar arrangements were made by writers. After Dante was banished
from Florence he found a patron in the Prince of Verona, for example.
And if you look at many old books of the Baroque period you find the
opening pages filled with florid expressions of gratitude from the
authors to their patrons. It's the same as in a modern book when it
says "this work was supported by a grant from the XYZ Foundation."

Nowadays we have different ways of supporting artists. Some painters,
for example, make a living selling their work to wealthy collectors. In
other cases, musicians or artists will find appointments at
universities or other cultural institutions. But in both such cases
there is a kind of accountability at work.

A wealthy art collector who pays a lot of money for a painting does not
like to see his money evaporate. He wants to feel some confidence that
if he or an heir decides to sell the painting later, they'll be able to
get an amount of money that is at least in the same ballpark. But that
price is going to be set by the market---it depends on the perceived
value of the painting in the art world. And that in turn is a function
of how the artist is esteemed by critics and by other collectors. So
art criticism does two things at once: it's culture, but it's also
economics.

There is also a kind of accountability in the case of, say, a composer
who has a faculty job at a university. The trustees of the university
have got a fiduciary responsibility not to throw away money. It's not
the same as hiring a laborer in factory, whose output can be easily
reduced to dollars and cents. Rather, the trustees have to justify the
composer's salary by pointing to intangibles. And one of those
intangibles is the degree of respect accorded that composer by critics,
musicians, and other experts in the field: how often his works are
performed by symphony orchestras, for example.

Accountability in the writing profession has been bifurcated for many
centuries. I already mentioned that Dante and other writers were
supported by patrons at least as far back as the Renaissance. But I
doubt that Beowulf was written on commission. Probably there was a
collection of legends and tales that had been passed along in an oral
tradition---which is just a fancy way of saying that lots of people
liked those stories and wanted to hear them told. And at some point
perhaps there was an especially well-liked storyteller who pulled a few
such tales together and fashioned them into the what we now know as
Beowulf. Maybe there was a king or other wealthy patron who then caused
the tale to be written down by a scribe. But I doubt it was created at
the behest of a king. It was created at the behest of lots and lots of
intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn.
And there was no grand purpose behind its creation, as there was with
the painting of the Sistine Chapel.

The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the
invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of
the population became literate. But when the conditions were right, it
suddenly became huge. The great serialized novelists of the 19th
Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the
apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass
traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to
a mass audience. And the economics worked out such that they didn't
need to land a commission or find a patron in order to put bread on the
table. The creators of those novels were therefore able to have a
connection with a mass audience and a livelihood fundamentally
different from other types of artists.

Nowadays, rock stars and movie stars are making all the money. But the
publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way
to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put
bread on their tables. It's conventional to refer to these as
"commercial" novelists, but I hate that term, so I'm going to call them
Beowulf writers.

But this is not true for a great many other writers who are every bit
as talented and worthy of finding readers. And so, in addition, we have
got an alternate system that makes it possible for those writers to
pursue their careers and make their voices heard. Just as Renaissance
princes supported writers like Dante because they felt it was the right
thing to do, there are many affluent persons in modern society who, by
making donations to cultural institutions like universities, support
all sorts of artists, including writers. Usually they are called
"literary" as opposed to "commercial" but I hate that term too, so I'm
going to call them Dante writers. And this is what I mean when I speak
of a bifurcated system.

Like all tricks for dividing people into two groups, this is
simplistic, and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But there is a
cultural difference between these two types of writers, rooted in to
whom they are accountable, and it explains what MosesJones is
complaining about. Beowulf writers and Dante writers appear to have the
same job, but in fact there is a quite radical difference between
them---hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at
the writer's conference. Because she'd never heard of me, she made the
quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer---one so new or
obscure that she'd never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary
criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I
couldn't be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely
teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her
straight, I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me
was because I was famous.

All of this places someone like me in critical limbo. As everyone
knows, there are literary critics, and journals that publish their
work, and I imagine they have the same dual role as art critics. That
is, they are engaging in intellectual discourse for its own sake. But
they are also performing an economic function by making judgments.
These judgments, taken collectively, eventually determine who's deemed
worthy of receiving fellowships, teaching appointments, etc.

The relationship between that critical apparatus and Beowulf writers is
famously awkward and leads to all sorts of peculiar misunderstandings.
Occasionally I'll take a hit from a critic for being somehow arrogant
or egomaniacal, which is difficult to understand from my point of view
sitting here and just trying to write about whatever I find
interesting. To begin with, it's not clear why they think I'm any more
arrogant than anyone else who writes a book and actually expects that
someone's going to read it. Secondly, I don't understand why they think
that this is relevant enough to rate mention in a review. After all, if
I'm going to eat at a restaurant, I don't care about the chef's
personality flaws---I just want to eat good food. I was slagged for
entitling my latest book "The System of the World" by one critic who
found that title arrogant. That criticism is simply wrong; the critic
has completely misunderstood why I chose that title. Why on earth would
anyone think it was arrogant? Well, on the Dante side of the
bifurcation it's implicit that authority comes from the top down, and
you need to get in the habit of deferring to people who are older and
grander than you. In that world, apparently one must never select a
grand-sounding title for one's book until one has reached Nobel Prize
status. But on my side, if I'm trying to write a book about a bunch of
historical figures who were consciously trying to understand and invent
the System of the World, then this is an obvious choice for the title
of the book. The same argument, I believe, explains why the accusation
of having a big ego is considered relevant for inclusion in a book
review. Considering the economic function of these reviews (explained
above) it is worth pointing out which writers are and are not suited
for participating in the somewhat hierarchical and political community
of Dante writers. Egomaniacs would only create trouble.

Mind you, much of the authority and seniority in that world is
benevolent, or at least well-intentioned. If you are trying to become a
writer by taking expensive classes in that subject, you want your
teacher to know more about it than you and to behave like a teacher.
And so you might hear advice along the lines of "I don't think you're
ready to tackle Y yet, you need to spend a few more years honing your
skills with X" and the like. All perfectly reasonable. But people on
the Beowulf side may never have taken a writing class in their life.
They just tend to lunge at whatever looks interesting to them, write
whatever they please, and let the chips fall where they may. So we may
seem not merely arrogant, but completely unhinged. It reminds me
somewhat of the split between Christians and Faeries depicted in
Susannah Clarke's wonderful book "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell."
The faeries do whatever they want and strike the Christians (humans) as
ludicrously irresponsible and "barely sane." They don't seem to deserve
or appreciate their freedom.

Later at the writer's conference, I introduced myself to someone who
was responsible for organizing it, and she looked at me keenly and
said, "Ah, yes, you're the one who's going to bring in our males
18-32." And sure enough, when we got to the venue, there were the males
18-32, looking quite out of place compared to the baseline lit-festival
crowd. They stood at long lines at the microphones and asked me one
question after another while ignoring the Dante writers sitting at the
table with me. Some of the males 18-32 were so out of place that they
seemed to have warped in from the Land of Faerie, and had the
organizers wondering whether they should summon the police. But in the
end they were more or less reasonable people who just wanted to talk
about books and were as mystified by the literary people as the
literary people were by them.

In the same vein, I just got back from the National Book Festival on
the Capitol Mall in D.C., where I crossed paths for a few minutes with
Neil Gaiman. This was another event in which Beowulf writers and Dante
writers were all mixed together. The organizers had queues set up in
front of signing tables. Neil had mentioned on his blog that he was
going to be there, and so hundreds, maybe thousands of his readers had
showed up there as early as 5:30 a.m. to get stuff signed. The
organizers simply had not anticipated this and so---very much to their
credit---they had to make all sorts of last-minute rearrangements to
accomodate the crowd. Neil spent many hours signing. As he says on his
blog

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp

the Washington Post later said he did this because he was a "savvy
businessman." Of course Neil was actually doing it to be polite; but
even simple politeness to one's fans can seem grasping and cynical when
viewed from the other side.

Because of such reactions, I know that certain people are going to read
this screed as further evidence that I have a big head. But let me make
at least a token effort to deflect this by stipulating that the system
I am describing here IS NOT FAIR and that IT MAKES NO SENSE and that I
don't deserve to have the freedom that is accorded a Beowulf writer
when many talented and excellent writers---some of them good friends of
mine---end up selling small numbers of books and having to cultivate
grants, fellowships, faculty appointments, etc.

Anyway, most Beowulf writing is ignored by the critical apparatus or
lightly made fun of when it's noticed at all. Literary critics know
perfectly well that nothing they say is likely to have much effect on
sales. Let's face it, when Neil Gaiman publishes Anansi Boys, all of
his readers are going to know about it through his site and most of
them are going to buy it and none of them is likely to see a review in
the New York Review of Books, or care what that review says.

So what of MosesJones's original question, which was entitled "The lack
of respect?" My answer is that I don't pay that much notice to these
things because I am aware at some level that I am on one side of the
bifurcation and most literary critics are on the other, and we simply
are not that relevant to each other's lives and careers.

What is most interesting to me is when people make efforts to "route
around" the apparatus of literary criticism and publish their thoughts
about books in place where you wouldn't normally look for book reviews.
For example, a year ago there was a piece by Edward Rothstein in the
New York Times about Quicksilver that appears to have been a sort of
wildcat review. He just got interested in the book and decided to write
about it, independent of the New York Times's normal book-reviewing
apparatus. It is not the first time such a thing has happened with one
of my books.

It has happened many times in history that new systems will come along
and, instead of obliterating the old, will surround and encapsulate
them and work in symbiosis with them but otherwise pretty much leave
them alone (think mitochondria) and sometimes I get the feeling that
something similar is happening with these two literary worlds. The fact
that we are having a discussion like this one on a forum such as
Slashdot is Exhibit A.

3) Singularity - by randalx

What are your thoughts on Vernor Vinge's Singularity prediction. Is
it inevitable? Will humans become a part of it or be left behind by
this new "species"?

Neal:

I can never get past the structural similarities between the
singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This
is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common
is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up
and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind.

I know Vernor. To know him is to respect him. He kicked my ass (as well
as J. K. Rowling's and Greg Bear's and a few other people's) at the
2000 Hugo Awards, and on top of that he knows more physics than I ever
will. So I don't for a moment think that he is peddling any such ideas
with his prediction of a singularity. I am only telling you why I have
a personal mental block as far as the Singularity prediction is
concerned.

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out
that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is
shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do
something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more
than a really complicated space heater.

4) Who would win? (Score:5, Funny) - by Call Me Black Cloud

In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal:

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how
it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing
a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by
to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered
something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I
had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat
from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into
Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During
the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been
incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time,
I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the
Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this
spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from
between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow
with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked
over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled.
Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I
gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no
match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of
smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded
with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts
and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle
on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local
bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been
in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these
goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a
message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane
Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I
climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole
in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above
the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I
had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and
knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck
only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged
shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would
expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around
his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a
stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure
energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group,
which eventually to the collapse of the building's roof and the loss of
eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.

Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border
between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort
of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and
sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden
brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must
fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not
remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my
side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble,
uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to
have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian
device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly
clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that
split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as
Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For
both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently
arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling's professed
interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in
superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we
have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and
white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to
attend a writers' conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any
further developments.

5) What are you reading these days? - by IvyMike

Since you're Neal Stephenson, I suspect the answer could be something
like "surveys of ancient Sumerian accounting systems".

If that's the case, please include a work of modern fiction or two in
your list; something you think that a fan of your work might also
enjoy.
:)

Neal:

Fiction I have lately read and enjoyed:

Set this House in Order by Matt Ruff

Ilium by Dan Simmons

Iron Council by China Mieville

Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart

The I Love Bees alternate reality game

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke

The Fool's Tale by Nicole Galland (in galleys; soon to be published)

Short story collections by Etgar Keret: The Bus Driver who Wanted to be
God, and The Nimrod Flip-out. Last time I checked, The Nimrod Flip-out
was only available from an Australian publisher named Picador, but this
should pose only the most minor of challenges to Slashdot readers.
Keret is a young Israeli writer who has also done some work in film and
graphic novels.

Nonfiction:

Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates and Lincoln's Cooper Union address

Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

6) storygramming -by Doc Ruby

You programmed computers before you wrote novels. Greg Egan shares
that hyphenated career, and continues to illustrate his stories with
Java applets [netspace.net.au]. Do you still program, possibly
targeting the same subjects with your word processor as your compiler?

As Snow Crash was originally designed as an interactive game, and such landmarks as
Myst have regenerated as (usually bad) novels, do you see the
arrival of a truly multimedia story, delivered simultaneously in
multiple media, anytime soon? By whom, specifically or generally?

Neal:

It has already happened in the form of the I Love Bees alternate
reality game, which, as many of you must know, is a promotional
campaign for Halo 2. I know the people who did it, but I have lost
track of what I promised not to reveal publicly, and so will shut up
for now.

I still program, but I tend to do it as a diversion from writing, and
so there is little crossover between it and fiction writing. Modern
programming is hairy and difficult for me to get a grip on. This is
because (1) there is so much user interface code, which kind of makes
my eyes glaze over, and (2) GNU type code is crammed with macros,
compiler directives and switches that make it very difficult for me to
read the source files. Lately my platform of choice has been
Mathematica, which is expensive (compared to gcc) but makes it easy to
do anything with a few lines of code. Mathematica makes it easy to do
proper documentation, in that you can mix narrative material freely
with executable statements.

For Cryptonomicon I needed to generate some illustrations of a cutaway
view of the mountain where Goto Dengo was building his tunnels. It
needed to have a rough, natural-looking profile that maintained its
roughness, but still had the same overall shape, when I zoomed in on it
for more detailed illustrations. I did this with a Mathematica notebook
that used the classic fractal technique of midpoint displacement.

For the Baroque Cycle books I needed to convert my manuscripts, which
were all TeX files, into a Quark format used by the publisher. So I
wrote an emacs lisp program that churned through the TeX files looking
for TeX escape codes and converting them to their equivalents in Quark.
This was nasty and tedious but, in the end, reasonably satisfying.

7) Money - by querencia

One of the major themes in Cryptonomicon that carried over (in a big
way) to The Baroque Cycle is money. You introduced some "futuristic"
views of currency and of where money might be going in Cryptonomicon,
and you skillfully managed to do the same thing, while explaining some of the history of modern monetary systems, in the most recent books.

You've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about money lately. Is
there anything going on in the modern world with monetary systems
(barter networks, for example) that you find particularly interesting?

What do you see on the horizon with respect to money?

Neal:

Actually, what's interesting about money is that it doesn't seem to
change that much at all. It became fantastically sophisticated hundreds
of years ago. Back before people knew about germs, evolution, the Table
of Elements, and other stuff that we now take for granted, people were
engaging in financial manipulations that seem quite modern in their
sophistication. So if I had to take a wild guess---and believe me, it
is a wild guess---I'd say that money and the way it works is going to
be a constant, not a variable.

8) BeOS - by Coryoth

When you wrote "In the Beginning was the Command Line," you were very
much in love with BeOS. As nice as BeOS was, it is now mostly gone. Do
you still use BeOS 5, or have you acquired YellowTab from Zeta? Or,
instead have you embraced the new UNIX based MacOS X as the OS you
want to use when you "Just want to go to Disneyland"?

Neal:

You guessed right: I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have
never looked back. So a lot of "In the beginning was the command line"
is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with
myself, I have to say this is unlikely.

9) Travel tips for modern primitives? - by timothy

Mr. Stephenson:

I greatly enjoy your travel stories, both non-fiction (Mother Earth,
Motherboard) and in particular your descriptions of the Philippines in
Cryptonomicon.

Can you share some of the ideas you've developed for savvy trav'lin?
For instance, how do you deal with carrying sufficient technology (whatever
level you deem this to be) while minimizing the risk of theft,
breakage, or loss by other means? Do you dress native or carry your entire
wardrobe? [And broader, do you travel with something close to nothing,
picking up necessary items as the need arises? What do you not leave
home without?]

Do you carry any sort of self-defense means in some places, and if so
What and Where?

Neal:

I haven't done that much in the way of adventuresome travel lately.
Even when I was doing so, I was never the sort of hardened third-world travel geek that you are imagining. The thing is that when you go to
such countries you can typically get a room in a five-star hotel for less than a hundred bucks a night. At that rate, it's easy to be a
sellout and wallow in luxury. Staying in a dive is more romantic, but
makes it harder to write. My excuse (if I need one) is that typically
I'm not writing about backpackers and rural people in those countries;
I'm writing about well-heeled expats whose natural habitat is airport bars and Shangri-La hotels. So that's where I tend to end up.

Re "self-defense means:" I am reminded of a history book I read recently entitled "Skeletons on the Zahara" by Dean King. It is about
some American sailors who get shipwrecked on the Atlantic Coast of Africa and go through hell. Eventually most of them make it back to
freedom with the help of some Arab traders based in Morocco. These traders range across the Sahara on incredibly arduous journeys. They
are just about the toughest and meanest hombres you can possibly
imagine. They've been through all kinds of fights and ambushes, plagues
of locusts, sandstorms, etc. and come out on top. Because of their
success they have acquired camels, horses, and weapons: not only swords
and daggers but rifles and shotguns too. After having rescued the
Americans, these guys go out on another journey in the desert, and find
themselves surrounded by a few dozen people who are wretched even by
the standards of the Sahara: no animals, little in the way of clothing,
and no weapons except for bags containing stones. A fight breaks out.
The traders discharge their weapons and kill everyone they shoot at:
maybe half a dozen. Then before they can reload they are all killed by
flying stones.

The best "self-defense means" when you are surrounded by a hundred
million people of some other culture is to avoid dangerous places and figure out some way to get along with the folks around you.

10) Confidential Proposal, Off shore data haven (Score:5, Funny) - by
SlashDread

Greetings to you in the name of the most high God, from my beloved
country Nigeria.

I am sorry and I solicit your permission into your privacy. I am
Barrister Leonardo Akume, lawyer to the late Dr. Koffi Abachus, a
brilliant Nigerian mathematician.

My former client, late Dr. Koffi Abachus, died in a mysterious plane
crash in the year 1994 on the way to a scientific conference to make
an announcement of the utmost importance to mankind.

He was planning to present a paper regarding his extensive work on
data storage. It is said the data storage device he had developed,
would be roughly ten times more secure compared to the latest quantum
excyption techniques. The device was about the size of a steamer
trunk, and stored on a privately owned island close to the coast of Nigeria. Dr Koffi
Abachus is also the King of the local tribe by heritage...
Neal:

Your proposition sounds quite reasonable. In order for me to provide
you with the support that you need, I will need for you to wire
$100,000 into my Swiss bank account...

Oh well.. Should there BE a data haven? If so, where?

Neal:

At this point, that is probably a technical question that I might not
be competent to answer. I can carry a gig of encrypted data on a thumb
drive now, and it doesn't cost much. Soon it'll be smaller and cheaper.
Millions of people in different countries carrying gigs of data on
thumb drives, iPods, cellphones, etc. make for a pretty robust
distributed data storage system. It is difficult to imagine how one
could build a centralized, hardened facility that would be more robust
than that. But perhaps there's some technical or regulatory angle that
I'm failing to appreciate here. I have not kept up to speed on this
since Cryptonomicon.

11) Blue Origin - by Concerned Onlooker

The Wikipedia lists you as a part-time advisor for Blue Origin
[blueorigin.com], a company that is working to "develop a crewed,
suborbital launch system." What is it that you do for them and has the
recent winning of the X-Prize by the Spaceship One team had any effect
on Blue Origin's plans? What are your visions of future private space
flight?

Neal:

Like Spock on the deck of the Enterprise, I sit in the corner and await
opportunities to jump out and yammer about Science. Unlike Spock, I
don't have anyone reporting to me and I never get to sit in the
captain's chair and aim the phasers. This is probably good.

Though the X-Prize is cool and good, Blue Origin never intended to
compete for it. Consequently, it has had no effect, other than
destroying productivity whenever a SpaceShipOne flight is being
broadcast.

As for my visions of future private space flight: here I have to remind
you of something, which is that, up to this point in the interview, I
have been wearing my novelist hat, meaning that I talk freely about
whatever I please. But private space flight is an area where I wear a
different hat (or helmet). I do not freely disseminate my thoughts on
this one topic because I have agreed to sell those thoughts to Blue
Origin. Admittedly, this feels a little strange to a novelist who is
accustomed to running his mouth whenever he feels like it. But it is a
small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a
minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel.

12) Do new publishing models make sense? - by Infonaut

Have you contemplated using any sort of alternative to traditional
copyright for your works of fiction, such as a flavor of Creative
Commons [creativecommons.org] license? Do you feel that making money
as a writer and more open copyright are compatible in the long term,
or do you think that writers like Lessig who distribute electronically
via CC are merely indulging in a short-lived fad?

Neal:

Publishing is a very ancient and crafty industry that existed and
flourished before the idea of copyright even existed. When copyright
came into existence, the publishing industry dealt with it and moved
on. My suspicion is that everything that's been going on lately will
amount to a sort of fire drill that will force publishing to scurry
around and make some new arrangements so that they can get back to
making money for themselves and for authors.

You can use the brick-and-mortar bookstore as a way to think about
this. There was a time maybe five years ago when many people were
questioning whether brick-and-mortar bookstores were going to survive
the onslaught of online retailers. Now, if you take the narrow view
that a bookstore is nothing more than a machine that swaps money for
books, then it follows that there's no need for a physical store. But
here we are five years later. Some bookstores have gone out of
business, it's true. But there are big, beautiful bookstores all over
the place, with sofas and coffee bars and author appearances and so on.
Why? Because it turns out that a bookstore is a lot more than a machine
that swaps money for books.

Likewise, if you think of a publisher as a machine that makes copies of
bits and sells them, then you're going to predict the elimination of
publishers. But that's only the smallest part of what publishers
actually do. This is not to say that electronic distribution via CC is
just a fad, any more than online bookstores are a fad. They will keep
on going in parallel, and all of this will get sorted out in time.

Posted by Chris at October 20, 2004 11:55 AM

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