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Via Spongeboy.

Via Slashdot was the announcement of 4 new inductees to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in Seattle (it’s part of the SF Museum there).

When is Neal’s day? Hopefully soon, he deserves it.

Nealfanpage.com has officially been added to the official Neal Stephenson Fanlisting ring. If you haven’t joined yet (and I am guessing not, since there are only 6 people listed), please do so today! The listing requirements are only for your first name, email, URI, and favorite Neal Stephenson book.

One cool thing about Fanlisting is that it brings fans together who maybe did not know about each other before. This can be a highly fruitful process, and allow people to make connections and friends both online and in their home towns. For more information and examples, check out thefanlistings.org.

In case you missed it, Neal Stephenson was featured in “The magazine in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field”, Locus, last August. To read excerpts from the interview and see his picture, go to the article. The full interview was published in the August 2004 issue of Locus Magazine, available for $7.95 if you want a hard copy (see the online article for details on how to purchase).

Neal was also featured in the same magazine back in 1999, and that interview excerpt is worth a read as well.

I found the more recent interview in Locus to be particularly similar to his Slashdot interview, but that’s OK because as Neal fans we like to read anything!

There’s an interview with Neal Stephenson in this month’s Reason magazine. You should check it out.

Jason Kottke read the interview and nonchalantly mentioned that he hasn’t read any of Stephenson’s novels, but that he’s a fan based on the recent interviews posted online.

I guess it doesn’t really matter how you find out about Stephenson’s work/ideas, but that you do find them. Personally, I had first read William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” and was looking for something similiar. Searches finally led me to “Snowcrash” and I’ve been hooked since.

How did you first find out about Neal Stephenson’s work?

What do Harry Houdini, Jay Leno, Kirk Douglas, Mariah Carey, Michael Jordan, Neal Stephenson, Paris Hilton, and W. C. Fields have in common?

Umm, they are all famous? Guess again!

No, they don’t share birthdays. They are "Birth Mates".

How did I find this out? Neal has his tarot card reading, rune reading, and other numerological phenomenona surrounding his astrology showcased on facade.com.

On a more serious note, though, being a cyberlebrity isn’t easy for Neal. He is most often seen downplaying his fame and huge role in shaping modern science fiction.

As he says about his personal site:
The existence of this page: narcissism or necessity? I would write books it even if nobody read them. So I am not doing it to get attention! It has come to my notice, however, that some people actually have been reading things that I write. I am most grateful for this.

Very cool attitude I would say. Wish other celebrities and authors were as down to Earth and level-headed.

The Command Line in 2004 is a fan written update/annotation to Neal Stephenson’s 1999 essay “In the Beginning was the Command Line”.

The author even got permission to keep it online from Mr. Stephenson’s handlers. Sometimes you just have to ask.

One of my favorite bits from the new version:

”... pry open the cardboard box, wrestle the styrofoam jaws apart, and dump the thing on a tabletop. “There!” we say. “A brand-new computer!” But by the historical definition, we’re actually looking at dozens of computers. A heap of computers. A computing collective.”

After 6 months or so of not appearing much online or in magazines, two great Neal Stephenson interviews happened within a short span. The first, a 12 question/answer session was published on the famous tech/geek web site Slashdot: “Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor” (posted Wednesday Oct 20, 2004). The other interview was published by Online, a web site run by UK’s Guardian Unlimited: “Neal Stephenson – the interview” (interview by Jim McClellan, posted Thursday November 4, 2004).

Both these interviews are great for Neal’s fans since they give us a little insight into his life and thinking. The Online interview focuses on the Baroque Cycle books and their themes while the Slashdot article fields 12 interesting questions that span book topics to Neal’s personal coding habits. Some questions in this interview were silly, but others took a serious tone and were actually highly informative. Of note was the lengthy answer Neal gave to the second question about commercial Sci-Fi writers getting less respect than other writers (both academic and in other fiction genres). His answer is verbose, but very important to read and understand. I also liked his mock battles with Willam Gibson � a very comical answer to question 4: “In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?”

So with two great interviews this year, hopefully this trend will continue!

Neal Stephenson Fan Blog went live November 13th, 2004 around 7:30 in the evening MST. Up until then the Neal Stephenson Fan Page created in early 2004 was located at neal.fautrever.com and served in static html with some images that I didn’t necessarily have permission to use.

This new weblog is a lot nicer since it’s published through Wordpress, and served as PHP templates that the blog’s authors can fill with whatever content they wish. It’s easier to update and since it needed to be moved to the new nealfanpage domain, a few design changes were thrown in as well.

For example, I deleted the images partly since they were borrowed anyway and also because they didn’t really serve much purpose on the site. My mantra for images on web sites has always been: “use only images that are relevent to the web site and it’s purpose.”

Soon I’ll be posting real entries about Neal Stephenson and his work, so stay tuned.