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!
