Neal Stephenson

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Title / Information

The Diamond Age

"Decades into our future, a stone's throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth's own daughter, the Primer's purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands. "Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetes -- members of the poor, tribeless class. Neglected by their mother, Harv looks after Nell. When he and his gang waylay a certain neo-Victorian -- John Percival Hackworth -- in the seamy streets of their neighborhood, Harv brings Nell something special: the Primer. And from the moment she opens the book, her life is changed. She enters a fairy tale in which she is the heroine, challenged with traversing an enchanted world in search of the fabled twelve keys. If successful, she could emerge with untold wisdom and power. "Following the discovery of his crime, Hackworth begins an odyssey of his own. Expelled from the neo-Victorian paradise, squeezed by agents of Protocol Enforcement on one side and a Mandarin underworld crime lord on the other, he searches for an elusive figure known as the Alchemist. His quest and Nell's will ultimately lead them to another seeker whose fate is bound up with the Primer -- a woman who holds the key to a vast, subversive information network that is destined to decode and reprogram the future of humanity." [jacket blurb, US hbk, 1995]

Snow Crash

"In the near future, Americans excel at only two things: writing software and delivering pizza in less than 30 minutes.... Franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see: Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the well-guarded borders of the Burbclaves. "Is it any wonder that most sane folks have forsaken the real world and chosen to live in the computer-generated universe of virtual reality? Here, in a major city the size of a dozen Manhattans, is a domain of pleasures limited only by the imagination. But now a strange new computer virus called Snow Crash is striking down hackers everywhere, leaving an unlikely young man as humankind's last best hope. "In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the CosaNostra. But in the Metaverse, he's a warrior prince, last of the solo hackers, and the greatest sword fighter in the world. Now, he's racing along the neon-lit streets, the skirts of his black leather kimono flapping, on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse!" [jacket blurb, US trade pbk, 1992]

His second Novel, Zodiac, came out in 1988.

"Something's rotten in the State of Massachusetts. The lobsters -- and the lobstermen -- are throwing off PCB readings high enough to curl anyone's hair. The Red Sox are stumbling through another season of shame. Mysterious speedboats are shadowing environmentalists' Zodiac inflatables. And fans of Poysen Boysen, a rock band with a fondness for pit bulls, have taken over a beached wreck in Boston Harbour from which lethal contamination flows freely. What the place needs is a guy with a cheap cigar, a fast Zodiac, and a bad attitude -- and a solid grounding in biochemistry wouldn't hurt, either. "Only Sangamon Taylor, a test tube-toting vigilante for GEE -- the Group of Environmental Extremists -- can put two and two together to make all kinds of trouble. Taylor's a New Age Sam Spade in a wetsuit instead of a trenchcoat. He knows about chemical sludge the way he knows about evil -- all too intimately. And the toxic trail he follows leads to high and foul places. Before long his house is bombed, he's in the FBI's top ten -- with a bullet -- and plays a starring role in the near-assassination of a presidential candidate. "As he navigates this ecological thriller with hardboiled wit and the biggest outboard motor he can lay his hands on, Taylor reveals himself as one of the last of the white-hatted good guys in a very dirty world." [jacket blurb, UK pbk, 1988]