Science Fiction From Fact

The sort of extravagant praise that has been heaped on novelist Neal Stephenson can sometimes be the kiss of death. Even the most confident writer could be driven into writer’s block by being called the bright future of science fiction, or the “hacker Hemingway.”

Some of the bouquets Stephenson has been handed, such as the Village Voice’s lauding him as “the Quentin Tarantino of post-cyberpunk science fiction,” seem a bit abstruse. That’s not surprising, considering that “Cryptonomicon” (Avon Books, 1999), the multi-plotted, 918-page tome that is rising on national bestseller lists and solidifying the 39-year-old author’s reputation as the next great practitioner of an evergreen genre, is a dizzyingly complex tale. The book zips around the world, zigzagging between time periods to follow the adventures of World War II code analysts and contemporary rebels trying to protect personal data from prying governments.

That theme--that technology will threaten privacy--has been present in science fiction at least since 1948, when George Orwell made Big Brother a symbol of government intrusion in his then-futuristic “1984.” The idea was bound to surface in a novel about cryptography, which is the making of codes, and cryptanalysis, the effort to break codes.

“At the moment, many people see the government as a scary, conspiratorial force, the ‘X-Files’ view of the world, in which everything is a conspiracy,” Stephenson says. “Most of the characters in ‘Cryptonomicon’ are worried about those kinds of issues. For them, cryptography is a tool to protect privacy. But in the World War II story line, the tables are sort of turned. Nobody’s read ‘1984,’ because it hasn’t been written yet. You have Hitler trying to take over the world and trying to do all sorts of horrible things. One of the linchpins of his thing is crypto. So one of the ways to bring him down is by breaking his codes. The basic problem in writing a book about crypto is finding ways to make it interesting. It has the potential to be a kind of dry, mathematical subject. Yet there have been times when it’s been extremely dramatic. The best example is World War II, when we had this whole code-breaking apparatus that helped us win the war. There’s this irresistible force that led me to set the book during World War II.”

Stephenson is more interested in telling a compelling story than in submitting to strict science fiction conventions. Although novels grounded in scientific developments have been largely set in some imaginary future, he doesn’t shy away from locating his story in the present and the past. If that frustrates readers looking for fictional treatments of real world technology, so be it.

“At the moment, I’m doing more research about the history of science,” he says. “In general, what I do is look at some idea in science or technology, and ask myself, ‘Can I make a good yarn out of this?’ And then I go out and try.”

Science fiction readers enjoy anointing their favorite authors as techno-prophets. When fiction anticipates reality, however, it’s as often a coincidence as the result of a writer’s prescience.

“The classic example of science fiction leading the way is that Arthur C. Clarke wrote about communication satellites long before they were actually made,” Stephenson says. “So people who would like to claim that science fiction predicts the future point to examples like that and make a big deal about them. I would say, in general, that it’s simply not the case. In the sense that a stopped clock is right twice a day, there are times when ideas presented in science fiction actually happen. But it isn’t really what science fiction writers are trying to do. I’m in the camp of the hard science fiction writers who study the science and try to get it right. The goal there is to make a story internally consistent, not to lay out a blueprint for the future.”

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Hard science fiction writers? Oh, yes. Within the genre, there are so many distinct subgenres that Arthur Cover, owner of Dangerous Visions, a science fiction and fantasy bookstore in Sherman Oaks, says, “Saying that you read science fiction is like saying you listen to rock ‘n’ roll.” The purists don’t confuse space operas with military or adventure science fiction stories any more than a heavy metal fan would start toe-tapping to disco. Stephenson is usually labeled a cyberpunk writer. And that would be?

“The movies ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘The Matrix’ are good examples of cyberpunk,” Cover explains. “The phrase was coined as a joke by Gardner Dozois, editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and it stuck. Cyberpunk was started in the ‘80s by a small group of writers who hung out together at science fiction conventions.”

They were writing about a future in which computers were pervasive, the U.S. had been surpassed as a world power by global corporations and hacker antiheroes found pristine cyberspace more appealing than the ecologically damaged real world. Cover says, “Stylistically and thematically, the authors were wildly divergent, but there was a common denominator among guys like William Gibson, John Shirley and Bruce Sterling, who published a magazine called Cheap Truth, which was the intellectual clearinghouse for a lot of cyberpunk’s ideas.”

Stephenson’s third, breakthrough novel, “Snow Crash,” was published in 1992 and became a cyberpunk classic. It takes place in a virtual reality Metaverse that imagined a Southern California in which people live in heavily fortified “burbclaves” and computer viruses really are deadly. The hero is a skateboarding pizza delivery boy. In 1995, Stephenson’s next book, “The Diamond Age,” won the prestigious Hugo Award, voted on by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Cyberpunk critics call the genre nihilistic. In fact, the term post-cyberpunk evolved partly to separate some of its better players from a field that had become littered with cyberjunk. Screenwriter Terry Rossio (“‘The Mask of Zorro”), a science fiction enthusiast, says, “After cyberpunk took off, a bunch of crappy writers wrote a bunch of terrible novels, pretty much killing the genre. Stephenson is probably described as post-cyberpunk because he’s known to be a kinder, gentler or maybe just smarter, more talented writer. It’s a compliment to classify him as post-cyberpunk, because nobody wants anything to do with cyberpunk anymore.”

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The man on whom the labels are being hung defends cyberpunk’s dark side.

“I think if you sit down and read some cyberpunk fiction, it’s not necessarily as nihilistic as the image it has,” he says. “People tend to contrast cyberpunk with stuff like ‘Star Trek,’ which presents this extremely optimistic view of the future--the idea that if we just had better technology, we could make all our social problems go away. So compared to that, cyberpunk might look a little bleak, because cyberpunk writers think that view is ridiculous. They do see social problems; they do see human nature not at its best. But I don’t think human nature in cyberpunk fiction is shown to be any worse than we’ve seen it to be in the 20th century.”

The other common criticism, easily understood by anyone who thought “The Matrix” was a mindless waste of flashy special effects, is that complexity can masquerade as profundity. Sometimes, audiences can be fooled into thinking that if they don’t understand a story that’s dressed up in techno-philosophical jargon, it must be brilliant. In Stephenson’s case, the faction that considers him visionary is more substantial than the dissenters nursing headaches induced by his intricate plots and highly caffeinated prose.

Living in Seattle with his wife and two children, Stephenson is already at work on his next novel.

“There’s a whole cluster of themes that crypto is part of,” he says. “It’s also tied in with the whole history of computers and the idea of computing and how it relates to the human brain, flow of information around the world, money. These things are all kind of interconnected in some way that I don’t claim to fully understand yet. It’s interesting subject matter and something that I can write about in different historical timelines. But each one of these books is intended to stand on its own. I don’t want people to get to the end and feel that they’ve been ripped off because the book doesn’t finish. So I’m trying to avoid calling ‘Cryptonomicon’ part of a trilogy or anything like that.”

A physics major and experienced programmer, Stephenson began writing while an undergraduate at Boston University.

“When I left school, I had trouble finding a job with the credentials I had, so I lived a slacker lifestyle for a while and pursued writing while I was working in stupid, dead-end jobs.”

He grew up in the East and Midwest in a family of academics. An essay Stephenson wrote on how society’s dependence on computers is distancing it from real experience was recently posted on his Web site (https://www.cryptonomicon.com), so it might not be entirely surprising that he writes his books in longhand. “Cryptonomicon” took two years to get on paper, and he spent another year “fooling around with it.”

Much in his profile would classify him as the spiritual brother of the computer freaks who embrace his books.

“I was never your classic nerd,” Stephenson says. “I was more the type who made fun of them. I don’t think nerds are as underappreciated as they used to be. The impression I get is that now young people are growing up looking at someone like Bill Gates. They have role models and heroes with rosy career prospects, and they know it. They may occasionally get a hard time from the jocks, but I don’t think there’s as much a problem as there used to be of nerds being universally despised. That’s why I try to write nerd characters who are shown as being complicated.”

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Mimi Avins can be reached by e-mail at mimi.avins@latimes.com.