About Neal Stephenson: Neal Town Stephenson is an award-winning American writer and game designer known for his works of speculative fiction.
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― Xerox it, and embed it in the ...
Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished, sphincters....
She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not to understand her. That's what she's after.... She doesn't want you to understand . She knows impossible. She just wants you to understand . Everything else is negotiable.
A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.
think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,
But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.
Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot" Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash
It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.
I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo.
Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.
He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.
I just saved your fucking life, Mom...It's like, if you--people of a certain age--would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures.
When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to ...
Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.
I don't know how to be anything but pretend," I replied, and it ached in me how true that really was. "But if I could be real, I'd be real for you.
This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.
I hate it when people talk like friendship is less than other kinds of - as though it's some kind of runner-up prize for people who can't have sex.
I hate it when people talk like friendship is less than other kinds of-as though it's some sort of runner-up prize for people who can't have sex. I had a boyfriend once, but I never liked being with him the way I like being with you." I held his gaze...