Neal Stephenson's new book REAMDE goes on sale Tuesday, so in preparation we sat down with him to ask a few questions. Here's what he had to say...
Q: Reamde is an adrenaline-fueled, non-stop action adventure thriller with a large international cast of compelling characters. How did you come with the idea?
NEAL STEPHENSON: It's been banging around in my head for years. We've all grown accustomed to stories about computer viruses that come out of nowhere and sweep across the world in days. I thought it would make a good plot hook to imagine a situation in which a powerful and vengeful person was seriously inconvenienced by such a virus, and decided to track down the hacker who created it and get even.
NEAL STEPHENSON: I definitely spend more time than is good for me playing games, to the point where I put together a system for playing XBox while using an elliptical trainer. But my few encounters with actual twelve-year-old boys in the online universe have made it clear that I cannot aspire to the title of "serious gamer."
Making T'Rain a reality would be a massive tech development project that would probably extend over several years and require hundreds of millions of dollars in capital. If someone wants to pony up the dough, I'd be happy to get involved!
Q: One of the interesting backstories in the book is how T’Rain was developed and the unique talents behind it—especially the writers who devised its bible. What connections do you see between an MMORPG like T’Rain and literature—storytelling? Would you consider that kind of game to be a kind of participatory literature?
NEAL STEPHENSON: The two writers are a kind of self-parody; I've taken two literary tendencies that are always competing for control of my keyboard, and made them flesh.
All role-playing games are a kind of improvisatory literature. It's easy to make fun of RPG dorks. But those games wouldn't be interesting unless the people playing them were coming up with interesting characters and spinning tales with legitimate narrative qualities--some of which are at least as good as what gets published as officially sanctioned literature.
Q: Talk about your characters. While Richard is the central figure, his niece, the super-smart, super-cool Zula, is a great kickass heroine. You’ve also got a frighteningly intelligent and supremely capable villain in Jones. What inspired their creation?
NEAL STEPHENSON: It's difficult to tease specific answers out of the morass of ideas and impulses that is my brain. In general, though, I would say this about thrillers. The characters in thrillers find themselves in crazy, dangerous situations that fortunately don't happen to the vast majority of real humans. As a writer, you have two basic approaches as far as coming up with characters is concerned. You can make your characters into James Bond/Jason Bourne types who live in the thriller universe all the time, or you can come up with more realistic everyday characters---people you might expect to meet in the pages of a more sedate, literary novel, say---and then plunge them into the thriller universe, whereupon it becomes more of a fish-out-of-water proposition. I've taken the latter approach just because I think it gives me more options as a writer.
Q: Reamde is a massive tale with a number of moving parts. How did you keep track of the divergent characters and parallel storylines as you were writing?
NEAL STEPHENSON: With a spreadsheet. Sorry.
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