Neal Stephenson

The mightyFoyles bookshop plays host to the author NealStephenson who is in London to promote his new novel. Interestingly Stephenson's books are starting to pop up in the main fiction a-z shelves as well as their original location amongst the science fiction offerings.His writing is what you might expect given the fact that he graduated from high school at the height of punk and was raised within a large family of engineers and scientists. His themes are enormous and far reaching embracing elaborate plots lines centered around future technologies and their influence upon sociological structures. Speculative but acutely plausible in the same manner Ballards ideas have now become banal realities of modern life. A comparison with the sadly now deceased
David Foster Wallace is also maybe fair. Both employ enjoyably punchy dialogue shot through with popular culture references to warm up and perhaps humanise subject matter many other writers serve up cold. Reading from his new book Anathem
which centres on a secular society of scientists and mathematicians. For 3,400 year they have lived a peaceful monk like existence away from the outside world of hyper capitalism,climate change,world wars,enormo malls,super casinos and crude boom/bust financial cycles.One day the denizens are summoned by the outside to provide some solutions.Hmm.

Shane Deegan