For Termination Shock fans, Neal Stephenson wrote up his thoughts on the plausibility of seeding the atmosphere to cool the planet

On his Substack.

Neal Stephenson has a substack

Mostly discussions of his experiments with LLMs and NFTs.

Listing for a new historical novel by Neal Stephenson

Here's the Amazon listing, but the Harper Collins page has a much longer summary:

The first installment in Neal Stephenson’s Bomb Light cycle, Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.

Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic, and the start of a captivating new series from Neal Stephenson.

Incidentally, he also has a new interview at the Atlantic, honestly a pretty lackluster one--basically, he's not impressed with AI so far, and assumes much more interesting applications will be discovered. The base inspiration for the primer in Diamond Age was his child's mobile--you were supposed to snap on more sophisticated shapes as the child aged.

Neal Stephenson's novel "Anathem" is a thrilling, pulpy page turner

A 2008 novel with a cover, description, and first few 100 pages seemingly designed to discourage most people, even his fans, from reading it. It seems like it's going to be hundreds of pages of monks debating string theory and other concepts in excruciatingly dull detail. 

But I recently reread it, found it thrilling, and flew through the 1,000 pages. Yes, the monks debate string theory and other concepts in excruciating detail. But they do so while having one thrilling adventure after another, culminating in....

Spoilers for a novel that came out in 2008 below: 

Footage of Indian and Chinese troops fighting to move the border in the Himalayas; Neal Stephenson imagines the near future of that battle involving martial arts influencers

CNN:

Video of what appears to be a previously unreported violent clash between Indian and Chinese troops at their disputed Himalayan border [in 2021] has emerged online, offering a rare window into the long-simmering territorial tensions between the two Asian powers. 

...

Though they’re separated by barbed wire, the footage appears to show Indian troops beating the Chinese soldiers with makeshift weapons, including what look like wooden sticks and metal pipes. In several instances, Indian soldiers can be seen throwing bricks or stones.

Many of the Chinese soldiers, gathered on the other side of the wire, also appear to be holding long sticks or batons.

Eventually the barbed wire collapses and the Indian soldiers move forward, prompting the Chinese troops to jump over a short stone wall and leave the area, to cheers from the Indian side.    

Here's a detailed analysis with maps concluding that China has built new infrastructure in the area to allow quick movement of troops and supplies.

One storyline in Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock (I'm about halfway through the novel) imagines civilians joining the fight as sponsored athletes:

Ractives from Diamond Age are here

Neal Stephenson got an awful lot right (or conjured a lot into existence).





The Tempest:

Now Available on Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift

Shows Nightly through September 2020. Purchase tickets in the in-app box office now!

...

What can I expect from Tempest?

The Under Presents: Tempest is a live, interactive, and intimate VR show inspired by the Shakespeare play. With personal variations among each actor, and new groups of participants at each showtime, no two performances of The Under Presents: Tempest will be the same. Each performance will last about 40 minutes.

How can I experience Tempest?

Ticketed showtimes will be held throughout a 4-hour window (4:00pm - 8:00pm Pacific on weekdays, 11:00am - 3:00pm Pacific on weekends) every day from July 9 through the end of September. Tickets are available as an in-app purchase within The Under Presents. The Under Presents: Tempest is exclusive to Oculus Quest and Rift.

Can I experience The Under Presents: Tempest with friends?

Each performance will include one actor networked with up to 8 participants. Multiple performances will run simultaneously. There is no guarantee that participants who purchase tickets for the same showtime will be networked into the same performance.

How does pricing work for all this?

-Tempest will be available for $14.99 (US) per ticket as an in-app purchase and includes permanent access to The Under multiplayer space.

-The Timeboat single player experience will be available as an in-app purchase for $11.99 (US) and also grants permanent access to The Under multiplayer space.

-The intro to The Under Presents (about 45 min of gameplay) will be free of charge as a demo of the experience.

A short trailer:



From a review:

This makes The Under Presents: Tempest wonderfully abstract in its retelling of Shakespeare’s play, as no matter how the actor tries to direct proceedings that live nature opens new interpretation possibilities. Prospero gives everyone roles depending on the number of people attending. While groups can max out at eight people, for this demonstration there were four of us, so I got to play roles including a boson and the groom – the first time I’ve been married in VR.

"Yes, the recurring character Enoch Root does appear in [Neal Stephenson's new novel] Fall"

A look at the new book, which is out tomorrow.

In a fight between Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, who would win?

From a Neal Stephenson interview on Slashdot. One question was:

In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal:

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building's roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.

Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling's professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers' conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.

Read the rest of the interview here.