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The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future it's an awareness that this is different.

Neal Stephenson

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Neal Stephenson
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 31
Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Camp Annapolis Junction
Neal Town Stephenson
Stephen Bury
Approach
Fiction
Future
Science
Doesn
Mean
Different
Always
Awareness

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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
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Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.
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Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.
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In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.
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It would be quite unusual for me to get deep into a project and then shitcan it. One of the advantages of having done this for a while is that I have a better sense than I used to of when something is or isn't working. Until I developed that sense, this was a pretty dicey career for me, both in terms of paying the rent, and emotional wear and tear.
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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.
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How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?
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Am I a technocrat? Im just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?
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I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.
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I am on an expense account that would blow your mind.
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The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.
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The mind knows...that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story.
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It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.
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So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?
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She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.
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I think that this vein is close to being mined out already, but I'll say that my knowledge of and talent for linguistics are quite limited and I'm not aware of being a hell of a lot more interested in that topic than I am in others.
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If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?
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This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.
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Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.
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That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.
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