Stephenson has always had an engineering outlook.

This novelist’s participation in a tech company is not as drastic a pivot as one might think. And seeing his fictional creation colonized by profit-seeking growth-greedy goliaths wasn’t fun. For one thing, the metaverse according to Snow Crash was a somewhat dystopian locale, a fact ignored by the companies telling us that it will be a great place to live. The answers Stephenson provided to that question were a mix of bemusement or, as a WIRED writer noted, disgust. “That turned into the ‘Neal, how do you feel about the Metaverse?’ book tour,” says Stephenson. Everyone from Microsoft to Amazon was suddenly coming up with a metaverse strategy, even though the technologies that might make it happen are still out of our grasp.Īt the time, Stephenson was publicizing his most recent novel, with a theme involving climate engineering. Most notably, Facebook, spending billions on its Reality Labs, renamed itself Meta. “Metaverse” became a buzz word, and Big Tech raced to productize it. But late last year, Stephenson’s ambient, persistent and immersive alt-reality suddenly became known as the next step in computing.

That book cemented him as a major writer, and since then he’s had huge success.

Though other science fiction writers had similar ideas-and the pioneers of VR were already building artificial worlds-Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash not only fleshed out the vision of escaping to a place where digital displaced the physical, it also gave it a name.

The Con Artist Handbook by Joel Levy