Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing, by Neal Stephenson,
William Morrow, 324 pages, $25.9

The term science fiction is often uttered with a
condescending sneer: a domain of outlandish and unrealistic
thinking. But
Neal Stephenson, writing in his new collection Some
Remarks, has a brighter view of the genre and the mind set
behind it. Stephenson, author of such popular science fiction
novels as
Snow Crash and
Cryptonomicon, sees the genre as “intelligence at
work.” Fiction, he says, isn’t good “unless it has interesting
ideas in it.”

The same might be said of compelling essays as well. Some
Remarks, like the science fiction stories he praises, enriches
our appreciation of Stephenson’s fiction through his view of the
real world.

The mix of essays, interviews, and fiction that comprise
Stephenson’s collection span the decades from the early 1990s
through 2012. The author doesn’t whitewash his own historical
record: Some of his pieces, he warns, will come across as “dated or
jejune.” In a surprising twist, it’s the fiction that shows its age
the most. The two short stories in the collection, both from the
mid-’90s, feel like they’re mired in the clichés of cyberpunk, a
subgenre that sputtered out years ago. In contrast, two
Wired magazine essays of the same early 1990s vintage wear
well.

The Wired articles are both travelogues. In “Mother
Earth, Mother Board,” Stephenson paints himself as a “hacker
tourist,” covering the globe to learn about networks and undersea
cables. He’s looking for answers to questions that initially seem
arcane: how the cables are built and how they help network the
world. Here, Stephenson the essayist turns out to be not so
different from Stephenson the novelist. Novelists obsessively
gather independent pieces of research from artifacts, images,
conversations, and impressions, then rearrange and contextualize
them to form a coherent narrative. In the Wired story, he
covers topics ranging from Lord Kelvin’s inventions to the problems
with laying down thousands of miles of undersea cable, from
interactions between monopolies and free enterprise to the
relationship between governments and the experts who get the job
done. The story has the same slow initial burn that characterizes
many of his novels, with an impressive payoff.

“In the Kingdom of Mao Bell”
finds Stephenson checking out southern Hong Kong shortly before the
handover to China. Stephenson asks various Chinese technology
workers what they think of the idea, popular in the west, that
“economic modernization will lead to political reform.” He is
greeted primarily by incomprehension. Stephenson shows a cover of
Wired with three Hanzi characters that supposedly mean
“network,” thinking the concept cool and geeky. He’s shocked to
discover that those three characters actually form the term used
during the Cultural Revolution for the Red Guard’s network of spies
and informers.

“Mao Bell” ends on a downbeat note: Bringing China online will
not bring freedom, Stephenson predicts, but greater control. In
1994, when he wrote the piece, Stephenson could not have foreseen
the Great Firewall of China, or the ways Google would compromise
its “do no evil” maxim just to do business in the country. On the
other hand, Ai Weiwei and other contemporary Chinese dissidents
have argued that the Internet is uncontrollable and eventually
freedom will win, a view much closer to Wired‘s original
meaning of network. If Stephenson revisited Shenzen today,
nearly 20 years later, would his conclusions change?

Beyond the cultural interpretations of science fiction,
Stephenson’s topics range from the hazards of sitting down all day,
to the clash of worldviews in Waco when government agents had their
standoff with the Branch Davidians, to a midwestern college town’s
influence on the novelist David Foster Wallace. Together they offer
a faithful historical record of an important writer’s short fiction
and nonfiction from the early 1990s through today. They showcase
Stephenson’s eye for detail, his ability to weave compelling
stories from reams of research, and his excitement about the world
of ideas. They illuminate the mind behind his fiction, and, I
think, may spur new readers to discover his novels.