Neal Town Stephenson is the author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Zodiac. Born on Halloween 1959 in Fort
Meade, Maryland -- home of the National Security Agency -- he grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and Ames,
Iowa, before attending college in Boston. Since 1984 he has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and has made
a living out of writing novels and the occasional magazine article.
Review
"A powerful voice of the cyber age."
--USA Today
"Stephenson is a literary visionary of the technological future."
--Seattle Weekly
"In the network world of the silicon samurai Stephenson is a big-time."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer
Submitted by Publishers, July, 2001
Summary
This is "the Word" -- one man's word, certainly -- about the art (and artifice) of the state of our
computer-centric existence. And considering that the "one man" is Neal Stephenson, "the hacker Hemingway"
(Newsweek) -- acclaimed novelist, pragmatist, seer, nerd-friendly philosopher, and nationally bestselling author
of groundbreaking literary works (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., etc.) -- the word is well worth hearing. Mostly
well-reasoned examination and partial rant, Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line is a thoughtful,
irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past and present; on operating system tyrannies and downloaded
popular revolutions; on the Internet, Disney World, Big Bangs, not to mention the meaning of life itself.
