An interview with legendary sci-fi author Neal Stephenson over a beer at the Porterhouse Bar in New York City.
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00:00You can conceal a lot of sins, of brewing sins, under this patina of flaming, bitter hoppiness.
00:12Personally, I'm done with hops. I've been through the hop thing and out the other side, you know. I'm finished.
00:22I'm from the Pacific Northwest. That's kind of where it started, because that's where hops come from.
00:27Spread like a plague.
00:30I'm from the Pacific Northwest.
00:35Also, super hoppy beers and high alcohol beers go together. I don't want like an 8% beer.
00:43I can't handle that anymore. I could never handle it. Now I'm honest with myself.
00:48I'm going to try the Nitro Red Irish Ale.
00:51I'm thinking that's probably going to be similar to a Kilkenny's or a Smitty's or one of those that is my safest bet to not just get blown out by hop flavors.
01:05Beautiful, thank you. Now this is going to make a mess with my facial hair.
01:14Yeah, I think I made the right choice.
01:22Dodge is a pretty complicated, well-rounded guy. He grew up on a farm in Iowa.
01:30He went off to Canada and ended up becoming a guide for hunters there.
01:36Thereby opened up a smuggling route to take marijuana across the D.C.-Idaho border.
01:43He makes a bunch of money and ends up just sort of chilling out and playing a lot of video games.
01:49And comes up with some of his own ideas on how to make a better one.
01:54What he wants to do is to build a fully realized world that people can immerse themselves in.
02:01He brings in writers and he brings in geeks of geology and designers and architects to make it all realistic.
02:10Years go by and he turns that into a big, very successful video game company and becomes a tech magnate in Seattle.
02:19So what happens is that he's having a medical procedure and something goes wrong and he's just gone.
02:27And it turns out that when he was younger, he signed a will stating that his remains were to be preserved.
02:35So that he could be kind of rebooted or brought back to life later.
02:39The twist that we see in this book, in Fall, is that after he dies, he has to build a world from scratch because there isn't one.
02:49He wakes up and he's in a field of chaos. It's a blank slate. He builds a world.
02:55And he's the one guy who is most qualified to do that because of what he did during his lifetime.
03:01This book is kind of like more of a fable.
03:04So I'm not trying to go super deep into a hard science treatment of brains and neurons.
03:09I'm basically saying, let's assume, for the sake of telling a fun story, that all of this could happen.
03:15And let's just go from there.
03:20Well, in the case of Fall, it was always the intention that it would taper from the beginning part,
03:28which is straight-up near-future techno-thriller, into something that was more like high-fantasy,
03:34crossed with the Bible and paradise lost and Satan and the apple and expulsion from paradise and the Greek myths.
03:42It's all kind of the background material.
03:44The jury is really still out on how it's going to be received.
03:48I mean, people who like fantasy also frequently like science fiction and vice versa.
03:54So I'm hoping people will enjoy a book that starts as one and tapers into the other.
04:01One of the fun things about Fall is it's an excuse to go back and revisit old myths and creation legends.
04:08Something that shows up in a lot of mythologies is this idea of creating something from chaos.
04:16At the beginning, there's this thing called chaos, which in a way seems like a weirdly modern, high-tech idea,
04:24because we have chaos theory, we have a mathematical definition now of what chaos means.
04:30But the ancient people seemed to have their own idea of chaos.
04:34And then there's this recurring theme of the supreme deity or the first god or whatever,
04:39who is able to transform chaos into something that's persistent and stable.
04:44And that's how the world gets created.
04:47And in a way, I think that's a creative activity that everyone does,
04:54to take kind of random elements that just come to us from different directions all the time
04:59and assemble them into forms that are persistent and meaningful.
05:05So hopefully it's a thing that we can all kind of relate to at some level.