About Neal Stephenson also known as Stephen Bury (writing with J Frederick George)
Neal Stephenson issueth from a Clan of yeomen, itinerant Parsons, ingenieurs, and Natural Philosophers that hath long dwelt in bucolick marches and rural Shires of his native Land, and trod the Corridors of her 'Varsities. At a young age, finding himself in a pretty Humour for the writing of Romances, and discourse of Natural Philosophy and Technologick Arts, he took up the Pen, and hath not since laid it down.

Bibliography:
(titles in RED are included in this topic)

Baroque Cycle
1. Quicksilver (2003)
2. The Confusion (2004)
3. The System of the World (2004)

Novels
The Big U (1984)
Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller (1988)
Snow Crash (1992)
Interface (1994) (writing as Stephen Bury)
The Diamond Age (1995)
The Cobweb (1996) (writing as Stephen Bury)
Cryptonomicon (1999)
Anathem (2008)


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The Baroque Cycle 01 - Quisksilver



If you love a rip-roaring yarn you’ll actually learn something from...if you devoured The DaVinci Code or The Name of the Rose or An Instance of the Fingerpost...if you’ve ever marveled at the ideas of Neal Stephenson in books like Snow Crash...have we got a treat for you. Quicksilver is here.

Stephenson has resurrected one of the most extraordinary eras in human history: the late 17th and early 18th century, when modern science (then called “natural philosophy”) stirred to its feet, and made its first powerful strides; when secret codes, secret knowledge, and alchemy were the order of the day; when Protestants and Catholics warred over the true faith, and the forces of Islam laid siege to Vienna...

Here are: Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the simultaneous, disputing co-creators of calculus, and Benjamin Franklin as a boy, slick beyond his years. Here are Barbary pirates and vagabonds making their way in King Louis XIV’s court at Versailles. Here, too, are binary systems, hexadecimals, and memes.

And, for those who’ve read Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, here are the forebears of some of that book’s characters. For example, “Half-Cocked” Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, and a distant ancestor of U.S. marine raider Bobby Shaftoe. And, at the heart of the book, Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, generations removed from the Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse who helped Alan Turing decode Nazi ciphers in Cryptonomicon.

It took an extraordinary storyteller (and researcher!) to create Quicksilver, one who’s been compared with everyone from Thomas Pynchon to Tom Clancy to William Gibson to Hemingway. (Incredibly, Stephenson, an early leader of the cyberpunk movement, wrote the first draft of this book with a fountain pen!)

If you’re as captivated by this parallel universe as we think you’ll be, there’s good news. Quicksilver is the first in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, with two more books to follow: The Confusion and The System of the World.

Each story stands entirely on its own (unlike, say, The Lord of the Rings). So you don’t have to read all three. But we bet you will.

The Baroque Cycle 02 - The Confusion



The Confusion, the shelf-bending sequel to Neal Stephenson's equally meaty Quicksilver, continues his epic Baroque Cycle by following a remarkable cast of late-17th-century characters that includes spies, vagabonds, and historical figures like Sir Isaac Newton and German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

The two primary story lines revolve around Jack Shaftoe, the infamous King of the Vagabonds, and Eliza, a seductive spy who is both puppet-master and pawn to powerful alchemists, cryptographers, and kings. The novel begins with Jack a half-insane, pox-infected galley slave aboard a pirate ship. He and a cabal of ten ingenious slaves engineer a wild plot to win their freedom -- and untold fortunes. The complicated scheme -- which involves stealing an enormous cache of silver bound for Spain -- succeeds beyond their wildest dreams; but instead of thieving a hoard of silver, the cabal now possesses gold: "not just any gold, but gold imbued with miraculous -- even divine -- qualities."

Meanwhile, Eliza -- a former slave -- finds herself penniless once again in France and must use intellect and cunning to save herself and her children from certain death. Her primary objective is to seek vengeance on the man who forced her into slavery, but fate intervenes at the most inopportune moment…

With the swashbuckling action and the quixotic ambiance of Alexandre Dumas classics such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, the page-turning intrigue of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and a cast of characters to rival any Harry Turtledove epic, Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is destined to rank among the most ambitious historical sagas ever written. Wildly engaging, richly described and delectably complex, The Confusion is a storytelling masterwork.

The Baroque Cycle 03 - The system of the World



The System of the World, the third and concluding volume of Neal Stephenson's shelf-bending Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver and The Confusion), brings the epic historical saga to its thrilling -- and truly awe-inspiring -- conclusion.

Set in the early 18th century and featuring a diverse cast of characters that includes alchemists, philosophers, mathematicians, spies, thieves, pirates, and royalty, The System of the World follows Daniel Waterhouse, an unassuming philosopher and confidant to some of the most brilliant minds of the age, as he returns to England to try and repair the rift between geniuses Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. After reluctantly leaving his family in Boston, Waterhouse arrives in England and is almost killed by a mysterious Infernal Device. Having been away from the war-decimated country for two decades, Waterhouse quickly learns that although many things have changed, there is still violent revolution simmering just beneath the surface of seemingly civilized society. With Queen Anne deathly ill and Tories and Whigs jostling for political supremacy, Waterhouse and Newton vow to figure out who is trying to kill certain scientists and decipher the riddle behind the legend of King Solomon's gold, a mythical hoard of precious metal with miraculous properties.

Arguably one of the most ambitious -- and most researched -- stories ever written, Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is set in one of the most turbulent and exciting times in human history. Filled with wild adventure, political intrigue, social upheaval, civilization-changing discoveries, cabalistic mysticism, and even a little romance, this massive saga is worth its weight in (Solomon's) gold.

Snow Crash



Plot: Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison—a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about Infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous...you'll recognize it immediately.

The Diamond Age



Decades into our future, a stone's throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the
rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neoVictorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth's own daughter, the Primer's purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands.

Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetes--members of the poor, tribeless class. Neglected by their mother, Harv looks after Nell. When he and his gang waylay a certain neo-Victorian--John Percival Hackworth-- in the seamy streets of their neighborhood, Harv brings Nell something special: the Primer.

Following the discovery of his crime, Hackworth begins an odyssey of his own. Expelled from the neo-Victorian paradise, squeezed by agents of Protocol
Enforcement on one side and a Mandarin underworld crime lord on the other, he searches for an elusive figure known as the Alchemist. His quest and Nell's
will ultimately lead them to another seeker whose fate is bound up with the Primer-- a woman who holds the key to a vast, subversive information
network that is destined to decode and reprogram the future of humanity.

Vividly imagined, stunningly prophetic, and epic in scope, The Diamond Age is a major novel from one of the most visionary writers of our time

Cryptonomicon



Neal Stephenson enjoys cult status among science fiction fans and techie types thanks to Snow Crash, which so completely redefined conventional notions of the high-tech future that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if his cyberpunk classic was big, Cryptonomicon is huge... gargantuan... massive, not just in size (a hefty 918 pages including appendices) but in scope and appeal. It's the hip, readable heir to Gravity's Rainbow and the Illuminatus trilogy. And it's only the first of a proposed series--for more information, read our interview with Stephenson.

Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods--World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first.... Of course, to observe is not its real duty--we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed.... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."

All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes--inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe--team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties.

Cryptonomicon is vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail so precise it's exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea, or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomicon is also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and crypto--all the crypto you'll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation). --Therese Littleton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Anathem



Anathem, the latest invention by the New York Times bestselling author of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle, is a magnificent creation: a work of great scope, intelligence, and imagination that ushers readers into a recognizable—yet strangely inverted—world.

Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside "saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside—the Extramuros—for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.

Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fraas and suurs prepare to venture beyond the concent's gates—at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious "extras" in. During his first Apert as a fraa, Erasmas eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn't seen since he was "collected." But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change.

Powerful unforeseen forces jeopardize the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros—a threat that only an unsteady alliance of saecular and avout can oppose—as, one by one, Erasmas and his colleagues, teachers, and friends are summoned forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster. Suddenly burdened with a staggering responsibility, Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world—as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond.

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