Neal Stephenson Books

""So, you're the UNIX guru." At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words. Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree, and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX."

"Hollywood was merely a specialized bank — a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium."

"Bobby Shaftoe reports back to his ship, and is not granted any more shore leave. He does manage to have a conversation with Uncle Jack, the last of the Manila Shaftoes…who has always been an odd combination of salty waterfront trader and perfumed dandy. When Bobby repeats the latest rumors, Uncle Jack's face collapses. No one hereabouts is willing to face the fact that they are about to be besieged by Nips. Bobby watches as he putt-putts away on his little boat…knowing that he is probably the last member of his family who will ever see Uncle Jack alive."

"The fellow has a red beard, which makes it just a bit less probable that he is a Nipponese soldier. But what is he? He prods like a doctor and prays like a priest in Latin, even. Silver hair buzzed close to a tanned skull. Shaftoe scans the fellow's clothing for some kind of insignia. He's hoping to see a Semper Fidelis but instead he reads: Societas Eruditorum and Ignoti et quasi occulti. "Ignoti et…what the fuck does that mean?" he asks. "Hidden and unknown more or less," says the man."

"Shaftoe needs morphine. He says as much to Red. "If you think you need it now," Red says, "just wait." He tosses his rifle to a native, strides up to Shaftoe, and heaves him up over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. Shaftoe screams. A couple of Zeroes fly overhead, as they stride into the jungle. "My name is Enoch Root," says Red, "but you can call me Brother.""

"Ronald Reagan has a stack of three by five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?" Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long... "Just kill the one with the sword first." "Ah...Smarrrt—you target them because they're the officers, right?" "No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill 'em because they've got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword?""

"The "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers…a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds."

"There is no in-between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past."

"Officers actually like it when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter they are than you. It makes them feel needed."

"Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave, shaped like the forked tongue of a reptile. Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave and crashes into the foliage below. It is low to the ground, moving on all fours. It pauses for a moment and flicks its tongue towards the Imperial Marine who is now hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty feet distant."

""Shit!" he says. "What’s wrong, Sarge?" "I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says."

"EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets…If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril — you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony. Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's get down to business."

"Phase n: before the ink on our Nobel Prize certificates is dry…all proceeds will be redistributed among our shareholders, who will hardly notice, since Spreadsheet 265 demonstrates that, by this time, the company will be larger than the British Empire at its zenith..... RESUMES: Just recall the opening reel of The Magnificent Seven."

"Randy reads another message simply because of the return address: [email protected] On a UNIX machine, "root" is the name of the most godlike of all users, the one who can read, erase, or edit any file…professional courtesy demands he at least read this message. I read about your project. Why are you doing it? Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be or to be indistinguishable from self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time."

"Randy opens up a terminal window and types whois eruditorum.org and a second later gets back a block of text from the InterNIC: eruditorum.org (Societas Eruditorum) followed by a mailing address in Leipzig, Germany. Record last updated on 18 Nov 98. Record created on 1 Mar 90. The "90" jumps out. That's a prehistoric date by Internet standards. It means that Societas Eruditorum was way ahead of the game. Especially for a group based in Leipzig, which was part of East Germany until about then."

"Corporal Benjamin hesitated, one hand poised above his radio key. "Sarge, are you sure they know we're here?" Everyone turned to see how Shaftoe would respond to this mild challenge. He had been slowly gathering a reputation as a man who needed watching. Shaftoe turned on his heel and strolled out into the middle of a clearing a few yards away…The Henschel was coming back for another pass, now so close to the ground that you could probably throw a rock through its windshield. Shaftoe unslung his tommy gun, pulled back the bolt, cradled it, swung it up and around, and opened fire…The Henschel went out of control almost immediately."

"In Shaftoe's post-high school experience he had found that guns…kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually…But the Vickers in the back of this truck was water cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure…and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for days — as long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition."

"Randy watches them in turn: Bad Suit Asians and Good Suit Asians. The former have grizzled buzz cuts and nicotine-tanned skin and look like killers. They are wearing bad suits, not because they can't afford good ones, but because they don't give a shit."

""...when I talk about Holocaust type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted… As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, I have no illusions about them," Avi says, "but, at their worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the Spaniards showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better around there.”"

"He hears the flint of Julieta's lighter itching once, twice, thrice behind his ear. Then her chest pushes him up as her lungs fill with smoke."

"It goes without saying that the Finns have to have their own sui generis brand of automatic weapon."

"Haven’t seen Enoch Root recently. Did he get the radio transmitter to work?" "Beats me," Shaftoe says, "but when big pieces of burning shit start falling out of the sky in my neighborhood, makes me wonder."

"Doug has spread out miscellaneous contents on a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex-Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a sort of librarian."

""So we suspect his name was Rudolf von Hacklheber," Doug Shaftoe says.…"There was a man by that name who wrote a couple of mathematics papers back in the thirties. And there are some organizations in and around Leipzig, Germany, that use the name…a defunct reinsurance company." Doug pings one fingernail against a glass tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written on the back in pencil…Randy flips the envelope over…It says: WATERHOUSE LAVENDER ROSE."

"World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth… The next-best thing is putting only a small amount in your bowl and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which takes about thirty seconds in the case of Cap'n Crunch."

"Aging Filipinas in prom dresses have come and gone across the lobby of the Manila Hotel for as long as Randy has known the place…Pursuing an explanation for every strange thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of rainwater out of a discarded tire."

"When Waterhouse returns from work that evening, he blunders into the parlor and interrupts Mrs. McTeague having tea with a young lady…Mary Smith…a petite girl dressed in a uniform. She is the only woman Waterhouse has ever seen. She is the only other human being in the universe actually, and when she stands up to shake his hand, his peripheral vision shuts down as if he has been sucking on a tailpipe. Mrs. McTeague, knowing the score, bids him sit down. Mary averts her eyes from his and when she swallows there is a certain cord in her white neck that stands out for a moment. Her skin, as unmarked as clear water, is an extravagant display of vibrant animal power. He wants his tongue on it. She sees him looking at her, and swallows again. She may just as well have caved his head in with a stone and tied his penis round a hitching rail. The effect must be calculated. But apparently she has not ever done it to anyone else, or there would be a band of gold round her ring-finger."

"Enoch Root has an old cigar box on his lap. Golden light is shining out of the crack around its lid…which contains the stuff Shaftoe wants: not morphine. Something better than morphine. Morphine is to the stuff in the cigar box what a Shanghai prostitute is to Glory. The box flies open and blinding light comes out of it."

""I ran statistical analyses of convoy sinkings and U-boat attacks," von Hacklheber said. "Certainly if they were smart enough to break the Enigma they would be smart enough to conceal the fact…It all came down to lengthy and tedious work." Shaftoe cringes, wondering what something would have to be like in order to qualify as lengthy and tedious to this joker. "It was obvious that Detachment 2702 was in the business of deceiving the Wehrmacht by concealing the fact that the Enigma had been broken." When von Hacklheber explains this, everything that Detachment 2702 ever did suddenly makes sense."

"Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette. "You expect them to throw all those Enigma machines away because one mathematician writes a paper?""

"Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring makes his way towards the rear of the train. His body is about as big as the hull of a torpedo boat, draped in a circus tent sized Chinese silk robe…He has the largest belly of any man Rudy has ever seen, and it is covered with golden hair that deepens as the belly curves under, until it becomes a tawny thicket that completely conceals his genitals. He is not really expecting to see two men sitting here eating breakfast, but seems to consider Rudy and Angelo's presence here to be one of life's small anomalies."

"Give those Finns a grim, stark, bleak moral dilemma and a bottle of schnapps and you could pretty much forget about them for forty-eight hours."

""If you're trying to say that my relationship with the Church is very complicated, I already knew that, Bobby.”"

"Two large black Mercedes issue from the forest, like bad ideas emerging from the dim mind of a green lieutenant. Germans climb out and stand up. This is the moment, then. Nazis are right over there and it is the job of Bobby Shaftoe to kill them all…because they are the living avatars of Satan, who publicly acknowledge being just as bad and vicious as they really are."

"Ask a Russian engineer to design you a shoe, and he'll give you something that looks like the box the shoe came in. Ask him to design something that will slaughter Germans, and he turns into Thomas fucking Edison."

"Root drifts off into a coma, mumbling something about cigars… Rudy is nowhere to be found, and Shaftoe suspects he has blown town. But then suddenly he shows up at Root's bedside holding an ancient Cuban cigar box, Spanish words all over it."

"Swedish people are beginning to come out of their houses. They look exactly like American midwesterners, and Shaftoe's always startled when they fail to speak English."

""Hey, friend!" says Mary's date. Waterhouse turns towards the sound of the voice. The sloppy grin draped across his face serves as a convenient bulls eye, and Mary's date's fist homes in on it unerringly."

"Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he's just taken a fifty caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames."

"So I’m well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of my books. I can remember at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby-Dick: There’s a helicopter that gets brought down; there’s a private jet that blows up; some people die; there’s confrontation and a girl goes home with her mom — so it seems like a good ending to me. [audience laughter] Once you write a book or two with controversial endings — and that meme gets going, of “Stephenson can’t write endings” — then that gets slapped on everything that you do no matter how elaborate the ending is."

"Such a world wouldn't be stable unless each little "burbclave" had the ability to defend itself from all external threats. This is not plausible, barring some huge advances in defensive technology."

"The idea of a "virtual reality" such as the Metaverse is by now widespread in the computer-graphics community and is being implemented in a number of different ways. The particular vision of the Metaverse as expressed in this novel originated from idle discussion between me and Jaime (Captain Bandwidth) Taaffe — which does not imply that blame for any of the unrealistic or tawdry aspects of the Metaverse should be placed on anyone but me. The words "avatar" (in the sense used here) and "Metaverse" are my inventions, which I came up with when I decided that existing words (such as "virtual reality") were simply too awkward to use. [...] after the first publication of 'Snow Crash' I learned that the term "avatar" has actually been in use for a number of years as part of a virtual reality system called "Habitat" [...] in addition to avatars, Habitat includes many of the basic features of the Metaverse as described in this book."

"This book germinated in a collaboration between me and the artist Tony Sheeder, the original goal of which was to publish a computer-generated graphic novel. In general, I handled the words and he handled the pictures; but even though this work consists almost entirely of words, certain aspects of it stem from my discussions with Tony…I became intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Macintosh during the early phases…when it became clear that the only way to make the Mac do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept."

""Send someone out to pick up the abandoned pizza car. And give the driver a day off," Uncle Enzo says. The lieutenant looks somewhat taken aback that Uncle Enzo is concerning himself with such a tiny detail. It is as if the don were going up and down highways picking up litter or something. But he nods respectfully, having just learned something: details matter."

"They have shut down the airport. This was easy to do: they just pulled Lincoln Town Cars onto all the runways, for starters, and then went into the control tower and announced that in a few minutes they would be going to war. Now, LAX is probably quieter than it has been at any point since it was built. Uncle Enzo can actually hear the faint crashing of surf on the beach, half a mile away. It is almost pleasant here. Weenie-roasting weather."

"As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise."

"Fido comes out of his doggie house, curls his long legs beneath him, and jumps over the fence around his yard before he has remembered that he is not capable of jumping over it. This contradiction is lost on him, though; as a dog, introspection is not one of his strong points."

"Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in a Ziploc bag."

"Another man duck-walks across the flight deck… "Hello, everyone," he says cheerfully. "Who are you?" Tony says. The new guy looks crestfallen. "Greg Ritchie," he says. Then, when no one seems to react, he jogs their memory. "President of the United States." "Oh! Sorry. Nice to meet you, Mr. President," Tony says, extending his hand.... "Frank Frost," Frank says, extending his hand and looking bored. "Don't mind me," Y.T. says, when Ritchie looks her way. "I'm a hostage.""

"Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan…After a few thousand years, one new language developed — Hebrew — that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, radical monotheists, were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history — a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.'"