Stephenson has been praised for having an almost prophetic vision of the future, and as a respected thinker in this area, is one of six visiting fellows at Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Innovation in Cambridge Massachusetts. Stephenson admits that he runs into people who tell him there are companies in Silicon Valley who are basically throwing his novel Snow Crash on the table and saying “this is our business plan.” MIT Media Lab Professor Michael Hawley says, “what Arthur C. Clarke was to a previous generation, Neal Stephenson is to ours. Neal is the kind of genius who puts one jarring idea on every page.”

Growing up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois and Ames, Iowa, Stephenson decided he never wanted to work in an occupation that forced him to wear hard shoes. He began college as physics major at Boston University but later entered the geography department because “they were using the coolest computers.” A capable programmer and acclaimed writer, he finds it hard to work unless he’s listening to music on headphones.

Since 1984, he has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and has made a living out of writing novels and the occasional magazine article. He lives in the Seattle area with his family where he is writing his next novel, Quicksilver, with a fountain pen. It is part of a series of historical novels entitled The Baroque Cycle, which will begin publication in October with the first volume, Quicksilver.

Speaker Bio:

Reference: Avon Books, The Hearst Corporation.

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