Neal Stephenson: 7.9.2003

NS: Obviously, the result here is my interpretation of these characters. It's a work of fiction, which shouldn't be confused with history. But I've tried to make the essence of these characters faithful to what appears in the historical records. ?

HC: How about characters like Jack Shaftoe and Eliza? Were they based on anybody you came across in your reading?

NS: They were entirely made up, but based on types that seem to have existed at that time. There was apparently a huge problem all over the place with what we would today call homeless people. They're called Vagabonds in the book. Sometimes there were more of them, and sometimes there were fewer of them, depending on what was going on in the way of wars or economic upheavals. There were encampments of people like this all over Christendom, as far as I can tell, and sometimes they would get together and rove around in big groups scaring the hell out of the citizenry.

That's a pretty well-attested type of person who existed back then, and Jack is my attempt to build the story of one such Vagabond. As for Eliza, she is someone who began life as a slave of the Barbary Corsairs, which may seem kind of outlandish to us now. But it is a fact that well into the 18th century the Barbary states in North Africa were routinely sending raiding parties up into Europe to snatch people off of beaches and take them back into slavery. Or they were overhauling ships on the high seas, seizing the cargo, and enslaving or taking hostage the people they found on those ships. So again, in the case of Eliza, I'm taking that whole class of people and trying to build the story of one individual.

HC: Jack Shaftoe has an interesting disability, the nature of which makes him a perfect companion for Eliza, considering her personal history as a slave. These two have some of the most moving scenes in the book together. Are they your two favorite characters?

NS: Well, without getting into details, the whole conceit of that relationship is that they have this bond--it's a complementary relationship that works. Even when they disagree with each other, even when they hate each other for one reason or another, there's this underlying bond between them that ties them together. I think that's true of a lot of successful relationships.

I do like those two quite a bit, and that probably comes through in the book. There's also a lot to be said for some of the other characters. I like Robert Hooke, who's a real person. I like Daniel Waterhouse, who's fictitious. And some of the people on Leibniz's end of the story are also quite fascinating individuals. Sophie, the electress of Hanover, who was Leibniz's patron, appears to have been a really fascinating and cool woman.

HC: Just by naming so many characters, you've offered a clue about how vast this story is, and this is just the first third of the cycle. How did you organize your materials to work on this massive project?

NS: For every book I have worked on, not only is the book different (obviously), with different characters, different story, but the system by which I write it is different, too. I always seem to have to invent a new system for writing each book. In this case I ran through a bunch of them, because I knew I had this big data management problem. So, I started with a bunch of notebooks, just composition books, in which I would write notes down in chronological order as I read a particular book, or what have you.

Those are always there, and I can go back to them and look stuff up even when it's otherwise lost. Then, I've got timelines and timetables showing what happens when in the story. I've spent a while monkeying around with three ring binders, in which I glue pages here and there trying to figure out how to sequence things. It's a big mess. It's a big pile of stationery.