Neal Stephenson has also written assorted short stories (The Great Simoleon Caper and Spew and non-fiction articles (Mother Earth Mother Board and In the Kingdom of Mao Bell), and recently gave an interesting speech at the CFP conference about the privacy threat from companies and private organization being larger than any 'Big Brother' government threat. From seeing him at a book reading, a Debian user who groans jokingly at the mention of Slashdot. Is currently working on the sequel to Cryptonomicon, as the book couldn't take any more plot lines. Roughly quoting him, "Once the manuscript gets about as deep as it is long the book binding machines stop working." One plot line involves suicidal personality chips grown by evolutionary software techniques and is set in the near future, and the other one is anyone's guess. He signed my penguin!