Tonight’s subject at the History Book Club: the Vikings. This is primo stuff for the men who gather once a month in Seattle to gab about some long-gone era or icon, from early Romans to Frederick the Great. You really can’t beat tales of merciless Scandinavian pirate forays and bloody ninth-century clashes. To complement the evening’s topic, one clubber is bringing mead. The dinner, of course, is meat cooked over fire. “Damp will be the weather, yet hot the pyre in my backyard,” read the email invite, written by host Njall Mildew-Beard.
That’s Neal Stephenson, best-selling novelist, cult science fictionist, and literary channeler of the hacker mindset. For Stephenson, whose books mash up past, present, and future—and whose hotly awaited new work imagines an entire planet, with 7,000 years of its own history—the HBC is a way to mix background reading and socializing. “Neal was already doing the research,” says computer […]
Original post by Steven Levy
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