Neal Stephenson on History, Spycraft, and American-Soviet Parallels

Neal Stephenson

Good to be back.

Neal Stephenson

For me, it’s a continuum. All of my science fiction-y books have had callbacks to historical themes, some more than others. I’ve always enjoyed history. When I’ve had the opportunity to write historical fiction, I’ve greatly enjoyed it. It’s been a while since I went there, and it was like going home almost, being able to go back and work in a historical setting again.

Neal Stephenson

It’s interesting that we’re in a weird situation now, where I think that people’s formal education in history is probably at an all-time low, and yet, there are all of these new ways of learning about history that didn’t exist 50 years ago. There are podcasts and YouTube videos and so on that you can sink your teeth into if you decide that you’re interested in some particular era of history. I think that more and more, what we have now is autodidacts out there who, on their own time, not at school but during their leisure time, have decided to become history geeks.

Neal Stephenson

The name is explained toward the very end of the book. There’s a funny thing about book titles today, which is that they need to be searchable. They need to be uniquely searchable. I’ve had the experience a few times in the last decade or two of proposing a title for a book, and the publisher coming back saying, “That’s an awesome title. We’d love to use it, but it’s not going to work when people begin typing it into a search engine.” Now, the trend is towards finding things that will auto-complete pretty quickly. Polostan is a word that emerges. It’s a joke that one of the characters makes toward the end of the book, but it’s a reference to the fact that the sport of polo enters into the storyline in a few different contexts. On the psychological makeup of spies

Neal Stephenson

I suspect that it begins to screw you up over time. You might go in normal, but it takes a big psychological toll to be trying to maintain multiple identities and always worrying about divulging information. It’s just not a natural way for people to live. From what I can tell, looking at espionage in the era of, say, the Second World War, the best spies were completely unexceptional people. That’s probably still true today. You don’t want James Bond. You don’t want the femme fatale kind of character who’s going to stand out. You want somebody who just disappears into the background. That’s the kind of people that they like to recruit.

Neal Stephenson

I guess so, yes. I think that it’s easiest when you don’t have to lie, when the role that you’re playing is reasonably close to who you really are, I guess, unless you’re a total sociopath. I don’t know.

Neal Stephenson

Yes.

Neal Stephenson

Yes. I don’t know if there’s a Myers-Briggs category for that, but maybe that’s what they look for. I heard a story once that there was a phase — I don’t know if it was in the ’70s or ’80s — where there had been some leaks from compromised people in the American intelligence world. So, they started trying to hire real straight-arrow types who just had no blemishes or perceived blemishes anywhere on their record that could be used to compromise them or blackmail them. They ended up with such pure, innocent characters that the Brits started withholding information because they couldn’t stand having to deal with these small-town naive people who were being sent their way by the Americans. I don’t know if it’s true, but good story.

Neal Stephenson

Yes. That’s where you would go to find such people.

Neal Stephenson

There’s some debate as to how important that leakage really was. At the time, it seems like a horrendous failure to have let that information go. How long would it have taken the Soviets to duplicate that effort based on available information? I don’t think it would have taken a lot longer. Their incentive to build a bomb was too great. Particularly, if you’re willing to settle for the gun-style of a bomb as opposed to the implosion device, that’s a pretty simple object.

Neal Stephenson

Yes.

Neal Stephenson

You mean like trade secrets or proprietary software that’s in AI systems?

Neal Stephenson

Right. The way you get those weights is by running these big training sessions that are incredibly expensive. I haven’t actually thought about it before, but I would imagine that if you’ve spent billions of dollars to get a set of weights, that you’re going to try to hang onto that. On the logistics of faking one’s own death

Neal Stephenson

To fake it or to actually —

Neal Stephenson

Wait, there’s not that many circumstances under which all physical traces of someone can be obliterated. That’s a fairly hard thing to do. It would have been easier a hundred years ago, but now we’ve got cameras everywhere, and we’ve got DNA testing and other ways to prove or to disprove that somebody’s actually dead. I guess it would have to be something like a plane crash into the ocean.

Neal Stephenson

Oh, yes. Okay.

Neal Stephenson

You could parachute out if it was a small plane, not a jet airline full of people, but a single-seater. I guess that might work.

Neal Stephenson

You’re witnessed getting into the plane and taking off, but then there’s no way to recover the evidence for some reason. It’s pretty hard to do. If someone really wanted to, if they were just determined to go and find the . . . You see the efforts that people have gone to to go down to the Titanic. Well, if you can go find that thing and check it out with a submarine, then it’s pretty hard to really find a place that can’t be accessed in that way.

Neal Stephenson

Not on legal pads, but I do write them in longhand, yes. I buy this fancy paper from Italy. I had this idea that if I bought fancy paper, I’d use less of it. I’d be more conservative. I don’t think that worked because even fancy paper doesn’t cost very much, and I like opening the package too much. It comes in a nice package with the wax seal on it.

Neal Stephenson

I can type really fast, so it’s easy to just . . . Keyboard goes burrrrr, where stuff gets put down on the screen almost as fast as ideas are coming into my head, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s valuable for a sentence to be lodged in the buffer for a little while because it’s really easy to improve it or even just to get rid of it while it’s between your ears. As soon as you put it down on the screen, even though it is editable and all that, it takes on a kind of permanence. It requires more effort to go back and fix it. I think that the first-draft quality is better. It’s also just faster to edit on paper. I can just draw a box around a paragraph and put a big X through it or cross out a word or write something in. It just takes longer to do all of those things if you’re screwing around with a mouse or whatever. On Soviet communism

Neal Stephenson

I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the main character in Polostan is a daughter of a Russian dad and an American woman who are both very involved in leftist politics in the late teens, early ’20s. There were a lot of, not just Americans, but Westerners in general, who went to the Soviet Union in those years because they thought that this was an opportunity to build something great. This was obviously before Stalinism and all that, but even then, there were all kinds of bad stuff going on. The Cheka, the precursor of the KGB, was coming into power and doing bad things. If you had the eyes to see it, you could see that this was going in a bad direction, but a lot of those people did not want to see the bad side of things and closed their eyes to it. There’s a great book by Malcolm Muggeridge. I think it’s called Winter in Moscow, which he wrote in, I think, 1933. It’s fictionalized, but it’s a thinly veiled account of these kinds of people in Moscow in the early ’30s. Muggeridge has been there, and he knows bad things are happening. He knows about the man-made famine in Ukraine, probably knows about a lot of other things. He’s depicting these Western expats who just refuse to acknowledge any downside to the revolution. There are plenty of stories like that from that era. I don’t know if it means that we’re deranged. I think we want to see nice things happen in the world. If we’ve decided that there’s a particular political movement or ideology that’s going to make nice things happen, then it’s a little too easy for us to deceive ourselves about the downside of such movements.

Neal Stephenson

Most admiring?

Neal Stephenson

Well, they make really good rockets. If you’re in the rocket business, their ability to make high-performing rocket engines and so on is pretty astounding. The amazing thing that they did in the ’30s, which is the period I’m focusing on, was to yank this backward country forward from the 19th century into the 20th century by building this huge industrial base at breakneck speed. In the course of doing that, they did a lot of terrible things. When I say that it’s admirable, I’m just referring to, “Oh, look, they built a big steel mill.” I’m not taking into account the body count.

Neal Stephenson

Yes, they were pretty serious about equal rights for women. I think that was maybe a big part of why a lot of Western leftists thought it was a great place, because there really were a lot of women getting better education, becoming doctors, getting roles in the military. It was easier to get things like abortions or to get a divorce. So, they did put their money where their mouth was as far as women’s rights were concerned.

Neal Stephenson

I like to find first-person accounts. I like to look at pictures to the iconography of the Soviet Union. There are various people who went there in the ’20s and ’30s and wrote memoirs, Americans who wrote memoirs describing their experiences there. And because they were written at the time before people knew about Stalinism and the excesses of Stalinism, it’s written without a full premonition of how bad things were going to get. In particular, there’s an account of an American engineer who went and worked at this huge steel mill at Magnitogorsk in the ’30s and helped them build that. He’s got a memoir telling about just his day-to-day experiences of working with these people, the good and the bad mixed together.

Neal Stephenson

Man, I don’t know if I’ve ever read a single word of Soviet fiction.

Neal Stephenson

Yes. I’m sure I know that one.

Neal Stephenson

Oh, thanks. Thanks. I was just listening to The Rest Is History podcast about the Kennedy assassination, and they do a segment on the Oswald stint in the Soviet Union. DeLillo writes about it too. But no, I’m sure it exists, but I’m too poorly read to know about it.

Neal Stephenson

Really?

Neal Stephenson

Yes, if I could go safely, it would be interesting to see, for sure. But obviously, I’m not setting foot in Russia anytime soon. The story, for those who don’t know it, is that Stalin said, “I want the world’s biggest steel mill,” and at the time, it was Gary, Indiana. So they just got the numbers on Gary, Indiana, and increased them by, I don’t know, 10 percent, and started working on this huge steel mill in this place called Magnitogorsk, which means magnetic mountain, which is in the Urals out in the middle of nowhere and called magnetic mountain because it’s an incredibly rich load of iron ore. In a pretty short time, they built this giant steel-mill complex, which still exists, and the city has grown up around it. I imagine that a lot of what made it interesting in 1933 is probably gone now. But I did go to Volgograd once, which got a few things in common with Magnitogorsk, I guess, the former Stalingrad.

Neal Stephenson

Yes, I think it does. I’ve actually got one of my characters in the book — he talks about this a little bit because, in both cases, there’s one part of the country — in the United States, it’s basically everything from Chicago to the Atlantic — which is densely populated and urbanized and lots of industry. In the Soviet Union, obviously, that’s the western part of the country. Then there’s this huge hinterland which is mostly empty. It’s got indigenous people. It’s got a history of those people being poorly treated by the cosmopolitan, industrialized dominant culture, and it’s a vast open resource-extraction zone to feed the industrial beast. So, it’s got that in common. I do think that there are some ways in which those two countries understood each other at the time. I think there was some of that thinking when Americans would come and visit and try to get involved in building the Soviet Union.

Neal Stephenson

At the same time, idealizing the wide-open spaces, the wilderness, the idea of the frontier. It’s both of those things going at once.

Neal Stephenson

Sure. On augmented reality

Neal Stephenson

I think we got somewhere with Magic Leap a few years ago. I think these products are all doing similar things. The only thing I am interested in hearing about is how many billions of dollars these companies are putting into the development of content to run on these devices, because nobody’s going to use them or want them unless there’s a reason to put them on, a reason to use them. Making content for an augmented reality device is very difficult. You take ordinary game development — that’s no picnic in and of itself. That requires a lot of smart people with specialized skill sets. VR is a whole step above that in terms of its level of difficulty, and AR is way beyond VR because there are so many other factors that you have to take into account in order to make content that actually takes advantage of what AR can do. My general sense is that the kinds of people who invest in building this hardware — they’re very comfortable building hardware. They’re not comfortable investing in content plays, and they have this mentality of, if we build it, they will come. If we provide the hardware, then creators are just going to somehow jump out of the woodwork and build cool applications that run on this hardware. I think that Magic Leap did a really good job of supporting a bunch of different creative teams making content for that device, but they still could have used more. So far, both of those companies have got programs to try to encourage people to build content, but I think they’re still relying on other investors too much to somehow come in and start writing checks and supporting developers. It takes years and millions and millions of dollars to make anything at all that’s worth seeing on one of these. So, where do you find the investors willing to write those checks?

Neal Stephenson

The thing is, Tyler, that those two applications that you just described are things that we were talking about 10 years ago at Magic Leap, and they were old ideas then. I’m not cracking on you for having old ideas. But I’m just saying, what is it about this space, that with probably hundreds of billions by this point that have been poured into building these systems and the zillions of person-years, that we’re still talking about the party name-finder application?

Neal Stephenson

It can work, and it does work, and it’s very promising. I’m working on a project with that right now, but there’s no obvious organic connection between that and AR particularly. If I want to build an application that uses LLMs or any other kind of cool technology that’s come along, again, I’ve got to think about the numbers. I’ve got to think about, okay, I’m going to have to employ X number of programmers for X years. Here’s how much it’s going to cost. The investors supporting this project are going to want to get paid back. Now, how many people own AR headsets? Okay, like a few thousand? I don’t know. Is that tiny group of people going to actually generate enough revenue that the investors who bankrolled this whole project are going to get paid back? Well, regardless of what your answer is to that question, it’s definitely the case that there are billions of people — literally billions with a b — who have access to phones, pads, laptops, flat screen technology. That market is so much more enormous that the economic considerations force you, as a developer, to make whatever you’re making — you got to make it run on phones and iPads and all of that stuff. If you do that, then you might also have the same thing ported to an AR device, but the market and the revenue that you get out of your application is going to be completely dominated by the version of it that runs on ordinary flat-screen devices.

Neal Stephenson

Group chats like Discord or Slack — that kind of thing?

Neal Stephenson

It’s hard to feel worse about social media. I do think that anything that gets you out of the glare of the big social media platforms and that de-risks it — if you have the feeling that you’re talking amongst friends, among people that you know, you don’t have to be as guarded. You don’t have to spend as much time fending off bots and dealing with just complete asinine bullshit that comes at you so thick and fast on Twitter or other kind of open platforms.

Neal Stephenson

People don’t seem to feel that it matters. I may have my own opinions, but people are just amazingly willing to put devices in their homes, to keep them on 24/7 surveillance, to listen to every sound that they make and track them with cameras, and they’re on the internet all the time. I guess we haven’t yet seen a huge disaster resulting from that. We haven’t yet seen a . . . Well, I don’t know, I guess I’m giving a Western perspective here, but it does seem that we got a couple of decades’ head start before the authoritarian, totalitarian countries of the world figured out how to make use of the internet. The internet was open everywhere, and now it’s not. Now, China and Russia and North Korea have ways of walling off their internet and controlling what goes in and out of the country information-wise. In like manner, they’re making use of the surveillance capabilities of technology that we’ve naively provided them with. I think there have been bad consequences, obviously, in those countries for dissidents or anybody who runs afoul of the authorities. If that stuff is happening here, I guess I haven’t heard about it yet. It doesn’t seem to matter yet.

Neal Stephenson

You probably write something that’s reasonably balanced in terms of pros and cons and that is rooted in some kind of basic understanding of the technology, and then let the chips fall where they may. The most recent book of that type that I’ve written was Termination Shock, which is about solar-radiation management, solar geoengineering. I feel like I went to some effort to present a balanced approach there and to present arguments on both sides and to show why some people would think it was great and other people would hate it. My feeling is that if I do that, then no one can say I’m presenting a propagandistic, one-sided view of the issue, and people are then free to make up their own minds as to what position they want to take. On AI

Neal Stephenson

Something close to that has probably happened already. I’m sure it’s happened. So, your question boils down to a critical judgment as to quality. My position on this, which I put out in a Substack a couple of weeks ago, is that the real purpose of art and the reason we like art is because it exposes us to a very dense package of micro decisions that have been made by the artist. As such, we’re engaged in a communion with that artist. What makes it interesting is that connection. It may be to a living writer, or it may be to a sculptor who died 2,500 years ago, but in either case, we’re making a human-to-human connection. If we know that we’re reading something or experiencing a work of art that was just generated by an algorithm, then that element of human connection isn’t there anymore. Furthermore, we know that for every one such book or image or whatever, a million more could be generated just by launching a Python script, basically. Familiarity, the law of supply and demand takes over at that point. If there’s an infinite supply of this stuff, then its value drops to zero. Even if such a book reads pretty well as a novel, I don’t think people are going to be interested in it.

Neal Stephenson

That’s an interesting thought experiment. It’s trying to craft a lie and claim that there was a human who wrote it and create a fake fan club or whatever. I guess that’s possible. I don’t know. Personally, I’m just not interested in it. I have too many books on my shelf that I haven’t read yet that were written by humans.

Neal Stephenson

They don’t yet seem to have an understanding of spatial relations and just basic logical relationships that exist between things in the real world. There are a million examples of this on the internet. There are people on Twitter who delight in posting the results. Ask an LLM to do an arithmetic problem, and it’ll give you the wrong answer in a very convincing and confident way. They don’t know their own limitations in that sense. The LLM should say, “Oh, that looks like a math problem, and I suck at math. I can’t give you the right answer. You should get your calculator out.” But they don’t do that. They just confidently give you the wrong answer.

Neal Stephenson

We have a terminology issue to talk about here, which is LLMs — I don’t think that an LLM, per se, is the right architecture to use to solve that problem. I’m sure that you can train some kind of AI on that kind of dataset. And in fact, we know that this is happening with, say, self-driving cars, where you can use, let’s say, a game engine to create an imaginary city with imaginary roads, and then you can generate the videos from the car’s point of view of what it would look like to drive around that city. You can generate that video dataset way more cheaply and rapidly than if you had to physically go out in a car with a camera on it and drive around in the car. You can definitely feed huge amounts of synthetic data to an AI system and help it learn that way. It’s a different brain from a large language model, per se.

Neal Stephenson

I think there’s a scattershot phenomenon going on, where a science fiction book might include a large number of hypothetical inventions, and the ones that are in there might be described somewhat vaguely. A bunch of those might never get realized, but people very generously tend to forget about those. They give the writer, the novelist, a free pass, and they only take into account the ones that seem to have come true. There’s also some generosity there in that the description of the invention might be a little wishy-washy, a little vague. Then later on, when a somewhat similar real invention gets made, someone’s nice enough to say that the science fiction writer invented this.

Neal Stephenson

There are a bunch of different elements that have to come together to make something that would work like the primer in The Diamond Age, and you just described one of them, which we can now get with LLMs. Another part of it is, how do you create that special relationship between the learner and the object, the book? Somehow, it’s just not as compelling to go on the internet and pull up a large language model and ask it to teach you something. You can do it, for sure, but you don’t see a lot of people that I know of using it that way. What you need is to productize that, I think, to use a really crass word. Package it in a way that a kid or somebody could pick up an object and open it to the next page and see what they needed to see that day, tailored for their learning style. I don’t know if people are working on that or not. Probably they’re working on it.

Neal Stephenson

Sure. That sounds like a promising place to begin a science fiction novel, Tyler. You should work on that. I like it. I don’t know how important IQ really is. To your earlier question about, are we all depraved? Lots of people with high IQs fell for ridiculous bullshit during the 20th century and are falling for it today. Getting access to even more IQ in a pocket or whatever doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere in dealing with practical, real-world decision-making.

Neal Stephenson

Kindness sounds great.

Neal Stephenson

Yes. A lot of the people — going back to our earlier topic — who were involved in terrible political movements in the 20th century and now, probably did so in the belief that they were ultimately being kind, that they were trying to improve the world somehow. There’s a level of self-deception that can creep in that can make kind people, paradoxically, very dangerous.

Neal Stephenson

I don’t know if enjoy is precisely the right word. One of my favorite writers is Joe Abercrombie, who writes fantasy novels. One of the main characters in his whole cycle of novels is a professional torturer. The trick that Joe manages to achieve is that he depicts this guy doing horrific things, but he ends up being a really interesting character, and you almost end up rooting for him in a strange way. There’s a whole field of what’s called body horror, which some writers like to work with, that’s somehow fascinating to people. We all have bodies. We all know things can go wrong with our bodies. This shows up from time to time in fiction. I think that if you’re going to depict it, the key thing is to do it in a way that doesn’t appeal to the worst parts of the readers’ human nature.

Neal Stephenson

Haven’t seen it.

Neal Stephenson

Oh, okay. Haven’t seen it.

Neal Stephenson

Well, that’s why, Tyler, I vaguely know what it’s about. If I’m working on a project of my own, I actively avoid trying to see other fictional treatments of the same or similar subject matter.

Neal Stephenson

I did.

Neal Stephenson

I would have liked to see more about making the bomb and less about his bureaucratic troubles getting his security clearance renewed. I guess I see why that makes for us a certain kind of drama that plays well on screen, but it’s not what I went there for.

Neal Stephenson

Yes. You can guess from the name of the series that it’s going to relate to the bomb, eventually. What I’ve became aware of, starting about 10 years ago, is that in the 10 years or so leading up to the building of the first atomic bomb, there were all kinds of really interesting stuff going on in the world of physics. The neutron wasn’t even discovered until 1932. Within living memory, there were all kinds of physics experiments underway during the 1930s, where people like Fermi and the Curies, Compton, Millikan, Rutherford, Chadwick were solving the mysteries of pursuing this detective story of how does the universe work, using very comparatively simple experiments. Just deductive reasoning. Trailing just on the coattails of that, you’ve got people in the world of military, the government, and so on beginning to understand that this is going to be really important. They don’t necessarily know that the bomb is going to be possible that early, but they know it’s important. And so all kinds of weird stuff begins to happen that is understood only by a few people in the world, but people who are in the know understand that it’s really important. To me, there’s all kinds of fodder in that situation for storytelling, for novel writing. This one really gets going in about 1932. Polostan — it ends in early 1934. It features one of the main characters of the series, a young woman who I mentioned before, who is half-Russian, half-American. The next book in the series is going to focus more on a different character who’s introduced in this book, but we don’t see much of him. Then there’s a third book planned that’ll be based around a different character, and eventually, all this comes together in the 1940s. Along the way, we see the development of what’s going on in the world of physics, but we also see what’s happening in parallel with that, with the rise of the Nazis and Stalinism, the Spanish Civil War, everything else that’s happening in the world during that decade.

Neal Stephenson

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on your program again.