Stephenson talks smart
This Neal Stephenson interview on Slashdot has a good essay on “commercial” vs. “literary” writers, and a lot more fun stuff.
A while back, I went to a writers’ conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we’d exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me “And where do you teach?” just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another “And which distro do you use?”
I was taken aback. “I don’t teach anywhere,” I said.
Her turn to be taken aback. “Then what do you do?”
“I’m…a writer,” I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.
“Yes, but what do you do?”
I couldn’t think of how to answer the question—-I’d already answered it!
“You can’t make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?” she tried.
“From…being a writer,” I stammered.
I went to see Stephenson a few weeks ago when he was in town hawking The System of the World. It’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t really enjoy public speaking, but gamely accepts it as part of a job he loves. He didn’t read from the book, but answered questions from the audience.
The last question was: “In Snow Crash, you said the three things America did better than anyone are music, software, and pizza delivery. What would you change if you were giving that list today? Have we gotten any better?”1
“Well, you can scratch software off the list,” he said. He paused to consider the matter. “I think I’d better just leave it at that.”
1 Actually, Snow Crash says four things, those three plus movies. But that’s my recollection of how it was asked.
Well, I have to disagree with Stephenson on that score. At least from my own business experience, I've seen what happens when American companies try to outsource their software development. And it isn't pretty. I've seen software projects take three times as long as planned, and deliver software that's so buggy as to be unusable, because the company thought they'd save some money by using cheap overseas code monkeys.
Other people do software cheaper than Americans. But I have yet to see proof that anyone else does it better.
Posted by Jimcat on October 21 2004 05:22
=v= I suspect that Stephenson might be talking about the Microsoftization of the industry. From a consumer perspective, an American corporation is producing most of the world's software and it's pretty horrible. There's good stuff too, though: GNU, Darwin, and much of Linux have Americans all over 'em, though the latter in particular is internationalizing pretty well.
Posted by Jym on October 21 2004 07:39