Neal Stephenson Quote
The lumbering bagos and topheavyfour-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his blackmotorcycle.All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking forthe America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together likeovercooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools,portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers,they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without ablueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them,altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain'twhat it used to be.The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouseabuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that fourwheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep movingjust quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twentyyears, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park theirbagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intenselifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It willmelt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to thebottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
The lumbering bagos and topheavyfour-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his blackmotorcycle.All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking forthe America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together likeovercooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools,portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers,they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without ablueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them,altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain'twhat it used to be.The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouseabuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that fourwheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep movingjust quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twentyyears, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park theirbagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intenselifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It willmelt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to thebottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
Related Quotes
About Neal Stephenson
Stephenson's work explores mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes nonfiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired. He has written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.
Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (founded by Jeff Bezos) developing a spacecraft and a space launch system, and also co-founded the Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He was Magic Leap's Chief Futurist from 2014 to 2020.