Author Bios
Neal Stephenson
• Birth—October 31, 1959
• Raised—Champaign-Urbana, Illinois; Ames, Iowa, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston University
• Awards—2 Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer and game designer known for his works of science fiction, historical fiction, cyber- and postcyber-punk.
Stephenson's work explores subjects such as mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired.
Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (funded by Jeff Bezos) developing a manned sub-orbital launch system, and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He is currently Magic Leap's Chief Futurist.
Background
Born in Fort Meade, Maryland, Stephenson came from a family of engineers and scientists; his father was a professor of electrical engineering while his paternal grandfather was a physics professor. His mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, and her father was a biochemistry professor.
Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1960 and then to Ames, Iowa, in 1966 where he graduated from high school in 1977.
He went on to stydy at Boston University, first specializing in physics, then switching to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe. He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in geography and a minor in physics.
In 1984, Stephenson published his first novel, The Big U — a satirical take on life at American Megaversity, a vast, bland and alienating research university beset by chaotic riots. His breakthrough novel came in 1992 with Snow Crash, a comic novel in the late cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk tradition. It was was the first of Stephenson's epic science fiction novels.
Successive novels deal with futurism, technology, World War II cryptology, metaphysics, ancient Greek philosophy, and international crime/terrorism (a thriller). He has also writen historical fiction, the Baroque Cycle — a series of eight books set in the 17th and 18th centuries, one of which won the 2005 Prometheus Award.
In May 2010, the Subutai Corporation, of which Stephenson was named chairman, announced the production of an experimental multimedia fiction project called The Mongoliad, which centered around a narrative written by Stephenson and other speculative fiction authors, including Nicole Galland (see below).
In 2012, Stephenson launched a Kickstarter campaign for CLANG, a realistic sword fighting fantasy game. The concept of the game was to use motion control to provide an immersive experience. The campaign's funding goal of $500,000 was reached by the target date of July 9, 2012 on Kickstarter, but the project ran out of money and finally closed down in 2014.
Seveneves, a science fiction novel, came out in 2015, and plans have been announced to adapt it for the screen. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/12/2017 .)
Nicole Galland
• Birth—ca. 1965
• Raised—West Tisbury (Martha's Vineyard), Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Currently—lives on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts
Nicole Galland is an American novelist, first known for her historical fiction. Then, in 2017 she switched genres to publish a near-future thriller, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., with Neal Stephenson. She has also published a contemporary comic novel, Stepdog, and using the pseudonym E.D. de Birmingham, she wrote Book Five of the Mongoloid Cycle. Mongoloid, a historical-epic-fantasy, is a collaborative effort of several speculative writers, including Neal Stephenson (see above.)
Background
Galland was born in New York, but grew up in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, a farming community on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where her maternal family has roots going back to the 18th century. Her mother works as a nurse and her stepfather, a Viet Nam vet, was a Physician’s Assistant at Martha’s Vineyard only hospital.
She studied theater and earned a degree at Harvard in Comparative Religion with a focus in Buddhism. Although she received a full fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in Drama at the University of California at Berkeley, she withdrew following a violent and bizarre assault at gunpoint. Traumatized by the encounter, she would eventually use it as fodder in her writing.
Moving back and forth between east and west coasts, and a stint on the Mediterranean, Galland spent her 20s and 30s working in theater, teaching, editing and juggling various odd jobs. This included co-founding a teen theater company in California that debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. She once described her eclectic life as existing at the whim of serendipity.
Her screenplay, The Winter Population, won an award in 1998 but has yet to be produced. When her first novel, The Fool’s Tale, was published in 2005, she left her position as Literary Manager/Dramaturge at Berkeley Repertory Theatre to write full-time. While at Berkeley Rep she had written Revenge of the Rose, her second novel, and her third, Crossed: A Tale of the Fourth Crusade, was written over a 2-year period during which she essentially lived out of a backpack.
Having resided in the California Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City for years, Galland returned to Martha's Vineyard to live full-time. She is married to actor Billy Meleady.
In addition to her novels, Galland has written for Salon.com and several Vineyard-based publications, including the Vineyard Gazette, Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, and Edible Vineyard, of which she is a contributing editor
Galland has been involved in Vineyard theater, working at the Vineyard Playhouse and with ArtFarm Enterprises. She is co-founder, with Chelsea McCarthy, of Shakespeare for the Masses, an off-season series presenting irreverent adaptations Shakespeare’s plays on the Vineyard. And finally, a point of trivia, she appears in the CD-ROM Star Wars: Rebel Assault II as Ina Rece. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/12/2017.)