Re: neal stephenson

Daniel J. Boone (djboone@romea.com)
Fri, 6 Aug 1999 07:03:11 -0800

>Do any of you know how to contact Neal Stephenson? I
>found 18 typos in Cryptonomicon, which he might like to
>fix before it goes to paperback. Have you found any others?
>We could submit them all together as the extropians
>contribution to a truly great book. spike

Try http://www.cryptonomicon.com/ . There's an "inquiries may be forwarded to" email for his publisher. He also put a "Frequently Anticipated Questions" document on the web about the book; it's at http://www.well.com/user/neal/cypherFAQ.html . It lists his email as neal@well.com, but with this warning:


One of the peculiarities of being a novelist is that there is an irremediable numerical imbalance between outgoing and incoming bandwidth. In other words, a novelist writes a single document and sends it out into the world, which is a fairly
low-bandwidth procedure. But if the novel is read by many people who try to send communications back the other way, the
novelist is quickly overwhelmed and becomes unable to function. There is nothing that can be done about this imbalance,
and so I apologize in advance if I do not respond to incoming e-mails. I will not take offense if e-mail is sent to me, but in return I ask that you not take offense if I fail to answer.

Finally, I imagine he is already well aware of the typos. The book has been out for a while and most people take great pleasure in informing authors and editors of errata.