Publication Order of Baroque Cycle Books
| Quicksilver | 2003 |
| The Confusion | 2004 |
| The System of the World | 2004 |
Publication Order of Mongoliad Books
| The Mongoliad: Book One (With: Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, Cooper Moo, Mark Teppo) | 2012 |
| The Mongoliad: Book Two (With: Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, Cooper Moo, Mark Teppo) | 2012 |
| The Mongoliad: Book Three (With: Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, Cooper Moo, Mark Teppo) | 2013 |
Publication Order of Bomb Light Books
| Polostan | 2024 |
| D: Heavy Water | 2026 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Big U | 1984 |
| Zodiac | 1988 |
| Snow Crash | 1992 |
| Interface (With: J. Frederick George) | 1994 |
| The Diamond Age | 1995 |
| The Cobweb (With: J. Frederick George) | 1996 |
| Cryptonomicon | 1999 |
| Anathem | 2008 |
| Reamde | 2011 |
| Seveneves | 2015 |
| The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (With: Nicole Galland) | 2017 |
| Fall; or, Dodge in Hell | 2019 |
| Termination Shock | 2021 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| In the Beginning... Was the Command Line | 1999 |
| Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing | 2012 |
About Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson is an American writer of speculative fiction, born on 31 October 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland. His novels have been classed as science fiction, historical fiction and cyberpunk, and he is best known for “Snow Crash”, “Cryptonomicon” and the three volumes of The Baroque Cycle.
Stephenson comes from a family of engineers and scientists. His father is a professor of electrical engineering and his mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory. The family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1960 and to Ames, Iowa, in 1966. He studied at Boston University, starting in physics and switching to geography, and graduated in 1981. Since 1984 he has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest.
His first novel, “The Big U” (1984), is a satire of life at a huge American university, and “Zodiac” (1988) is a thriller about a radical environmentalist. Neither drew much attention at the time. The breakthrough came in 1992 with “Snow Crash”, the novel in which he coined the term Metaverse. “The Diamond Age” (1995) won the Hugo and Locus awards. During the same years he wrote two political thrillers, “Interface” and “The Cobweb”, with his uncle George Jewsbury under the shared pen name Stephen Bury.
“Cryptonomicon” (1999) moves between Second World War codebreaking and a modern attempt to set up a data haven. The Baroque Cycle, set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is in some respects a prequel to it: “Quicksilver” won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and “The System of the World” won the Prometheus Award. “Anathem” (2008) took the Locus Award. Later novels include “Reamde”, “Seveneves”, “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell” and “Termination Shock”, a climate novel about solar geoengineering. He also co-wrote “The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.” with Nicole Galland and the first three Mongoliad books with a team of authors.
Away from fiction, Stephenson worked for Jeff Bezos’s spaceflight company Blue Origin and was chief futurist at Magic Leap from 2014 to 2020. His most recent novel is “Polostan” (2024), a spy story that follows Dawn Rae between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. It opens the Bomb Light series, and his website lists the second volume, “D: Heavy Water”, for 13 October 2026.
Photo: Phil Konstantin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).