Free Neal Stephenson Stuff

Neal Stephenson is a great writer who is able to put deep ideas and pretty technical detail in his entertaining stories and essays. He has a lot of works that are available freely on the internet, so you can give his writing a try. If you like these samples, you'll almost definitely like his novels.

Jepe and the Paranoid Chip - A freely available short story involving AI.

Spew - A freely available short story about... hmm... infomation and trending?

THE GREAT SIMOLEON CAPER - A freely available short story about currency.

In the Beginning, there was the Command Line - An essay mostly about Neal Stephenson's experiences and thoughts about computers. This is very long and slightly out of date, but it's still interesting, especially if you don't know much about the early days of computers.

Mother Earth, Mother Board - A cool, long essay that talks about the literally huge wires that connect the world.  It's about Neal Stephenson following FLAG, a global undersea fiber optic cable. He comments a lot about the history and politics around FLAG, as well as about his surroundings.

Snow Crash: A fictional cyberpunk novel about the metaverse, Y.T., and the sword toting Hiro is perhaps the novel Neil Stephenson is best known for.