Though Neal Stephenson has authored just a handful of books, his science-fiction thrillers that blend high-tech intrigue with sly humor have made him one of the most successful new authors in the genre. Called "the hacker Hemingway" and compared even to renegade indie filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, Stephenson enjoyed a significant career breakthrough when his 1999 title, Cryptonomicon, made it to the New York Times bestseller list.

Born in 1959, Stephenson grew up in the college-campus towns of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and Ames, Iowa. A career in the sciences seemed pre-ordained--his father was a professor of electrical engineering, his mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, and even his grandfather had been a physics professor. This last field was Stephenson's original major when he began at Boston University in the late 1970s, but he discovered that the geography department at the college had far more advanced computers. Already fascinated by emerging information technology...