# Neal Stephenson Neal Stephenson (b. 1959) is an American writer whose novels supplied Silicon Valley with both a foundational vocabulary and, in one case, a literal founding employee. He is the rare SF author who crossed fully into the industry he wrote about. ## Snow Crash and the metaverse *Snow Crash* (1992) coined the word **metaverse** — the immersive, networked virtual world its sword-wielding hacker protagonist inhabits — and popularized **avatar** as the term for a user's virtual body. (Stephenson did not coin "avatar"; Richard Garriott's *Ultima IV* (1985) and Lucasfilm's *Habitat* (1986) used it first, a debt Stephenson has acknowledged.) The novel is a satire of a privatized, hyper-corporate, government-collapsed America — a dystopia, not a brochure — which makes its adoption as a product roadmap deeply ironic. His later *The Diamond Age* (1995) and the *Baroque Cycle* extended his reputation for technically dense, idea-rich fiction. ## Blue Origin employee #1 Stephenson is the single most literal SF-to-tech link in this vault: he was **the first employee of [[Jeff Bezos]]'s [[Blue Origin]]**, joining in 1999 after he and Bezos watched the film *October Sky* together. As a Member of Technical Staff he did hands-on work and helped evaluate alternative propulsion concepts, later staying on as a part-time advisor. The novelist who named the metaverse helped start a rocket company. ## Influence on the tech elite When [[Mark Zuckerberg]] renamed Facebook "Meta" around a metaverse vision, he was building on Stephenson's coinage — though notably without citing the book by name and while distancing the project from its dystopia. Stephenson says he has "never had any communication with Zuckerberg" and is skeptical of Meta's hardware-first approach. *Snow Crash* also appears on tech reading lists as a kind of founding scripture for virtual worlds. See [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]]. ## See also - [[Snow Crash]] — the novel that named the metaverse - [[Blue Origin]] — where he was employee #1 - [[William Gibson]] — the other foundational cyberpunk - [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]] — the hub