Happy Birthday: Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, and baroque. His Snow Crash (1992) was included on Time's list of the 100 best novels since 1923.

Stephenson has explored mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science in Cryptonomicon (1999) and The Baroque Cycle (2003-2004). He also writes nonfiction essays about technology in publications such as Wired. He has written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.

Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (founded by Jeff Bezos) developing a spacecraft and a space launch system, and also co-founded the Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. His work for the Long Now Foundation inspired his novel Anathem (2008). He was Magic Leap's chief futurist from 2014 to 2020. A collection of his essays and lectures was published as Some Remarks (2012).

[Only read two by this author (so far) - Snow Crash & The Diamond Age, both of which I enjoyed. I'll see if I can get around to reading some of his total chunksters at some point!]