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Of all the books I’ve borrowed, there’s one book that holds a seminal place within my personal canon. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has not only made me friends (there’s something about the idea of a city franchise that’s an instant bonder with new acquaintances) but it actually got me my first job (the magazine was doing a story on Second Life, a virtual reality program inspired by the cyberpunk novel). The book was slow to start and the ending was close to nonsensical, but everything in the middle was nothing short of genius and I would be lying if I denied that Stephenson holds a special place in my heart.

Above is a video of Stephenson giving a lecture on literary genres at Gresham College in London last May. It’s a pretty interesting topic and if you’re a “SF kind of person” you will get a kick out of Stephenson’s referral to anything not of the SF world as the “mundane”.

[Neal Stephenson Lecture on Genres]
(via BoingBoing via Beyond the Beyond)