Anathem by Neal Stephenson – Interview

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Tim Martin peers into the fertile worlds of writer Neal Stephenson and finds that he hasn’t made it all up

We’re sitting in the Mason’s Arms near Marble Arch in London, which still has 18th-century manacles in the beer cellar, where prisoners on the way to be hanged at Tyburn would stop for a last drop before their last drop. Since Neal Stephenson has spent much of the past decade writing a giant trilogy of swashbuckling scientific novels set in Enlightenment Europe, his publishers have scored something of a coup by booking him into the hotel next door. But for now he’s instructing me, over a pint, about longsword-fighting, walking-stick self-defence and an Edwardian martial art that used a bicycle as a weapon. “When I was writing the Baroque Cycle,” he says, “I had to write some swordfighting bits, and it became obvious to me that I was writing rubbish: there’s nothing like writing something down to make it clear that you have no idea what you’re talking about. So I started trying to get more information about rapier-and-dagger fighting, which got me onto the trail of what’s known as historical European martial arts, or western martial arts.

Neal Stephenson: Self-defence with a parasol and turning a bicycle into a weapon – Telegraph.