I got to know of Neal Stephenson from a good friend in the winter of 1999, some months after Cryptonomicon was published. He used to read it during the long boring lecture days at Imperial and over the course of a couple of weeks I got to catch a glimpse of the interweaved stories Stephenson eloquently presented in that book; enough of a glimpse so that when the summer of 2000 came and I was killing time at Heathrow, waiting for my return flight to Athens I picked up a paperback copy myself from an airport bookstore.

Love for Sci-Fi. Aversion to Cyberpunk.

I used to read a lot of literature when I was a child and until my early to mid teens. Yet by 2000 my relationship with literature had largely given its place to countless hours spent with technology, music and other interests; perhaps it was the thirty odd hours of lectures per week plus the constant progress reports, coursework and weekly tests the university required, along with my numerous other interests, friends etc. that relegated reading literature books to the backburner. It certainly was not what it used to be some years earlier. During those years most of my reading was either purely technical or scientific or involved history.
»