Neal Stephenson speaks clever

Not sure how many of you will care about this, but since this blog is really for me anyway...

This is a video of SF writer Neal Stephenson giving a talk last May at Gresham College in London. His subject is whether or not genre distinctions really matter anymore, or if the conventions of genre fiction have been embraced by the mainstream (or "mundane" as Stephenson calls it) and rendered the distinction mute. This is a subject near and dear to my heart and, while I find his delivery a bit plodding, to topic and ideas discussed are fantastic.

By the way, Stephenson's next novel, Anathem, will be out in September. It's already on my must-read list.