Neal Stephenson: recommendation

Transcript context

…Do you think readers enjoy reading scenes of torture? Enjoy in a broad sense of the term. I don’t know if enjoy is precisely the right word. One of my favorite writers is Joe Abercrombie, who writes fantasy novels. One of the main characters in his whole cycle of novels is a professional torturer. The trick that Joe manages to achieve is that he depicts this guy doing horrific things, but he ends up being a really interesting character, and you almost end up rooting for him in a strange way. There’s a whole field of what’s called body horror, which some writers like to work with, that’s somehow fascinating to people. We all have bodies. We all know things can go wrong with our bodies. This shows up from time to time in fiction. I think that if you’re going to depict it, the key thing is to do it in a way that doesn’t appeal to the worst parts of the readers’ human nature. Do you like the TV show The Americans?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.