The longest piece is "Mother Earth, Mother Board," which looks at the process of laying a cable (specifically the FLAG (Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe) cable, from England to Japan. The essay addresses specific "on the ground" issues, like the people and technology involved in the underground path across Thailand, as well as undersea issues, like the math involved in determining a minimum "slack" course across the ocean bottom. It also looks at the business complexities of the project -- and at the historical background of undersea cables, particular the mid 19th Century rivalry between Wildman Whitehouse and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). Fascinating stuff, well worth the nearly 50,000 words devoted to it. The shortest piece is all of 34 words, "the first sentence of a thriller that I will never complete"... for obvious reasons, as it's set in J.R.R. Tolkien's Shire.

The other two short stories are complete, and both are enjoyable enough if not brilliant -- Stephenson's introduction confesses to a weakness as a short fiction writer after all. "Spew" is about a man who gets a job as a "patrolman on the information highway," in this case sort of a VR-enhanced web (in a story from 1994); while "The Great Simoleon Caper" concerns a plot to create a new currency. Both stories fit this nonfiction collection well, in that much of their value lies with their engagement with futuristic tech/economics, as opposed to their story-telling strength.

Also here is a set of extracts from one of his other famous very long essays, "In the Kingdom of Mao Bell." (His third famous long essay, In the Beginning was the Command Line, has already been published as a separate book.) "Metaphysics in the Royal Society 1715-2010" takes a quite different than usual look at some aspects of the rivalry between Newton and Leibniz, in particular examining some of Leibniz's stranger ideas. Ideas that, Stephenson argues, are more interesting and, in some ways, contemporary than people credit. This is the sort of thing that makes books like these really worthwhile -- telling me about something I not only didn't know anything about, but didn't know was even there TO know anything about. (By contrast, I knew there were undersea cables like FLAG, even though I certainly learned a lot in "Mother Earth, Mother Board" that I had never known.)

The book also includes a series of more miscellaneaous pieces -- interviews and lectures and memoirish stuff and occasional writing, as well as a few more speculative pieces. It is a comprehensively interesting collection, a great representation of Stephenson's writerly voice and of his interests and enthusiasms. Definitely worth reading.