Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon spam

Someone took an unauthorized online copy of my novel Cryptonomicon, crumbled it up into little pieces, and embedded the pieces into spam messages, presumably as a way of getting past the filtering software. I’m already aware of this, so if you get one of these messages you don’t have to notify me.

A couple of remarks:

1. This is a curious form of literary immortality. E-mail messages are preserved, haphazardly but potentially forever, and so in theory some person in the distant future could reconstruct the novel by gathering together all of these spam messages and stitching them back together.
   

2. On the other hand, e-mail filters learn from their mistakes. When the Cryptonomicon spam was sent out, it must have generated an immune response in the world’s spam filtering systems, inoculating them against my literary style. So this could actually cause my writing to disappear from the Internet.