Neal Stephenson: As far as I can tell, that's what it was like. I mean, their records of vivisection experiments are very clear. There's no getting around the fact that they did that kind of stuff, so in a sense the easy thing would be to just reproduce that in the story and show these guys as really cruel vivisectionists. But as usual, the reality is a little more complicated and a little different. If you read the records of the Royal Society and what they were doing in the 1660s, it's clear that at a certain point, some of these people: and I think Hooke was one of them: became a little bit disgusted with themselves and began excusing themselves when one of these vivisections was going to happen. I certainly don't think they turned into hardcore animal rights campaigners, or anything close to that, but I think after a while, they got a little bit sick of it and started to feel conflicted about what they were doing. So I've tried to show that ambivalence and complication in the book.