Neal Stephenson: A person writing a historical-swashbuckler-potboiler-epic in 2003 can't pretend that this is the first such book that's ever been written. People have been writing such books for hundreds of years. The classic example would be the works of Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo , The Three Musketeers , and so on. If you go back and look at those books, you can see that they are partly historically correct, or as close as one can come to that. But they are also partly a product of their times. When you read a Victorian swashbuckler novel set 200 years earlier, you can tell that it's a Victorian novel. It's got all this stuff in there that only Victorians would have put in. The literary style is Victorian, the diction is Victorian. And that's true, mutatis mutandis, for any historical novel written in any period.