Thread by @nealstephenson

In June I mentioned that there would be a few announcements coming up pertaining to the 30th anniversary of the publication of Snow Crash. This is probably the last of those. For almost a year, I've been working with @Sothebys on an auction of Snow Crash-related items.

Even before then, I was collaborating with @WetaWorkshop on what we were calling Sword One: the first in a series of real+digital artifacts from the fictional universe of Snow Crash.

The sword is now done. It's at Sotheby's in New York where it will go on display on 1 March, with the auction closing on 6 March. It's insanely beautiful, intricate, and exquisitely crafted. Well worth a look if you are there. This might be the last time it's displayed in public.

@Sothebys and @WetaWorkshop will be releasing more details about this and the other items in coming days. Bidding starts on 27 Feb. There's a teaser page up already, but in coming days they'll release a lot more detail.
sothebys.com/en/buy/auction…

As I explained 30+ years ago in the Acknowledgments, the precursor to SC was a graphic novel project called Dioxin Posse: a collaboration between me (writer/coder) and Tony Sheeder (artist).

We intended to make heavy use of then-novel computer graphics tech to generate the artwork. This plunged me deep into graphics programming for a couple of years, which informed Snow Crash and early ideas about the Metaverse.

The only surviving relics of that project are some 35 mm slides that we took of the paste-ups that Tony laboriously assembled, working with images produced on a color dot matrix printer. These will be part of the auction.

The first time Tony ever picked up a computer mouse was in 1988 when I showed him MacPaint. He drew a cartoon face, which I loved and was careful to save onto a floppy. We named him Elmo and he became the project's icon.

More recently Tony has been working with @sterlingcrispin to produce a limited run of Elmo-based generative art images. These will be sold as NFTs through @Sothebysverse .

There's a leather jacket with Elmo stenciled on the back. We used this as a costume when shooting some photographs of the character who eventually became Y.T.

Two versions of the book's manuscript are included in the auction: the first version I felt comfortable sharing with my agent, and the final, heavily edited and annotated copy used for actual typesetting.

If any of this interests you, your best bet is to follow the auction page at Sotheby's (already linked above, but I'll do it again here) which will become a clearinghouse for additional detail and updates as this goes on.
sothebys.com/en/buy/auction…