An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.

Style
In his earlier novels Stephenson deals heavily in pop culture-laden metaphors and imagery and in quick hip dialogue as well as in extended narrative monologues. Since 1984 Stephenson has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and currently resides in Seattle with his family. A.

His novels have been variously categorized as science fiction historical fiction cyberpunk and "postcyberpunk. He has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin a company (funded by Jeff Bezos) developing a manned sub-orbital launch system and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. " Other labels such as "baroque" often appear.