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NS Neal Stephenson Neal Stephenson Author of Snow Crash and other books.

“My theory is that the big bang of this was the last shot of Planet of the Apes, where you see the Statue of Liberty, it's fallen over… it's a super powerful image, but a very inexpensive one, right? So, I mean, they got a model of the Statue of Liberty and they kicked it over and threw some dirt on it… Whereas if you're trying to show a more positive kind of future, you know, you do have to do some pretty hard imagining.”

Core Memory · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“My theory is that the big bang of this was the last shot of Planet of the Apes, where you see the Statue of Liberty, it's fallen over… it's a super powerful image, but a very inexpensive one, right? So, I mean, they got a model of the Statue of Liberty and they kicked it over and threw some dirt on it… Whereas if you're trying to show a more positive kind of future, you know, you do have to do some pretty hard imagining.” — Neal Stephenson, Core Memory

Context

Stephenson's theory of why films and TV default to dystopia: a ruined future is cheap to film, while a hopeful one takes real imaginative work. It came up in a discussion of efforts to get more optimistic science fiction made.

Listen to the episode → More from Neal Stephenson → More Startups & Venture quotes →

Transcript

Core Memory
Neal Stephenson

…or series of little side projects that doesn't, you know, I mean, it could have some kind of constructive effect. It could, you know, maybe help some writers or filmmakers, you know, get some traction somewhere. And, you know, like you say, a lot of people in the tech world are keen on the idea. So

Speaker 3

clearly make the worst films, though.

Neal Stephenson

Yeah. Well, so, I mean, this is a kind of hobby horse of mine for a long time, but I do think that my theory is that the big bang of this was the last shot of Planet of the Apes, where you see the Statue of Liberty, it's fallen over, you know, and it's a super powerful image, but a very inexpensive one, right? So, I mean, they got a model of the Statue of Liberty and they kicked it over and threw some dirt on it. And, you know, so that was a really cheap and easy way to make a very powerful image. And so you kind of see this in a lot of post-apocalyptic dystopian movies. You see examples where they've just taken something that exists today and sort of, you know, bang it around and throw some dirt on it. And, you know, it looks cool. And it doesn't require a big imaginative investment. Okay. Whereas if…

Ashlee Vance

Okay. Okay. So they have to try harder,

Speaker 3

be more creative.

Neal Stephenson

Yeah, I think so.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Core Memory

“I think we are embodied creatures, and I think that bypassing the body, I just don't understand it. I write with a fountain pen on paper. The full engagement of the body, not just the abstract stuff up here, but the motor cortex and down the arm to the hand. That is all part of thinking to me. It's not that there's thinking, which is this separate thing up here, and then this chunk of meat attached to it that's kind of dumb and stupid.” — Neal Stephenson, Core Memory “I follow the teachers' subreddit and a bunch of other channels of information where actual teachers and actual classrooms talk about the problems they face, none of which can be solved by giving them a piece of technology. Okay, I mean, that is at the bottom of their list in terms of what they actually want.” — Neal Stephenson, Core Memory