The railways came to Aylesbury in 1839 when the Aylesbury Railway opened from Cheddington on Robert Stephenson's London and Birmingham Railway.

Stephenson's big break came when director William Wyler cast him, in spite of studio resistance, in The Letter ( 1940 ) opposite Bette Davis.

In June 2012, it was announced that Cornish had been signed as director of a future film adaptation of Neal Stephenson's classic 1992 novel, Snow Crash for Paramount Studios.

The term was coined in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional space that uses the metaphor of the real world.

There are several works of fiction where the main character delivers pizzas, including Tom Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons ( 2004 ), and Neal Stephenson's postcyberpunk novel Snow Crash ( 1992 ), which posits a future in which pizza delivery is organised by the Mafia as one of the US's two major industries.

Stephenson's safety lamp shown with Davy's lamp on the left

William Losh of Walker Ironworks had thought that he had an agreement with Stephenson to use his cast-iron rails, and Stephenson's decision caused a permanent rift between the two men.

The next ten years were the busiest of Stephenson's life, as he was besieged with requests from railway promoters.

Despite Stephenson's losing some routes to competitors due to his caution, he was offered more work than he could cope with, and was unable to accept offers for additional work.

Stephenson's next solo novel, published in 1995, was The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, which dealt with a future with extensive nanotechnology and dynabooks.

In keeping with the baroque style, Stephenson's books have become longer as he has gained recognition.

* In Neal Stephenson's three-volume The Baroque Cycle, 17th century alchemists like Isaac Newton believe that Solomon created a kind of " heavier " gold with mystical properties and that it was cached in the Solomon Islands where it was accidentally discovered by the crew of a wayward Spanish galleon.

In a conversation with Miranda, one character tells her that the nation-states of the world collapsed when electronic communications started using an untraceable relay system that made it impossible to enforce taxes on online transactions ( which was later used as a plot element in another of Stephenson's works, the 1999 novel Cryptonomicon ).

Stephenson's most visible decision was to use a single pair of driving wheels, with a small carrying axle behind.

Early locomotive designers had been concerned that the adhesion of a locomotive's driving wheels would be inadequate, but Stephenson's past experience convinced him that this would not be a problem, particularly with the light trains of the trials contest.

Though the genre has evolved since its inception, the historical novel remains popular with authors and readers to this day ; bestsellers include Patrick O ' Brian's Aubrey – Maturin series, Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, and Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

* Neal Stephenson's series The Baroque Cycle ( Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World ), published in 2003 and 2004, deals with the rise of the scientific worldview and the beginnings of modern capitalism in late-17th-and early-18th-century Europe.

Stephenson's design had depended on the wrought iron trusses to strengthen the final structures, but they were anchored on the cast iron girders themselves, and so deformed with any load on the bridge.

Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem was partly inspired by his involvement with the project, to which he contributed three pages of sketches and notes.

In addition, Mark Pickup in Cameron Anderson and Laura Stephenson's " Voting Behaviour in Canada " outlines three additional " behavioural " responses that voters may exhibit when faced with polling data.

The 25-mile ( 40 km ) long route opened on 27 September 1825 and, with the aid of Stephenson's Locomotion No 1, was the first locomotive-hauled public railway in the world.

Although showy polished brass covers over safety valves had been a feature of steam locomotives since Stephenson's day, the only railway to maintain this tradition into the era of pop valves was the GWR, with their distinctive tapered brass safety valve bonnets and copper-capped chimneys.

The Independent places emphasis on the comparisons between the story that evolves in Quicksilver and Stephenson's earlier novel Cryptonomicon, with the former " shaping up to be a far more impressive literary endeavour than most so-called ' serious ' fiction.

Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon includes a fictionalized version of Magic, with the Japanese cryptosystem being named " Indigo " rather than " PURPLE ".

: Highly decorated and a Knight of the Order of the Garter, the Admiral is Robert Stephenson's main point of contact with the British Government.

By 1840, a Treasury committee decided broadly in favour of Stephenson's proposals, with final consent to the route including Britannia Bridge given in 1845.

* Rat Things in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

By then, memetics had also become a theme appearing in fiction ( e. g. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash ).

Snow Crash can be considered to be the first expression of Stephenson's mature style.

Other popular fictional works that use the concept of virtual reality include William Gibson's Neuromancer which defined the concept of cyberspace, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, in which he made extensive reference to the term avatar to describe one's representation in a virtual world, and Rudy Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants, in which programmer Jerzy Rugby uses VR for robot design and testing.

* Stephenson's short story " The Great Simoleon Caper " which refers to both the Metaverse seen in Snow Crash and the First Distributed Republic seen in The Diamond Age ( another short story which fits in the Diamond Age milieu and even shares a character is " Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast ").

* Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, in the form of a weapons system called Reason

The eponymous Snow Crash of Neal Stephenson's novel is a combination mental / computer virus capable of infecting the minds of hackers via their visual cortex.

* Chapter five includes a description of a " Snow Crash Spectacular parade " based on Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash.

It is technically an MMOSG or Casual Multiplayer Online ( CMO ) by definition, though its stated goal was to realize the concept of the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash.

* In Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash skateboard Kouriers like Y. T.

It appears to be set in a United States that precedes the events in Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, using an early version of his Metaverse.

Anarcho-capitalism also plays a major role in Neal Stephenson's novels Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.

* Reason ( weapon system ), a fictional weapon system from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash

Fictional descriptions of memetic engineering include Isaac Asimov's seminal Foundation Trilogy ( New York: Bantam Books, 1991 ), George Gurdjieff's artificial mythology Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson ( New York: Penguin USA, 1999 ); Neil Stephenson's novels Snow Crash ( New York: Bantam Spectra, 1993 ) and The Diamond Age ( New York: Bantam Spectra, 1996 ); and Robert W. Chambers ' unearthly The King in Yellow ( Buccaneer Books, 1996 ) tome, which influenced seminal horror author H. P. Lovecraft.

The use of virtual globe software was widely popularized by ( and may have been first described in ) Neal Stephenson's famous science fiction novel Snow Crash.