Then he wrote Snow Crash, a book that postulated the Metaverse, an exquisitely fleshed-out vision of a digital alternative world, and Stephenson found himself at the front ranks of cyberpunk authors. “I was sort of going for broke with Snow Crash,” he told me a few years back. “I had tried to write stuff that was more conventional and that would be appealing to a large audience, and it didn’t work. I figured I would just go for broke, write something really weird, and not be so worried about whether it was a good career move or not.”

Perhaps this is a third sex. The concept of a third sex is one that’s been around for centuries in Indian and Thai cultures, and has come in and out of popularity in the Western world in modern times. Do we need to have a binary view of gender? Is it either/or?