Writers Named Neil: A Guide
For those having trouble distinguishing Ne[ia]ls, behold! The same scene, rewritten in each of their styles.
Neil Gaiman:
“Sorry I’m late,” said Alice. “I was attacked by a flying pig.”
Bob couldn’t bring himself to care what, if anything, this meant.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said briskly. He took her hand to lead her off and noticed it was slick with blood. He hesitated, but kept walking. If they didn’t leave soon, he wouldn’t be able to get the lamp to his father’s party before the main course was served, and that would be a disaster.
Neal Stephenson:
“Sorry I’m late,” said Alice. “I was attacked by a flying pig.”
Bob knew that this was aerodynamically improbable. The lift generated by a flapping wing was a product of the density of the air, the surface area of the wing, and the square of the velocity of the creature in question. Given reasonable estimates for the mass and running speed of a pig, it would need at least 32 square feet of wing area to get airborne. This presented several possibilities, to wit:
Alice was lying.
Possibly Bob was meant to understand this and there was some subtlety of communication involved here.
The pig had a smaller-than-expected mass, or other anatomical oddities in its construction.
Alice’s method of transportation had passed through a region, world, or dimension that had a significantly higher atmospheric density than Earth’s, allowing the pig to half-fly, half-swim through some kind of exotic soup.
“Huh?” said Bob.
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
“Sorry I’m late,” said Alice. “I was attacked by a flying pig.”
“Well, actually,” said Bob, “if it was flying, then by definition it was not a pig. You see, in 1735, the philosopher Carl Linnaeus invented a way to put order to the chaos of the natural world…”
