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Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)

Spectra

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Average customer rating: 4 stars

Best cyberpunk novel of the 90s

This was the best cyberpunk novel of the 1990s. It is very well written, tremendously innovative, and incredibly entertaining. Neal Stephenson has found his own unique viewpoint on American culture, and the result is awesome. It is darkly humorous in places (the Deliverator is one of the best sub-characters in American fiction) and he leads you into a great deal of thought about the future of this country while remaining so enjoyable that you have to be dragged from the book to eat. I consider this to be one of the great books of the twentieth century, and have bought copies for several friends just to be able to discuss it with them.

So hip it made me yawn

this is a book where everything moves fast because a taste for character development seems to have vanished together with the United States as we know it. The year is later, and Hiro, a multicultural hero, is a hacker who delivers pizza for the Mafia (who have taken over pizza delivery and teach it at the Cosa Nostra Pizza University). Then Hiro finds out that there is a nefarious plot that uses a lot of references to Sumerian mythology - a plot to take over the world.
This is a story that is full of clever and hip little descriptions; it moves at a frenetic space, it's cool, it has as its heroes a hacker and fifteen year old skater, it takes place in virtual reality and in normal reality, and there's plenty of sword fighting and things blowing up to keep you away from the fact that - well, that the story is kinda thin, kinda childish. We spend a lot of time with Hiro but darn it if you get any sense of who the guy is; darn it if you really understand a lot about YT aside from the fact that she's a cool teenager with a heart (gag!). When it comes down to the meat of the story - to explaining why things are happening and where he wants to take us, Stephenson sounds like an amateur - there's page after page of earnest exposition, like crib notes taken from Wikipedia; we're fed a lot of stuff about mythology in page after page of little summaries. Then it gets kinda incoherent, like when he calls Christianity a 'brutal, irrational theocracy' - but then it sounds like he endorses it because he praises it for suppressing speaking in tongues.
By the time you get to that it's too late to throw the book against the wall, so you just go along with the explosions for a while longer, knowing there will be a sword-fight at the end that will tie things together (like Lebowski's rug) while you're left scratching your head and thinking you're not cool enough to 'get it.'

Entertaining.

Snow Crash is a pretty entertaining read, especially for the gadget-oriented. There is a lot of fun computer hacking, sword fights, and explosions, and the characters are pretty well developed.

The backstory behind the main antagonist is unique; the author weaves ancient Sumerian mythology with Human physiology to create a sort of computer language of the human mind. It's interesting, but I think the time Hiro (the main character) spends in the library studying Sumerian lore should have been condensed. The book otherwise has a very good pace.

Snow Crash is mostly an external adventure. What I mean is, the main characters don't do a lot of growing throughout the book. They pretty much are who they are, and they're out to get the bad guy. It's like watching a good action flick. That's why I gave it 3 rather than 5 stars. For me, the development and conclusion of the anagnorisis, that 'ah-ha' moment, is most enjoyable.

Really well written

Well written fast paced novel that does not read like cyber-punk. The book slows occasionally as we learn about language and viruses but this only adds to the book.

I feel so "with it" after a Stephenson Novel

Neal Stephenson has a knack for making this 50+ year old reader feel like he just had a heck of a run down the longest ski slope in Colorado. It is not often that I feel so "with it" as I do after being able to keep up with the rapid flow of verse, eye popping word candy and just out and out futuristic fun from another novel by Stephenson. The first time I read anything by Stephenson, it was Cryptonomicon, a 1200 page book that went by in a very short time without any boredom at all. So I dug up the scoop on his books and found another well liked book was Snow Crash. When you read a Neal Stephenson novel, the take-off begins on the opening page and then it's full steam ahead for the rest of the book. Oh, sure, in Stephenson fashion, he meanders a bit into tangential imagery and off topics looks at the weird and wild, but it's all done in nanoseconds.

Snow Crash has been explained ad infinitum for 500+ reviews, so I will not bore you with the details, but roughly, this book takes place in the future. All that is left of the official United States of America is a group of Federal Buildings on a campus somewhere near L.A. The land mass known as the lower 48 in today's lingo is now a variety of little burbclaves, each with a ruling president of sorts but not like a political country, but a company/city-state mixed with business and politics. For example, there are franchise companies/countries such as Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, Reverend Wayne and the Pearly Gates, the Nipponese Quadrant and Uncle Enzo's Mafia among others. Crime can be driven out by a menacing robotic/biomass dog-like creature that can move at almost the speed of somewhere-between-sound-and-light. The Police forces have become large for profit as the MetaCops and Enforcers take different tacks to keep the peace.

Pizza delivery is the opening segment and it is "a riot, Alice, a real riot" to quote Jackie Gleason. The names of the main characters should give away some of the thought process of Stephenson as Hiro Protagonist tries to keep his partner Y.T. (no, not Whitey) from getting killed. Although as a one of the best Kouriers in the New World, she can take care of herself pretty well.

Reality and the online world of the Metaverse have become meshed and where one starts the other leaves off has become a gray area. Much of the analysis of what is happening was out of my reach for a long while in the book. Then with a deft piece of writing, Stephenson brings all of the pieces together with quite an interesting proposition on about page 400. His genius is illustrated with this fascinating look at language skills, human comprehension and viral infection. I know, it sounds whacky; and it is, but no less fascinating.

The best explanation I can come up with is this is like reading a book by H.G. Wells while he was on speed with side orders of Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut.