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Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)

Spectra

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MYTHOLOGY MEETS TECHNOLOGY

0101 1100 1101 0001
1111 0010 0101 1010

What if looking at these seemingly innocent binary numbers could not only affect your computer, but your brain as well? After all, your brain is simply a biological computer itself.

This is one of the main themes in Stephenson's SNOW CRASH, a becoming-more-recognizable future where people divide their time between Reality and the Metaverse.

The other theme is more complex, but tries to draw parallels between Sumerian mythology and computer viruses. It's interesting in that it challenges the reader to alter their view of history, but the analogies are not as well drawn as they could be.

Fortunately, these two suit-and-tie topics are woven into a story that features an eccentric cast of characters and an action-packed storyline. I couldn't use the phrase "colorful cast of characters" as some of them are literally black and white in the Metaverse!

For example there's the main hero, Hiro Protagonist. I haven't come across a name that creative since Prince S., a character in Dostoyevsky's THE IDIOT.
The sword-wielding Hiro reminded me heavily of the motorcycle-riding Cloud of the famous FINAL FANTASY 7.

Then there's the skateboarding Y.T. (not Whitey!), a 15-year old female Kourier that reminds me of the rebellious, skateboarding, John Conner of TERMINATOR 2.

The locations are just as interesting, where people live in storage units or the neighborhoods of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, The Sacrifice Zone, Nova Sicilia, Narcolumbia, et al.

It's not exactly Mister Roger's Neighborhood either as each place has their own rules and lots of security to keep out unwanted people.

Just off the shore of California (where most of the story takes place) is a mass of ships called The Raft. Very similar to Mieville's ship-city of Armada in his book THE SCAR (written many years after this book).

With so many crazy ideas all into one book, it is understandable that the first hundred pages read like SNOW CRASH FOR DUMMIES, complete with laugh-out-loud humor, to make your transition into this world easier than Orientation Day at school or work.

After those first hundredish pages, the story races along like a mechanical guard-dog on a straight highway.

The mythology portions come up about halfway, but are presented by a Librarian. The best way to imagine the Librarian: What if GOOGLE could talk? or What if that stupid paperclip in MICROSOFT OFFICE actually helped you?

The ending, while action-packed and exciting, is where I felt some disappointment. The last line is good, but there is not much closure on what happens to the characters and the chapters that were previously ~15 pages are rapidly narrowed down to ~5 pages--a sign of an author who can't contain his excitement at almost finishing his book.

But on the whole, I found this novel much more enjoyable and understandable than Willian Gibson's earlier NEUROMANCER.

If Hiro were rating this book, he would give it 0100 out of 0101 Stars.

gift

This item was given as a gift to a friend, who specifically requested it, and expressed great satisfaction on receiving it. Pricing, delivery and product integrity were all satisfactory. My rating it a 4 out of a possible 5 reflects only the fact that I lack first hand experience with the purchased item, and can only reflect the limited information conveyed to me by its recipient.

Almost unreadable

Like many other one-star reviewers, I heard about this being a classic in the Neuromancer sense. I tried to like it, I really did (I was hoping to have this be the first leap into discovering Stephenson's other works), but I ended up doing something quite rare for me: I put the book down halfway through it.

I really tried, but I found it simply unreadable. I have to agree with other reviewers that the torturous sentences, simple plot, shallow characters, and just plain boring storyline killed it for me. I also found it funny that for futuristic cyberpunk sci fi, it wasn't very futuristic or cyberpunky... the technology feels like it was written by someone from the 1950's envisioning their future.

I'm an avid sci fi/fantasy reader and can count the number of unfinished books on two hands. Snow Crash has joined that list. I wish I could get my money back, it was THAT bad. Are all his books written like this? Should I just stay away from Neil Stephenson?

One complaint

Stephenson's vision of the present/future is remarkable, especially for a book published in 1992 (his only misstep I saw was stating that people carry CD players). My only complaint is that the man on the cover of this version is clearly Caucasian while Hiro is supposed to be black and Asian. Really, that's my only complaint.

Cyberpunk meets DA VINCI CODE

Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH has won itself near-classic status in the cyberpunk genre by combining the worship of technology and hacker skills made popular by earlier writers like Gibson with a humorous tone and farcical view of the future. Published in 1991, the book suggests a near-future America where the privization and libertarian fantasies of the Reagan years have led to America breaking up into innumerable little city states, each part of a franchise chain. The independent hacker and swordsman Hiro Protagonist pays his bills by working as a "deliverator", conveying pizzas from a Mafia-owned pizzeria franchise to LA suburbs designed to the same general plans. When not making deliveries, Hiro is a luminary of the Metaverse, a 3D virtual environment accessed by people all over the globe. In this technological fantasy world, someone is spreaking a virus that kills hackers, and Hiro has to take down the culprit with an understanding of Sumerian myth.

Parts of SNOW CRASH are dated indeed. The Metaverse concept seems silly now that the 1990s interest in virtual reality has faded. Stephenson's hope that hackers would be the heroes of the future has gone unrealized when the people who keep the web's most popular sites running are still considered socially inept geeks. Nonetheless, quite a bit of it is still remarkably fresh. Consider this early observation of globalization:

"Once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave overs in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken all these historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity--y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery."

I really enjoyed this book the first time I read it in my early teens. Nowadays, however, I see the book as incredibly flawed. Anyone with a liberal arts education is sure to be annoyed by Stephenson's treatment of linguistics and Sumerian myth, and the DA VINCI CODE-esque sensationalism on ancient religions. When Stephenson has to introduce the Sumerian element, he has no better way to do this than a long droning monologue from a librarian character. The whole hacker and super-privatized America portions of the book are great fun, but the Sumerian virus element just seems lame. Still, as this book does have the potential to keep you entertained, I'd recommend it as light reading.