Snow Crash

chromatic has continued our trend of reviewing ever Neal Stephenson book ever written, with this weeks subject being Snow Crash. A book that has Sumeria, the USS Enterprise, and the Metaverse - what more could you ask for? Follow the link (white rabbit) below to read more.

Snow Crash
author	Neal Stephenson
pages	468
publisher	Bantam Spectra
rating	9.5/10
reviewer	chromatic
ISBN	0553562614
summary	Highly recommended

The Rundown.

Snow Crash is a well-crafted, tongue-in-cheek romp through a near-future America so familar, one expects to see its characters chasing each other down the street.

Set mostly in geographic California with arterial highways delivering consumers to the fast food, faster shopping, and even small country franchises, a very modern, ancient Sumerian virus is turning hackers and non-hackers alike into tongue-speaking refugees.

Throw in the Metaverse, Stephenson's version of the global information structure. A three-dimensional audio and visual hallucination built around the mystical powers-of-two, cartoon physics rule the day. Rent a cheap avatar for a stroll down the main street. Ride your motorcycle at 300 km/h and bounce harmlessly off of a 20-mile square building. Just don't read the scroll held by the Bland Angel of Judgment.

Further complicating matters is a slew of divergent and entertaining characters. Your guide through this journey is the unlikely Hiro Protagonist (no, really!), a once and future hacker wonderboy who took off before the IPO and now delivers pizza for the Mafia (thirty minutes or less or you're fired). Joining him is the ever resourceful Y.T., a teenaged Kourier skateboarding her way through traffic by harpooning cars.

Want more? How about the surprisingly boyish Uncle Enzo, head of aformentioned Mafia, or L. Bob Rife, fantastically wealthy crank, founding funder of Rife Bible College and current owner of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier. Perhaps you'd like to meet Mr. Lee, proprietor of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong Franchise, or stop to pet Rat Thing, a supersonic isotope-powered cybernetic pit bull. Pushing forward the plot is a Metaverse librarian and Raven, a one-man killing machine and nuclear power.

Sounds serious? Perhaps. Complicated? Enjoyably so.

What's good?

The writing is crystal clear and very descriptive. Stephenson never gets lost in the details, and is as comfortable relating various myths about Babel as technical descriptions of the Graveyard Daemons cleaning up unfortunate Metaverse corpses. They fit together into an interesting, if complicated puzzle. He's also highly creative and well-researched, much like Neil Gaiman. It would take a serious student of a particular field to spot an error in his work (except for the strange 'Built-In Operating System' acronym).

What's not so good?

There's one piece of the backstory (concerning the parentage of a couple of characters) which is a little too convenient... it makes the story more effective, but it was an obvious dramatic advice. The ending might leave some readers a cold. Frankly, it's quick. Very quick. All of the pieces had been in place for a hundred pages (no MacGuffin here), but it's still a surprise. Stephenson is better at creating a believable yet outrageous world and populating it with appropriate characters than he is at telling an airtight story. Don't be fooled -- he's no slouch in the story department, but the draw of "Snow Crash" is Stephenson's fertile imagination. All things considered, these are very small nitpicks.

What's to think about when you finish?

This is a story about dualities. There's a reason for the 'powers of two' lecture early on. The obvious schism is the organized technocracy of the Metaverse contrasted with the hyperinflationary franchised real world.

Pit Hiro against Raven. One reluctantly saves the world he helped create, the other seeks to destroy the world that created him. How about Uncle Enzo versus Rife? Ng and Rat Thing? YT and ... well, everybody else.

The Conclusion.

Given the quality and density of Snow Crash, it's easy to recommend this work as a defining piece of SF. If you consider yourself a serious cyberpunk fan, hacker, or geek, you ought to feel guilty until you read it.

Note: as with most cyberpunk pieces, Snow Crash contains quite a bit of harsh language, some violence, and one sexual encounter. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Thanks to Chilli for additional insights during this review.

Pick this book at Amazon.

Best Part of Snow Crash

The reviewer overlooked the very best part of Snow Crash: the first chapter. I've never wanted to be a pizza delivery guy so badly in my entire life.

----

Am I the only one

Who doesn't like Stephenson's writing, his plots, his pacing, his dialogue, his characters, or his books?

It would be nice if /. would review books by different authors. Generally if you give one good review to an author people are going to check out his/her other books. I would much rather see reviews of different authors rather than a review of every book a given author has written.

The Snow Crash intellectual virus a reality?

I've noticed something that I thought had to be unique to my experiences.. that being that Nobody Buys Snow Crash By Themselves. I've yet to meet anybody who has gone to the bookstore, seen this book, picked it up, and liked it. Eveybody had a friend who handed them their battered, much-read copy and said, 'Hey, you're gonna like this'. The book somehow got introduced to the geek culture and has been spreading from carrier to carrier ever since. You may not be actually handed the book, but more likely than not you heard from a fellow geek that it was good and you went out and bought it.. I know i'll never lend my copy again, I've had to buy it twice now since my first copy never came home.
So is the nam-shub of stephenson subliminaly planted throughout the book? Did the publisher soak the paper stock in the blood of geeks? Or perhaps there's really no Mr. Stephenson at all.. the book came in on a comet from out beyond the oort cloud ;) --insert spooky x-files music here--

Dreamweaver

Re:Implicit logic?

My short list -

• Don't waste your time with the Illuminati trilogy; it's all a very long joke, and by the time you get to the punch line, you'll have wasted a great amount of time.
• Asimov - doesn't have the style of Gibson, but wrote a number of great books. I'd recommend the Robot Trilogy and the Foundation Trilogy (and the 4 or 5 other related books), but I read this stuff when I was twelve - it may be too puerile for your taste (don't know your age).
• Clarke - wow, spent many found hours with good ol' (Sir) Arthur C. He's more cerebral than Asimov, but sometimes there isn't much story or plot. Definitely read 2001 and 2010 , and Rendezvous with Rama and the second Rama book. Don't bother finishing any of his book series, they end horribly. For example, 2061 was mediocre, but 3001 was just monstrously bad.
• On the opposite end of the spectrum, try Stanislaw Lem. He's a bit hard to find, and he is weird. Try The Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress . Lem should get more props - he's really important, but people tend to shy away from translated work.
• Kurt Vonnegut. Anything. Start with Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five , but I don't think he's written anything second-rate. NOTE: Not all of his work (and arguably none of his work) is scifi. Also, avoid Slapstick till you've read some of his other work.
• Philip K. Dick. Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep has a delicious cyberpunk feel to it, but it predates the genre. Very influential.
• Jorge Luis Borges. Possibly one of the greatest writers of all time, and ertainly one of my favorites. Borges wrote in a genre called magic realism; it'll make you think of Twilight Zone. Try Ficciones. One favorite story is "The Garden of the Forking Paths".

That's hardly all of them - I've left out everyone from Jules Verne to Douglas Adams. However, this is probably a good start.

-Josh

Further thoughts on Snow Crash

Yes, the cyberpunk genre has been going on for a while. Yes, there are similarities between Stephenson's Snow Crash and Gibson's world.

But there's a generation gap between the two, and that's why I love Snow Crash and am lukewarm to anything Gibson wrote beyond Neuromancer. Whereas Gibson writes for a general public fascinated by technology, Stephenson is a second-generation cyberpunk writer (insofar as his effort on Snow Crash goes; the rest is mildly cyberpunk.) Stephenson writes for people who read cyberpunk. And who reads cyberpunk? Hackers.

And that's where the genius of Snow Crash comes in. Stephenson obviously plays on the clichés of the genre. His novel is highly humorous, yet it deals with very real people facing very real danger. Characters such as Raven are both satirical yet very much human.

Same goes for the Metaverse; it's a wild place, filled with avatars of giant penises and such behavior you might expect from the normal brainless troll populating the Web years from now. Yet it is also a place that's barely real, and Stephenson makes a point of reminding us of that fact throughout the novel. The Metaverse is an illusion, yet it carries a good part of the drama. Contrast this with Gibson's hyperrealism, where Cyberspace is more real than the real world.

All this, in my mind, makes of Snow Crash the groundbreaking novel it is. And even without them, it'd still be a witty and entertaining read. Snow Crash has injected humour and self-reflection in a genre that was in desperate need of a dose of self-derision.

Now, if only Stephenson could learn to end a novel properly, without having to resort to the #&$^ showdown between the forces of Good and Evil...

"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

I continually wonder...

Is the hacker community trying to live up to these novels?

We have talked numerously about the script kiddies, that everyone likes to rip on, for trying to live up to the MTV and movie potrayals of hackers...

But do these books serve as a guideline for future innovations to the internet. I am sure there are some very intelligent people out there right now trying to make the "Metaverse" spoken about in Snow Crash, a reality.

Is that misguided?

Gasp!

And all this time I thought that came from everyone playing Ultima IV when they were supposed to be studying! Another illusion ruined. ;)

Implicit logic?

Here's a question for all you out there - where's the central repository for "Stuff to read" for your typical net.geek ? There doesn't seem to be one place you can go which says, "okay this is cool, you gotta check THAT out, and don't forget this!" Instead it seems to be implicitly assumed you've already read things like the Illuminati, the Hacker Dictionary, Ender's Game, and related.

My question is, of course, with all the disorganization... what else have I missed?

--

Let's interview Neal

Neal Stephenson would be an excellent person to interview on /.

Of the interviews we've done here so far, John Carmack was definitely the most responsive and insightful. Sterling (surprisingly) was the worst.

Stephenson consistently strikes me as not only one of the cleverest SF writers around right now--Gibson may be a better prose stylist, but Stephenson is much funnier--but one of the brightest.

In each of his books, he seems to have had a number of deep insights into contemporary culture, and extrapolated it into a future world-view. The "franchise" society in Snow Crash, for example, was a profound meditation on the commercial balkanization of American culture.

I, for one, would love to have a (mediated) discussion with him about the future.