Snow Crash

Great book, I can see why it's a staple of the cyber-punk / hacker genre. Stephenson does an amazing job weaving together sci-fi/hacker culture with mythology.

I really want to like this book, but there's something about it that just leaves me cold. Is it Stephenson's annoyingly declarative (and present-tense) prose? His habit of telling instead of showing? Or maybe just the way the main characters never do anything, just sort of hang around and bear witness to the unfolding of the epic plot? And what the heck is up with the ending anyway? (It never stops driving me crazy when Y.T. sleeps with Raven. That has never made any sense to me, from either of their perspectives.)I used to hate this book for its smugly self-assured pretentiousness, but rereading it now, that feels intentional and almost like parody. If nothing else, it could be in a museum of 90s hacker culture, capturing the egoism and machismo perfectly. Snow Crash is really no sillier than [b:Neuromancer 22328 Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1) William Gibson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1285017005s/22328.jpg 909457], I guess, but Stephenson feels a real need to go into long explanations of programming (I understand, thanks) and (now-dated) technology.I would ultimately call this a cool idea and an homage to hacker culture that doesn't quite turn into a real story ever.

Tried to finish this. Had a lot of interesting stuff going for it. The main character, named Hiro Protagonist (its so ridiculous to name his this that it actually works somehow), was rather interesting. He rides around on a motorcycle and wields a samurai sword better than anyone else in the world. OK, cool. I like this guy. He hacks computer. Cool. He teams up with a sassy teenage ‘delivery' girl named Y.T. who gets around town by using some type of magnetic grappling hook to latch onto cars as they drive down these futuristic highways. Alright, cool. Bad guy named Raven who is more badass than Hiro shows up. Alright, things are getting interesting.

Nam-shubs. What the fuck? Everything from here on out is completely gobbledygook. Language is a code just like computer code. Spells are virus made by words that take infect people and get spread by prostitutes. This caused the Tower of Babel. There is a televangelist who has a massive floating city made out of all sorts of random boats and is the richest man on the planet or something. He wants to spread some super spell/virus/code.

I gave up.

Story: 3 / 10
Characters: 6
Setting: 5
Prose: 4

Snow Crash and Neuromancer (Gibson) are well known as the two more famous Cyberpunk novels ever written. Neither really work though (1 / 5). Gibson's novel takes place almost exclusively online and is extremely difficult to follow. Thankfully, Stephenson's virtual world is interesting and significantly more straightforward. Snow Crash's problem is really that the prose is obscure and the action story is worthless. Despite the minute value the book had for me...
...I can recommend it to readers interested in linguistics and analytic philosophy.

Tags: rat things, burbclaves, Mafia, franchises, Fedland, lawlessness, corporate anarchy

It's as good as everybody says it is. That is, “Snow Crash” is one of the greatest novels of our time.

“The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.”

The only Stephenson worth reading, and even so its desperate attempts to be hip will irritate you the whole way through. Some good stuff buried underneath it, though.

This will be a pretty hard review for me. Snow crash was the first book by Stephenson which I read and I approached it as other, typical sci-fi (I read mostly hard sci-fi...). That probably was my first mistake. This book is not at all as what I was used to as it is more of a sci-fi exploitation... The amount of ridiculous and over the top things here amount as high as the Babel tower brought all the time in the plot. The main character is called Hiro (pronounced like or closely to hero) Protagonist (sic!) who is half afro-american, half asian (deep breath) haker genius, greatest sword fighter in the world, one of the main creators of the metaverse (kinda matrix) working for pizza delivery, CIA and haker-triad Hong Kong. His sidekick is overly sexualised (seriously, this was sometimes way too much) 15 year old courier working for Pizza delivery which happens to be also sicilian mafia and a sovereign state. Their main antagonist (weirdly not called Npc Antagonist) is a native russian east coast ruthless killer and kayak surfer (lol) creating nano blades from glass and connected to a hydrogen bomb (which he has stolen from a soviet nuclear submarine he single-handedly took control over) in case something happens to him... And that is not even a half of what is there!
However under this Kung-fury-like plot (that movie is great btw! ;) ) there is a lot of really interesting ideas and a mix of academic theories from language theory, psychology, philosophy and more. I truly loved how the author has shown human languages as being parallel to computer programming languages. The type of implications it has, how viruses may spread, etc. is quite amazing. Also the historical background, even though quite fantastic, is compelling and creates a believable (to an extent!) context.
Even though I tend to enjoy the exploitation genre (mostly in cinema), here I felt like there was way too much of everything piled up. The ending was like a car crash at a high velocity abruptly leaving the story as if the author was becoming tired with his own book. Also most of what happens throughout the plot doesn't have any great meaning and is there mostly too show how bad-ass is, albeit one-dimensional, is our hero protagonist or his antagonist. What also left me uneasy was author's oversexualised picture of young girls, where our 15 year-old courier is pictured as a sexual object in almost every interaction with males.
Bottom line, it's a book full of great ideas, pretty good form, but buried under way too much nonsense and sexism.

Snow Crash is definitely ahead of its time being written in 1992 but I just can't get into this at all unfortunately

Snow Crash didn’t clock in with the interest and weight of Gibson’s Neuromancer (unfair, yes), but you can see the larval stages of Stephenson’s ability to take delight in humans in contest with each other.

This was a really cool world that is unfortunately filled with really forgettable, wooden characters, frustrating pacing, and some really uncomfortable situations. Still kept my interest, but maybe a case of its reputation coming by way of being first rather than actually good.

This was…interesting, to a point. Probably my favorite parts were the interesting twist on linguistics and Sumerian history/mythology. I’m a sucker for anything pertaining to ancient Mesopotamia. Probably the only reason I finished. The characters aren’t likable, they’re a Mary Sue and Gary Stu. 🙄 I really thought Stephenson was going to do more. The ending was so lackluster and felt very slapped together. Really hoped for more oomph…

Overrated

This was a book that wasn't as clever as it thought it was. I had the exact same complaints as with ‘Seveneves' - long, ponderous and dull with one dimensional characters. I kept wondering how many more pages left I had to power through. Stephenson is very popular and regarded as a sci-fi legend, so clearly I'm wrong. It just isn't for me.

Mesmerizing action packer with thrilling twists and turns.

I feel the books was slow. There are about a million things going on and at times it feels like the pace is picking up only to move the story slightly forward. The world created is great, the characters are vivid, and at times it reads well.

I read this as a “You've got to read this book!” Recommendation and while I see what people like, I just found myself seeing how many pages I had left.

Simply phenomenal!

Meh

Snow Crash is a decent novel and my first from Neal Stephenson. The book wasn't bad but I just couldn't get into the story and I found Stephenson writing style a lot less engaging than I thought. Sometimes the dialogue seemed like it was written by a teenager - making me cringe from time to time. Additionally, I couldn't follow when the story was in the metaverse and when it was not, which added to the frustration of reading this book.

YMMV.

An old favourite. This time around, I found myself getting impatient towards the latter half. The first act setup is probably my favourite part, how it creates the setting and introduces the concepts of the Metaverse. As a software guy, I love that “hacking” is like a superpower in the book. Once we get into the long discussions with the Librarian, I started skimming.

9/10

Well that was a strange book. The first quarter of the book was really hard to get into, but once you get past the weirdness it becomes interesting. The ideas expressed in this book are really interesting and powerful, however the way it is written makes it quite hard to dwell into. Still an interesting read regarding as it's considered a must read by a lot of the Silicon Tycoons.

When the internet was just starting to become a thing, no one knew quite what it would do to society. Stephenson took a guess, added some William Gibson and some humour and swords, and created a really fun story. (He was WAY off though.)
It did feel a little dated of course, not just because it takes place approximately now, but is nothing at all like our present day, but also the relationships were a little iffy and the gang and racial factions were a bit hard to swallow. I recognize that this is extrapolated from LA in the 90s, which was consumed by gangs and racial factions at the time, so I wouldn't say that it is problematic, but I think Stephenson would agree that if he applied this concept of a neural linguistic virus in the near future now, it would come out very different.
That said, Stephenson's trademark ability to combine humour, excitement and fascinating details over larger-than-life, mind-bending philosophical concepts is very evident here, and I certainly enjoyed the ride.
I listened to the audiobook, which I wouldn't recommend too highly. Stephenson books are tricky on audio because he adds a lot of details and multiple perspectives, including the perspective of a cyborg super-dog in this case, so while I usually listen to books a little sped up, I couldn't in this case. Also, the intermission between chapters is odd and feels a little racist, though it turns out it's just an approximation of what Sumerian would sound like, but all this meant I wasn't too thrilled with the audio. Also, the narrator did a bad job with the lead character's voice in my opinion.
But overall, it was a fun and exciting read for sure!

Oh, and I just want to add, Neo from the Matrix is a total rip off of Hiro.

Reading this was like a mix of attending a history of language lecture and reading a detailed explanation of what the future of the internet would be like from a 90's perspective.

This sounds worse than it is as I actually really enjoyed the concept of linguistic viruses affecting our evolution and was blown away at how much the author got right about how we interact on the internet today; however, the characters and through arc let the story down a bit as I wasn't as invested in them as I needed to be for such a book.

Glad I read it but wouldn't be tempted to pick it up again.

like a more intellectual dan brown - not for everyone. his political satire is cutting, modern and absolutely BASED.

like brave new world and 1984, it presents a disturbing sci fi dystopian feels surreal and realistic at the same time; but unlike these classics, it's vision has yet to become outdated or deteriorate into cliche. it's an intriguing vision of a true anarcho-capitalist technocratic non-state and how its inner workings might look like. then again, someone probably sees it as a utopia to aspire towards, just like some inevitably argue brave new world is a utopia.