Snow Crash

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.