Snow Crash

The first pages were awesome. The author goes to great lengths to describe a future where pizza delivery is the most important business in America.

The protagonist (called Hero Protagonist) is interesting, he is the worlds best sword fighter. His sidekick is a 15 years old girl with an attitude and mad skating skills.

The scenario is kind of interesting as well. The Mafia is a legitimate corporation. There is no much law, “the enforcers” deal with peace, not right or wrong.

Much of the story passes on the virtual world, and Snow Crash is a drug that can infect people online, and make them speak incoherently. There is a plot dating back to the Babel, involving ancient Sumerian incantations.

Yet, the book is boring! I just told nearly all the story, there isn't much more to it. Not much events going on, complex situations or anything. The swords are never used. The girl's role is pretty much that of a typical MMORPG “fetch quests”.

I stopped reading after about the 3rd time the book went into “history book reading” mode. Very tedious descriptions of the ancient Sumerian world.

Finallly got around to reading this one. This is a great story if you're into cyberpunk or computers and technology.

I found I enjoyed this a lot more than Neuromancer, although if you haven't read that, I'd still read it first.

Rating: Five Stars (out of 5)

Snow Crash is a book I've had on my to-read shelf for a long time. I think I bought this book in the 90's when there was a ton of buzz about it and when I was reading Science Fiction and Fantasy regularly. Why it took me so long to actually get around to reading, I'm not sure. It probably had something to do with a combination of high expectations and the size of the book. Finally, though, I bit the bullet and actually got to it through my Audible.com account. I love audiobooks.

Brief Synopsis:
A fast-paced adventurous romp in the near future. The cast of characters include a 15-year old skateboarding delivery girl, a nuclear harpoonist, a mafia kingpin, an advanced librarian AI, a religious hacker, and the main character Hiro Protagonist. The story revolves around Hiro, who turns out to be the second-baddest dude on the planet, though he starts out as a sword-wielding pizza delivery guy and part-time hacker. Along the way he partners up with YT (the delivery chick) and encounters all the other main characters while he discovers and tries to foil an intricate plot that endangers everything they hold dear.

Deeper Discussion
World Building
One of the great things about this book is the world that Stephenson “creates” in his near-future dystopia. Though the book was written in 1992, it still reads well in 2012 (20 years later). It has a great not-too-distant future feel. The concepts used involve the breakup of law and the corporatization of essentially everything. Sometimes it has a Mad-Max feel and at other times it feels like Gibson's seminal cyberpunk works (Neuromancer et al.) In this book, there are not one, but two worlds created. And done well. The Metaverse is Stephenson's online habitat, where users “jack in” to a computer-generated otherworld in which is greater in scope than the real world, but which still has programmed “rules” that make it interesting. Both the near-future and the metaverse are remarkably plausible and make for great plot devices. Needless to say, the author puts them to great use.

Metaphysics and Religion
While the beginning and end of the book are mostly fast-paced adventure, the middle of the book gets a lot deeper with a venture into metaphysical concepts of language, religion, and viruses (computer and biological). I found it to be extremely interesting as a plot concept. Clearly there was a lot of research done by Stephenson, which allows him to put it all together nicely while not derailing the whole book. Briefly, he explores the idea of vectors (see the medical terminology) including biological viruses, thought concepts as vectors, language as vectors, and religion as vector and infected state. He takes this all the way to the hacker world by analogizing the way software viruses work (essentially these are language programs, after all). Bringing in some ancient-world religion and quite possibly real research into religion and tying it all together on three separate levels (biological, religious, and metaverse) gets pretty “deep.” I can see this being offensive to some people. It was borderline offensive to me.

But just as you start to get worried about the discussion crossing the line, the author gets back to the adventure and finishes things up with a mad dash to the finish line.

Thoughts
This was a super-fun book to read. It seems rare to find a book that will successfully build worlds these days. Maybe that's just because I'm not reading a lot of science fiction anymore. But this book is exceptionally good in that regard, in my opinion. It's equally rare to see a book where the author will even attempt to touch on deeper subjects such as religion and metaphysics in what is a fun adventure. Honestly, this book reminded me of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code in that respect. Maybe not quite as well researched, but with a similar “feel.” I would highly recommend Snow Crash to anyone who enjoyed The DaVinci Code.

For some reason, I got the feeling that the wrap-up was a bit abrupt. Somehow it felt like the author would have liked about 30% more space to write in the book. Maybe to go a little deeper in the middle section. Maybe to flesh out the ending a little differently. I could be wrong. Despite this, it was still very satisfying and makes me eager to read Cryptonomicon.

Who should read this book?
• Anyone who enjoys science fiction or dystopian fiction. This is a key book in the genre of cyber punk. For that reason alone it is required for SF readers.
• Anyone who enjoyed The DaVinci Code or that general type of fiction (adventure with some research) or even those who enjoyed the Indiana Jones flicks.

The prototypical cyberpunk thriller with an interesting side-take on the future of capitalism. Hiro and Y.T. join forces in and out of the “metaverse” to stop a virtual virus from killing the real-life hacker elite. Thinks a lot harder than its contemporaries about the parallels between religion and technology and the programming “languages” that underlie each of them. Also manages to set the stage for MMORPG's to come, though what we have today is surely more dumbed-down than what Stephenson had imagined. The book keeps the reader in a state of perpetual confusion, and the answers come quickly and unexpectedly (except for some unnecessary bits of pure exposition). A blast to read, though the story dissolves near end into an action sequence carrying less weight than it deserves. Really should have read this one years ago!

It was good up until the end then it kinda of stopped. Maybe I was not paying attention enough but I'm not sure what happened at the end. I was really enjoying it until then. I think I'll reread the last few chapters and see what I missed. I'll update this after that.

Okay I've re-read the end and it makes more sense now. But it does wrap up rather quickly.

A bit on the nerdy side, but it was nothing but engaging. A bit of forcefed storyline near the end.

I read this because it's always referred to in like, everything else I read. The ideas in this book are super interesting, and were certainly pioneering when Snow Crash first came out. However, the narrative voice was so obnoxious. It's like it was written by a 14-year-old boy who wants to be congratulated for his paltry attempts at thinking about the human condition. I mean, the two main characters are (1) the [male] [biracial Japanese/African-American] greatest sword-fighter in the universe/hacker and (2) a hot 15-year-old skateboarding girl.

There is terrible exposition – it's like Stephenson wants us to be impressed by how much data he has dredged up in text form. Basically, I think the person who wrote that Internet hit “If all stories were written like science fiction” had this book in mind.

I also found Stephenson's speculative futurecasting pretty distracting, especially when it was crazy wrong. Like, we have the Metaverse but we still use pay phones?

Anyways, I read this thinking it'd be much better as a shorter, more tightly-edited action movie with great special effects, so I guess it makes sense that, as is explained in the acknowledgements, it was originally conceived to be a graphic novel. It was also interesting that Stephenson cited as a chief influence on his conception of the Metaverse the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which he describes as a book explaining “the philosophy behind Macintosh.”

While I can't say that I didn't dislike this book, I can't honestly say that I liked it either. At times fascinating, at times cutting-edge, and (yet) at times cumbersome, the book does serve as a romp through a futuristic United States with rampant technology and seemingly unending attempts to mold society into a single, homogenized mass.

Certain topics contained within were thought provoking: Sumerian myth, linguistic variation, virtual reality. Many of these most interesting concepts, though, ended up being ancillary and unnecessary to the plot. The book checks in at 470 pages; it could have just as easily been 150 to convey the basic story.

In short, I will probably find myself re-vising this book in the coming years, once I've done a little more research on some of the more interesting ideas (mentioned above).

Ottima idea e gran personaggi per questo libro di fantascienza tamarro come pochi!

Good post cyber punk book. As with many cyber punk books there is an underlying them of spirituality. But this is clearly not a Christian view of spirituality. The book is good and the ideas are thought provoking, but if you are easily offended by books that attack the core tenants of Christianity then you want to avoid this book.

I finished this audiobook a couple of weeks ago after hearing several tech podcasters recommending it. It's a cyberpunk novel, whatever that might mean, set in the near future. The main character, Hiro Protagonist, starts out as a pizza delivery guy working for Uncle Enzo, head of the Mafia. The USA is broken up into corporate franchises and the mafia is now one such franchise.

Hiro is a hacker and was involved in programming The Black Sun, the geek hangout in the metaverse. The metaverse is an idea of the future of the internet, more sort of AI where users goggle in and wander round using avatars to represent themselves.

The book gets into religion and linguistics and, as a former linguist and a current geek, I found Stephenson's ideas intriguing. Some of the best parts of the novel are when Hiro is discussing science and linguistics with the librarian (a piece of software that has access to the digital info archives).

All in all I found it to be an enjoyable, well-written and well-researcehd novel and I liked it well enough to consider reading more of Stephenson's novels.

This is an action-packed novel slowed down in places by some intrusive background information. It seems to have been popular and influential in the 1990s.

It's set in a future in which the American government still exists, and still employs quite a lot of people, but seems to be largely irrelevant to everyone else. The President's name and face are not recognized. If the book ever explains how this diminished form of government functions, I missed it.

The story is mostly about the main characters, described below.

L. Bob Rife is in a way the central character although he's also rather a non-character, remaining offstage for most of the book. He's a rich man who discovers from someone else's research that the long-dead language of ancient Sumeria is the machine language of the human brain, and he decides to use it to take over the world by programming everyone to do as he says. As a weapon against clever people who might find out what he's up to, he also develops a kind of virus called Snow Crash, which computer programmers (but only computer programmers) can catch by looking at a screenful of data. It fries their brains. All of this is seriously implausible, but it takes up only a relatively small part of the book.

Hiro Protagonist is an African/Asian-American software wizard who happens to be delivering pizzas for the Mafia at the start of the book. He was in at the start of the Metaverse, a virtual world existing only in cyberspace, and hence knows some of its secrets. He's armed with a matched pair of Samurai swords that he inherited from his father and knows how to use. Hiro is loosely allied with Y.T., Uncle Enzo, and others opposed to Rife.

Y.T. (short for Yours Truly) is a 15-year-old girl who ought to be a minor character, but turns into a major character because the author and several of the other major characters (plus one of the extraordinary Rat Things) are unaccountably fond of her. She works as a courier, delivering packages on her technologically-enhanced skateboard. She's quite likeable and has a nice line in cheeky dialogue, emerging as the best character of the book, but she's impossibly resourceful for her age.

Raven is an Aleut, a native of the Aleutian Islands on the fringes of the Arctic. He's large and deadly, armed with an endless supply of glass knives and glass-barbed harpoons, and he kills almost everyone who gets in his way. In spite of which, he's not entirely unlikeable. He has his own private agenda, but he also has an alliance of convenience with Rife.

Uncle Enzo is the head of the Mafia, and not really a major character, but he rates an honourable mention because he's the only person in the book to fight Raven in the real world without definitely losing. Hiro fights Raven in the Metaverse without losing; but Hiro has unfair advantages in the Metaverse.

I quite enjoyed the book despite its occasional bloody deaths and occasional briefings on Sumeria. I wouldn't rate it as one of my favourites, but it was worth reading for the colourful and imaginative worlds that it describes (the real world and the Metaverse), and even for its weird account of Sumerian history and language.