Paperback, 470 pages
English language
Published Sept. 1, 2008 by Bantam Spectra.
In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosaNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous… you’ll recognize it immediately.
For all the high-flying cyberpunk action, my favorite parts were the conspirasist digressions on ancient linguistics.
One of my all-time favorites (although not quite my favorite Neal Stephenson book, that would be The Diamond Age), I read this way back when, and it's held up over time and many rereadings. If I'm wandering a bookshop and don't see anything that grabs me, I'll just get another copy of this book. It's a fun, zippy read (not as epic an undertaking as his later 500+ page behemoths), and its metaverse still sparks the imagination more than the present-day Meta metaverse. The characters are all great, but for emotional depth, I'm going with the Rat Thing.
I've read this a few times over the years and It holds up. Interesting to see many things in the tech landscape emerge that hark to this book. Also fun to see what didn't launch into our lives no matter how hard the tech bros tried to make it happen. Maybe in another 20 years.
Wonderful classic with both action and philosophical depth
the opening is one of the best things I've ever read, ever. huge shame that it fails to maintain the momentum for long long periods. hugely flawed but extremely entertaining
A little difficult to get into at the start, turned a corner sharply and hooked me right to the end. An interesting use of ideas surrounding the history of language, of virtual and physical viruses, and the ‘metaverse’ seeing it’s first outing (before Facebook borrowed the name) - and a pair of protagonists who you find yourself desperately hoping will get to the source of the problem.
Just re-read this book, and it's amazing how prescient Stephenson was in 1992. Re-reading gave me a strange combination of nostalgia, hope and fear of how technology can be used. The wide-open possibilities of the early net have been largely foreclosed by commercial interests, but the current implosion of Tw*tter and growing awareness of the dangers of siloed spaces may be creating a renaissance of DIY, distributed and free (as in speech) media. Or it could still move into the hypercapitalist hellscape of Snow Crash. The power is in our hands.
(re-post for experimental reasons)
Just re-read this book, and it's amazing how prescient Stephenson was in 1992. Re-reading gave me a strange combination of nostalgia, hope and fear of how technology can be used. The wide-open possibilities of the early net have been largely foreclosed by commercial interests, but the current implosion of Tw*tter and growing awareness of the dangers of siloed spaces may be creating a renaissance of DIY, distributed and free (as in speech) media. Or it could still move into the hypercapitalist hellscape of Snow Crash. The power is in our hands.
Es una novela cyberpunk original, gamberra y algo divertida. La podía visualizar como una peli de risa sin muchas pretensiones, pero debido a su originalidad y ambientación únicas se podría convertir en un hito. Me recordó en algunas partes chorras a Kung Fury. Creo que el autor era un frikazo de la programación pero bastante visionario con el futuro de internet.
Neal Stephenson is famous for throwing in everything and the kitchen sink.
As this is an earlier work of his, he has put more effort into the story and writing, with so many more ideas than his later work.
Would recommend if you have read his later work. Considered one of the best Sci-fi books of the year by critics when it was released.
The dates are a total guess; (side note: an annoyance I have on BookWyrm right now is that in order to list a book as read, you have to give exact read dates, which I don't track, especially for a book I read roughly 25 years ago). I enjoyed this a great deal; back at that time the techno-libertarian themes of the book appealed to me, 'Hiro Protagonist' was a cute joke, and there was useful social commentary. It was a fun way to explore things that have now come to be.
I really liked the story, the characters where good enough and the world the write created was really interesting. The whole "language" angle is my favorite part, really interesting, almost plausible and different enough from what I've read in the past. My main problem is with the ending: too quick, not at the same level as the rest of the story, in my opinion.
I’m a big fan of cyberpunk, and I thought I was going to like this more since it’s such a celebrated and seminal cyberpunk novel. I actually really enjoyed the cyberpunk parts, but the romance made me cringe, and not just because it was romance. Neal Stephenson is just bad at writing romance.
Overall it’s good, I think my expectations were just too high.
It would have been a great graphic novel.
With this, Stephenson is 1 for 3 with books of his I've read and enjoyed. That 1 is Seveneves.
For Snow Crash, I really enjoyed, specifically, the story/plot. However, the main characters I found uninteresting and somewhat flat. The world was ok, but the world building was not ideal. This could use some trimming and pacing changes as well. All in all, as 2 stars says, it was just ok.
SNOW CRASH is a cyberpunk fantasy starts with a high-stakes pizza delivery and ends with some cool explosives, taking a path that leads through many burbclaves, at least one cult, and a lot of exposition that relies on fascinations explanations of ancient Sumer to discuss a computer virus that's messing up brains.
It's using and remixing available stereotypes to their limit to create cartoonishly distilled essences that allow for quick action in the partitioned but not wholly divided setting. There are stark boundary lines all over the place, governing laws, behavior, and life-or-death stakes for everyone within these borders, lit by each Franchise's signage and governed by their franchisee manuals. Where the grooves of life are so well worn around most denizens that they barely notice a disturbance to their routines, unless they’re the protagonist, Hiro Protagonist or perhaps the Kourier Y.T. There's a franchise for most things, and some …
