Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy.In his 1999 essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash'". Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of the main influences on Snow Crash.The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According …
Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy.In his 1999 essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash'". Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of the main influences on Snow Crash.The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program, which he called a nam-shub, that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).
Stephenson originally planned Snow Crash as a computer-generated graphic novel in collaboration with artist Tony Sheeder. In the author's acknowledgments (multiple editions) Stephenson recalls: "it became clear that the only way to make the Mac do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept..."
Snow Crash was nominated for both the British Science Fiction Award in 1993 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994.
I suspect that I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I'd read it 30 years ago. Reading it now, the cyberpunk stylings all feel incredibly dated and are unable to paper over the many problems with this novel. Starting with the characters, who amount to a collection of one-dimensional stereotypes about which it is impossible to care.
The plot doesn't feel like it's going anywhere for much of the time and when Stephenson starts talking about technology, everything starts to become increasingly ludicrous. This book really hasn't aged well.
My girlfriend lent me this to read on the plane when I had a long flight. Overall entertaining, I didn't feel like I was slogging through (mostly), but it takes itself Way too seriously for a book whose main character is named Hiro Protagonist.
Boy-o-boy am I surprised I didn't like this more. Its rating here on Goodreads is very good. People whose opinions usually align with mine gave it 5-stars. 10 years ago I read Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon' and really liked it: I gave it 5 stars. Esquire put Snow Crash on their list "The 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time"!
Some of the ideas are pretty interesting, and the story outline is good. But the thing is, I just never really got into it. I found the writing to be bland. (Detail: The writing 'voice' of the robot dog felt like a person trying to write in the voice of a robot dog.) I found the protagonist Hiro to be kinda boring, the love interest was unconvincing, and the big bad never felt super menacing. I did like the Aleut assassin Raven, and kinda liked Y.T. I did not like their …
Boy-o-boy am I surprised I didn't like this more. Its rating here on Goodreads is very good. People whose opinions usually align with mine gave it 5-stars. 10 years ago I read Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon' and really liked it: I gave it 5 stars. Esquire put Snow Crash on their list "The 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time"!
Some of the ideas are pretty interesting, and the story outline is good. But the thing is, I just never really got into it. I found the writing to be bland. (Detail: The writing 'voice' of the robot dog felt like a person trying to write in the voice of a robot dog.) I found the protagonist Hiro to be kinda boring, the love interest was unconvincing, and the big bad never felt super menacing. I did like the Aleut assassin Raven, and kinda liked Y.T. I did not like their relationship though.
For me it's a middling 2+, rounded up to 3. For context: 1 star is 'did not finish', and 2 is 'I thought about putting it down but soldiered on', so 3 is the 'right' rating for me for this book even if it feels generous.
As for liking Cryptonomicon but not really liking this one: Cryptonomicon was published around 7 years after Snow Crash. I'm thinking, hoping, that it means that I like newer Stephenson books so I can maybe try another one some day.
I will admit it took a while for me to warm up to it, but it's actually pretty entertaining and has some cool ideas re: what it means to be a "hacker".
I like Neal Stephenson's talks (e.g., Authors@Google, his Slashdot interview, etc.) a lot, so I've felt ok with letting Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver sit on my shelf for years. I picked up Snow Crash after enjoying reading his brother-in-law's blog https://sawiggins.wordpress.com---this is relevant because Stephenson credits discussions with said brother-in-law for a lot of the Asherah and Sumerian mythology backstory---and then recently getting more interested in Sumerian and Canaanite mythology through my own brother-in-law. What I mean is, I wanted to see how a hacker-cum-speculative fiction writer addresses ancient and modern religion. Most hackers (technical term used in this book and in regular life to mean "maker"), I think, are interested in religion. Well, most hackers are interested in everything---and being interested in everything will help finish reading this book.
Stephenson's writing is awkward and ugly, contrasting equally with the euphony of, say, Tolkien and the slickness of the average …
I like Neal Stephenson's talks (e.g., Authors@Google, his Slashdot interview, etc.) a lot, so I've felt ok with letting Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver sit on my shelf for years. I picked up Snow Crash after enjoying reading his brother-in-law's blog https://sawiggins.wordpress.com---this is relevant because Stephenson credits discussions with said brother-in-law for a lot of the Asherah and Sumerian mythology backstory---and then recently getting more interested in Sumerian and Canaanite mythology through my own brother-in-law. What I mean is, I wanted to see how a hacker-cum-speculative fiction writer addresses ancient and modern religion. Most hackers (technical term used in this book and in regular life to mean "maker"), I think, are interested in religion. Well, most hackers are interested in everything---and being interested in everything will help finish reading this book.
Stephenson's writing is awkward and ugly, contrasting equally with the euphony of, say, Tolkien and the slickness of the average popular SF writer. Every few pages, a firework of a simile explodes. There's an encyclopedia's worth of juicy tangents and interesting asides. You all know this. You all will read it someday, and some will make it to the end. And it will be good.
Back to slinging code. And applying modern germ theory to three thousand year old histories.
In a time in the not so distance future where the federal government of the United States has yielded most of its power to private organizations and entrepreneurs, franchising individual sovereignty reigns supreme. Merchant armies complete national defence, highway companies compete for drivers and the mafia own the pizza delivery game. Hiro Protagonist, “Last of the freelance hackers and greatest swordfighter in the world”, finds himself without his pizza delivery job when a young skateboard “Kourier” named Y.T. tries to hitch a ride on his vehicle. Leading them on a grand scale adventure trying to uncover just what exactly Snow Crash is.
Like all of Neal Stephenson books, you can expect this one to cover subjects like history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, and philosophy, all while keeping to his cyberpunk thriller style. He says this book was named after the early mac software failure mode:
“When …
In a time in the not so distance future where the federal government of the United States has yielded most of its power to private organizations and entrepreneurs, franchising individual sovereignty reigns supreme. Merchant armies complete national defence, highway companies compete for drivers and the mafia own the pizza delivery game. Hiro Protagonist, “Last of the freelance hackers and greatest swordfighter in the world”, finds himself without his pizza delivery job when a young skateboard “Kourier” named Y.T. tries to hitch a ride on his vehicle. Leading them on a grand scale adventure trying to uncover just what exactly Snow Crash is.
Like all of Neal Stephenson books, you can expect this one to cover subjects like history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, and philosophy, all while keeping to his cyberpunk thriller style. He says this book was named after the early mac software failure mode:
“When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a ‘snow crash’”
His goal, was to take the reader on a “full tour of Sumerian culture, a fully instantiated anarcho-capitalist society, and a virtual meta-society patronized by financial, social, and intellectual elites.” Snow Crash is a pseudo-narcotic or is it something far worse; Hiro and Y.T (short for Yours Truly) slowly discover that it is in fact a computer virus capable of infecting the brains of careless hackers in the Metaverse (the successor to the internet) and a mind altering virus in reality.
One of the things I liked most about Snow Crash was the fact that Neal Stephenson showed us how to write a kick ass teenage girl protagonist. Young Adult novels like to use a strong teenaged girl as a main character but few of them really know how to make her great; most are just Katniss clones. While Y.T’s narrative wasn’t as focused as that of Hiro, it was more of a pleasure to read, she seemed to accomplish the most in the entire book and she did it her own way without compromising her character. Sure, she did manage to get into some trouble and make some bad choices but she’s human, I expect them to struggle and fall and recover from their mistakes.
While this was a fun and exciting novel there are some things that I just didn’t like; firstly each ethical group portrayed the stereotypical extreme. The mafia, the rednecks from New South Africa, the Pentecostals, Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong and so on, all felt very much like the cliché versions of these cultures and Stephenson played on the stereotypes a little too heavily. I know they were only minor plot arcs but it still felt like it was overdone. The most interesting people in the book are the ones living outside their cultural and ethnic groups; Hiro, Y.T and Raven.
Then there is my biggest problem with the book, which is a similar problem I had with Reamde and that is I feel like Neal Stephenson turns some chapters into a Wikipedia articles just to give us all the interesting information he has on a subject he is exploring. In this book it is every time the librarian talks, there is heaps and heaps of interesting, and sometimes irrelevant, information and the way Stephenson tried to stops it become and wall of text is the awkward attempt to make it sound like a conversation. Hiro keeps interrupting the librarian’s information with very simplified reiteration, agreements and metaphors, I found it incredible annoying.
Overall this was a fast paced cyber thriller with some weird and unusual tangents and twists. Stephenson has some interesting ideas about the future of the world but for some reason I never feel a strong connection to his books. I think I prefer William Gibson’s style and take on the future cyber world but can’t fault Stephenson for what he does. Not that I’ve read many books from this author and there are plenty more I want to read, maybe I just feel like he over simplifies and draws his novels out a little too much.
