Paperback, 440 pages
English language
Published Aug. 13, 1993 by Penguin (ROC imprint).
Within the Metaverse, Hiro is offered a datafile named Snow Crash by a man named Raven who hints that it is a form of narcotic. Hiro's friend and fellow hacker Da5id views a bitmap image contained in the file which causes his computer to crash and Da5id to suffer brain damage in the real world.
This is the future we now live where all can be brought to life in the metaverse and now all can be taken away. Follow on an adventure with Hiro and YT as they work with the mob to uncover a plot of biblical proportions.
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.
The book ranges a pretty wide variety of topics, probably more interesting to readers who program.
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 …
Now, that the Metaverse is becoming a brand one might reread this classic and realise how visionary Stephensons' book was in its day. Though some things are outdated, other parts feel very contemporary.
I feel science fiction plots rarely mix, like this book does, real history, extremely accurate predictions, far extrapolation of technology, and a captivating plot through and through. To be far the very end of the book was a bit underwhelming, but overall 5* :)
Wrote a whole long review about why I didn't like it, but got bored of my own opinion.
In short:
While clever, the linguistic virus, Sumerian, and religion lessons were long and dull
Characters unbelievable, and didn't really invest in them.
Sex with a minor scene - didn't want that
Did like:
the world
the technology
the prologue bit about pizza delivery. Loved that world building, really great opening! Then the main story wrecked it (for me).
I knew nothing of the content of this book coming in, although it's been on my radar to-read for 20 years now. Being late to the party I suspected a somewhat dated cyberpunk hacker expose: similar to Gibson's Neuromancer.
This is true in some sense, although I don't think it dates as poorly as Neuromancer does. There's not a gigantic amount of technical jargon that's fallen out of use (PROM - programmable read-only memory) is perhaps the only concept that kids growing up now wouldn't understand directly (even though we still use it a lot in our daily lives, RFID for example).
What I wasn't expecting was the connections to ancient Sumer, religions and gnosis; language hacking, culture exploration and a whole raft (!) of other tropes tying together to uncover an answer to one of societies oldest questions.
A thrilling ride all in all.
The ending felt a little …
I knew nothing of the content of this book coming in, although it's been on my radar to-read for 20 years now. Being late to the party I suspected a somewhat dated cyberpunk hacker expose: similar to Gibson's Neuromancer.
This is true in some sense, although I don't think it dates as poorly as Neuromancer does. There's not a gigantic amount of technical jargon that's fallen out of use (PROM - programmable read-only memory) is perhaps the only concept that kids growing up now wouldn't understand directly (even though we still use it a lot in our daily lives, RFID for example).
What I wasn't expecting was the connections to ancient Sumer, religions and gnosis; language hacking, culture exploration and a whole raft (!) of other tropes tying together to uncover an answer to one of societies oldest questions.
A thrilling ride all in all.
The ending felt a little sharp perhaps. Things tied up, sure, but I may have liked a epilogue.
A cyberpunk satire of capitalistic culture wrapped around a plot based on neurolinguistics. The protagonist (literally Hiro Protagonist) is written as an iconic hero (a hero that doesn't undergo any significant changes over the course of the story) rather than a transformational one. This seems to bother some readers, but is unsurprising knowing that the book started out as a graphic novel project, a medium that often features iconic heroes.
Published in 1992, the book appears to be set around the year 2000 based on clues given by the apparent ages of characters compared to their background. The book is obviously dated at this point, but it wasn't too jarring for me.
I did have some issues with the book. It took me a while to figure out that the story is jumping between two different time periods for the first few chapters. Non-obvious time skips are becoming a new …
A cyberpunk satire of capitalistic culture wrapped around a plot based on neurolinguistics. The protagonist (literally Hiro Protagonist) is written as an iconic hero (a hero that doesn't undergo any significant changes over the course of the story) rather than a transformational one. This seems to bother some readers, but is unsurprising knowing that the book started out as a graphic novel project, a medium that often features iconic heroes.
Published in 1992, the book appears to be set around the year 2000 based on clues given by the apparent ages of characters compared to their background. The book is obviously dated at this point, but it wasn't too jarring for me.
I did have some issues with the book. It took me a while to figure out that the story is jumping between two different time periods for the first few chapters. Non-obvious time skips are becoming a new pet peeve of mine.
More importantly, while the main female character is generally well written, there is a very problematic scene near the end of the book where the character becomes incredibly horny in a situation of duress, and is so affected by it that she forgets very important things. So, an age-inappropriate relationship (she's 15 and he appears to be about twice her age) where the female doesn't have any real choice, but she gets so horny that she doesn't mind and actually loses higher thought processes. Yeah, no problems there.
If you leave that out you're left with a comic book style action adventure with some long ramblings on the nature of neurolinguistics as they relate to ancient Sumeria and binary machine language.
3 stars is too low, but 4 is a little bit too high, this is a 3.5 if I ever read one.
I never really got into the story the way I expected to. The story has everything I think I should want, and some more stuff on top of that, but none of it hit home for me the same way stories like Ready Player One, or movies like Tron have done.
I think that none of the characters were really likeable enough for me to really care about them. I'm not sure if that's the story, or the reading of the audiobook I listened to.
The book is definitely suffering because I finished Cryptonomicon directly before reading this. I think that book trumps this one in every way. The audiobook reading is better, too.
I'm going to give Neal Stephenson books a break for a while, and then …
3 stars is too low, but 4 is a little bit too high, this is a 3.5 if I ever read one.
I never really got into the story the way I expected to. The story has everything I think I should want, and some more stuff on top of that, but none of it hit home for me the same way stories like Ready Player One, or movies like Tron have done.
I think that none of the characters were really likeable enough for me to really care about them. I'm not sure if that's the story, or the reading of the audiobook I listened to.
The book is definitely suffering because I finished Cryptonomicon directly before reading this. I think that book trumps this one in every way. The audiobook reading is better, too.
I'm going to give Neal Stephenson books a break for a while, and then probably go for the Baroque Cycle.
Fantastic 90s futurism
My new favourite book.
You don't respect those people very much, Y.T., because you're young and arrogant. But I don't respect them much either, because I'm old and wise.
A Blade Runner meets 1984 world wrapped in Steampunk and a dash of virtual reality. I was on board with the world Stephenson created. It was different, but yet similar enough that it wasn't too improbable.
I liked Hiro and Y.T. as characters and the dystopian world they interacted with was fun. Harpooning delivery kids, pizza delivery that is taken seriously and it's all being run by mobsters, gangs and everything in between. It was fun and kept me reading to learn more about the world.
My enjoyment all changed when Hiro met the Librarian and started asking questions about Snow Crash. And once it crossed over in to several pages of theology and history my interest came to a halt. The story changing locales …
You don't respect those people very much, Y.T., because you're young and arrogant. But I don't respect them much either, because I'm old and wise.
A Blade Runner meets 1984 world wrapped in Steampunk and a dash of virtual reality. I was on board with the world Stephenson created. It was different, but yet similar enough that it wasn't too improbable.
I liked Hiro and Y.T. as characters and the dystopian world they interacted with was fun. Harpooning delivery kids, pizza delivery that is taken seriously and it's all being run by mobsters, gangs and everything in between. It was fun and kept me reading to learn more about the world.
My enjoyment all changed when Hiro met the Librarian and started asking questions about Snow Crash. And once it crossed over in to several pages of theology and history my interest came to a halt. The story changing locales to the floating colony of refugees couldn't win me back, I was already lost and finishing the story became a struggle.
Because it's not really camping when you don't have a house to go back to.
I had high expectations for this book, especially after enjoying Seveneves so much, but this book wasn't cut out for me and I feel bad giving it a one star but it wasn't a good two weeks reading this story.
At the start, Snow crash is very jarring with strange and unexplained jargon and slang from a cyberpunkish future. Terms like 'deliverator', 'kourier' (and palusibility of what they are) don't seem so strange in some time. The plot is a tasty mix of cyberpunk themes(like big corporations, virtual reality, hackers etc.), linguistics, history/mythology and you will remember things from it for a long time!
