Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)
by Neal Stephenson

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Book Reviews of Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)

Book Review: A Rare Accomplishment In the Genre
Summary: 5 Stars

Snow Crash is an astonishing, clever, funny, suspenseful work of the imagination. I've read a couple of Neal Stephenson's books (Cryptonomicon and The Diamoind Age, both of which I highly reccommend), and I still think this is his best novel. In Snow Crash, a part-time hacker, information-scrounge, and delivery boy for Uncle Enzo's Cosa Nostra Pizzerias, and full-time Metaverse (virtual reality) samurai named Hiro Protagonist (one of the best names since Billy Pilgrim!), is slowly drawn into a mystery involving a virus program called Snow Crash, which is claiming not only the computers but the minds on hackers the world over, including Hiro's best friend. Who is behind all this, and what it has to do with Sumerian mythology and the hard-wiring of the human language centers is what Hiro must find out, while at the same time he attempts to prevent the further spread of the Snow Crash virus. Along the way he falls in with a skateboard punk named Y.T., who is more instrumental to the story than might first be suggested, and who is the novel's most intriguing character, if only because her investigations are almost more revealing than Hiro's are -- in fact, Hiro comes off as a bit of a cypher compared to her. But I digress. All of these events take place in Stephenson's richly- imagined near-future, where the American government has become a tight-sphinctered, half-failed corporation, while corporations have become governments, and a multimedia mogul has cobbled together a vast fleet of refugee boats from various countries, in the most questionable act of philanthropy since Ted Turner tried to buy the UN. There are also gated communities that are not just gated but practically self-contained universes. And then there is the Metaverse...Stephenson's delightful extrapolation of the Internet, where you can be anyone you want to be, whether that person is yourself or someone else, within reasonable limits of course. The Metaverse is also as overloaded with advertising as the 'net is, and it was Stephenson's clever description of M.V. ads that really hooked me on this book for good (not that I needed much more persuasion at that point). The Metaverse, and the weird, wired world which surrounds it, are both so enthrallingly, memorably...I was going to say realistically, but perhaps a better term would be surrealistically, rendered, that reading about it is one of the novel's high points. Every moment of Snow Crash, practically, is full of mystery, intrigue, brightly-drawn (for the most part) characters, and humor. Oh, didn't I mention that Stephenson is a bloody riot to read? The man is a futurist-humorist-satirist of the first caliber...I would say worthy of Vonnegut, but that's pretty lofty company, and probably not entirely accurate. yet Stephenson comes darned close, and he, along with Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, and Douglas Adams, is one of the few authors who can make me laugh right out loud, so mordantly witty is his stuff. But Stephenson is also more than a wit, as the clever premise behind Snow Crash suggests. His concept, that human consciousness and language concepts are as programmable as any computer, is as intelligently-reasoned as any science-fiction concept I've ever come across, and one which would later be revisited, reexplored, and expanded upon by Greg Bear in Darwin's Radio (see my review, he said in a shameless plug), although Bear added some wrinkles even Stephenson didn't think of. And in linking his concept back to both the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, and to the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish, Stephenson creates a tapestry of invention that few writers in my experience have been able to equal, all told elegantly in Stephenson's supple, muscular prose. And if none of what I've written here convinces you to pick up Snow Crash, maybe this will: There is a tendency in science-fiction for writers to create improbable post-apocalypse dystopias (i.e., The Matrix, Mad Max, or any one of a hundred bad stories written by good writers -- even the great Harlan Ellison has written his share), and in my opinion such stories are not only ill-conceived but also a cheat. It's easy to imagine a post-apocalyptic world (where there seems to be all the gasoline, computer time, and electric energy available, no matter how wretched the rest of the world has become) -- in fact, it's too easy, which is part of the problem. Show me instead a far more difficult feat...instead of a blue-sky approximation of the post-apocalypse, show me how the world is GOING to end. That is what Vonnegut has done time and again (cf. "Harrison Bergeron" and the novel Slaughterhouse Five), and that is pretty much what Stephenson is doing with Snow Crash. He isn't worried about the post-apocalypse...but rather, about the aptly-named Infocalypse which may be happening all around us even now, right under our noses. And that, above all else, is why I love Snow Crash so much. It is rare, unique, and a thrill to read, and I would reccommend it without reservation to anybody.

Summary of Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)

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