Snow Crash

Hard to collect my thoughts on this one. Took a really long time to get going. The 2nd half was better and more connected. The world was cool, a high tech low life corporate America ad absurdum. The central idea of a latent root language in the brain, that if mastered can be used to program people, is interesting but its expression in this novel is layered in a tonne of religious-historical discourse which at times both hampers the action and labours the point. The full extent of the philosophy of language behind the idea wasn't really brought out. Then again, it's not a philosophy essay.

The book could be cut down a lot and not lose anything. A tonne of the novel is just building up the mafia, building up YT, building up Raven. Does the final confrontation pay off? Not..really. The ending is fine enough, a little rushed, the baddies get their comeuppance, the heroes poon off into the sunset (... I never did get over that word). If you're already sold on how cool the world is by the first few chapters, which I was, you'll slog through a lot of the book like “yeah I get it, get on with it now”.

But there's a world changing, understanding-of-humanity changing idea at the core here. A reimagining of the reasons behind the evolution of all language, culture, and religion. So despite it being a bit bloated, it's still a 4 star book in my mind. Slimmed down and streamlined it could have been a 5, there's plenty to think about here.

The 17 year old me who downloaded hack/phreak text files over dialup really wanted to read it, and I know he wouldn't have been ready for it back then. The 38 year old me who just finished it for the first time... he got it, but maybe he's too old to get excited about it any more.

Maybe it's the right book at the wrong time. But I'm glad I read it.

(warning: not really a review, more of a thing to remind me of the book)

Overall, a fairly cinematic story akin to the genre I'd expect The Matrix to fall into. If I'm completely honest, I did occasionally lose track of what was going on through the story (it took me a good few weeks to read it), but the story and two main characters managed to carry me along.

I also have to admit that it took me a little while to get past the corny named main character “Hiro Protagonist” and the overly macho techno all black, motorcycles and swords. Of course, Hiro is the world's best swordsman...obviously. Though when I just went with it, it was pretty good fun.

Neal Stephenson writing was extremely good at visualising a scene and the objects in the world the characters live in (in reading the acknowledgement I learnt that the book was intended as a graphic novel and I wonder if there was graphic work he was describing). All the same, it was very easy to read and see the world as we moved from reality, to the metaverse (virtual world), to vehicles and different landscapes.

There's a tonne of historical and religious background to the story too, most of which I understand to be based on real research (from our universe) and the depth of which was incredible.

The Snow Crash is (supposed to be) a virus that exists in both the digital world and the real world. The story creates (perhaps tenuous?) links between computer/digital ideas and pre-biblical times explaining that the story of Babel was the first instance of the virus, transmitted through verbal programming, affecting humankind.

The two other main-ish characters were Y.T (a young women/teenager who we follow in parallel with Hiro) and Raven. Y.T. is really fun, and perhaps more relatable since she's a little more “regular” (compared with Hiro) - just kitted out with lots of tricks in her suit.

Raven is the uber baddie, throwing glass spears, cutting through bulletproof suits and generally being invisible. He definitely plays the “main henchman” really well, and we even get to understand his motives which I love for a “proper” baddie.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, left a little confused about the motivation about some of the connections in the book (like what really motivates Y.T. to join forces with Hiro, or how Hiro was one of the first creators of the metaverse, yet he's somehow a promotor for his roommate's band...).

Sorry, not much of a review, more a prompt for my own memory in years to come!

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.

like a more intellectual dan brown - not for everyone. his political satire is cutting, modern and absolutely BASED.

like brave new world and 1984, it presents a disturbing sci fi dystopian feels surreal and realistic at the same time; but unlike these classics, it's vision has yet to become outdated or deteriorate into cliche. it's an intriguing vision of a true anarcho-capitalist technocratic non-state and how its inner workings might look like. then again, someone probably sees it as a utopia to aspire towards, just like some inevitably argue brave new world is a utopia.

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.”

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.

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!

I feel the books was slow. There are about a million things going on and at times it feels like the pace is picking up only to move the story slightly forward. The world created is great, the characters are vivid, and at times it reads well.

I read this as a “You've got to read this book!” Recommendation and while I see what people like, I just found myself seeing how many pages I had left.

Witty and exciting cyber-punk. I can't believe I missed this guy back in the 1990s. This was reminiscent of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy with its hipster-youth outsider characters, division of haves and have-nots, corporate-controlled dystopia, and the combining of the spiritual with technology.

There are tons of funny one-liners; Snow Crash was worth it just for this alone. I also fell for the colorful characters I could root for even if at times they were impossibly attractive, savvy, and quick.

A few things in the plot and some motivations were slightly unresolved and fuzzy but overall I loved reading this.

The main character Hiro really did feel like Mary Sue (the constant saying that he's the greatest swordsman in the world, which is totally irrelevant, etc) but despite that, I LOVED this book. The idea of an ancient Sumerian proto-language that allows for linguistic bio-hacking of brains? Sign me up.

This was a book that wasn't as clever as it thought it was. I had the exact same complaints as with ‘Seveneves' - long, ponderous and dull with one dimensional characters. I kept wondering how many more pages left I had to power through. Stephenson is very popular and regarded as a sci-fi legend, so clearly I'm wrong. It just isn't for me.

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.

Reading this was like a mix of attending a history of language lecture and reading a detailed explanation of what the future of the internet would be like from a 90's perspective.

This sounds worse than it is as I actually really enjoyed the concept of linguistic viruses affecting our evolution and was blown away at how much the author got right about how we interact on the internet today; however, the characters and through arc let the story down a bit as I wasn't as invested in them as I needed to be for such a book.

Glad I read it but wouldn't be tempted to pick it up again.

Well that was a strange book. The first quarter of the book was really hard to get into, but once you get past the weirdness it becomes interesting. The ideas expressed in this book are really interesting and powerful, however the way it is written makes it quite hard to dwell into. Still an interesting read regarding as it's considered a must read by a lot of the Silicon Tycoons.

When the internet was just starting to become a thing, no one knew quite what it would do to society. Stephenson took a guess, added some William Gibson and some humour and swords, and created a really fun story. (He was WAY off though.)
It did feel a little dated of course, not just because it takes place approximately now, but is nothing at all like our present day, but also the relationships were a little iffy and the gang and racial factions were a bit hard to swallow. I recognize that this is extrapolated from LA in the 90s, which was consumed by gangs and racial factions at the time, so I wouldn't say that it is problematic, but I think Stephenson would agree that if he applied this concept of a neural linguistic virus in the near future now, it would come out very different.
That said, Stephenson's trademark ability to combine humour, excitement and fascinating details over larger-than-life, mind-bending philosophical concepts is very evident here, and I certainly enjoyed the ride.
I listened to the audiobook, which I wouldn't recommend too highly. Stephenson books are tricky on audio because he adds a lot of details and multiple perspectives, including the perspective of a cyborg super-dog in this case, so while I usually listen to books a little sped up, I couldn't in this case. Also, the intermission between chapters is odd and feels a little racist, though it turns out it's just an approximation of what Sumerian would sound like, but all this meant I wasn't too thrilled with the audio. Also, the narrator did a bad job with the lead character's voice in my opinion.
But overall, it was a fun and exciting read for sure!

Oh, and I just want to add, Neo from the Matrix is a total rip off of Hiro.