Snow Crash

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.”