Snow Crash , written by Neal Town Stephenson, was first published in 1992 and follows in the footsteps of the cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson, though Stephenson breaks away from typical "techno punk" stories by enhancing this story with large amounts of satire and his own brand of black humour. This is why it is invariably described as ‘genre-busting’. He went on in The Diamond Age to envision the next century in the same way.
Snow Crash went straight to the top of the fiction best-seller charts upon its release and established Stephenson as a major science fiction writer for the 1990s. Bruce Sterling called him ‘the hottest science fiction writer in America’ and that Snow Crash was ‘without question the biggest SF novel of the 1990s.’
Like many post-modern novels, Snow Crash has a unique style and a chaotic structure which many readers find difficult to follow. Like Stephenson’s other books, it is packed full of subtle references to geography, politics, anthropology, philosophy, history, and computer science, which many find they do not appreciate until several readings.
The book began life as a possible computer generated graphic novel collaboration with the artist Tony Sheeder, and maybe that is the reason why the various scenes seem so well defined, life-like and colourful.
I liked this book; I liked all the asides, the jokes and the set-pieces, but I didn’t rate it much as a sci-fi thriller. It was advertised as a ‘gigathriller of the information age’. It didn’t grip me and make me turn every page as Cryptonomicon had done. Partly, I have to put that down to having also just read The Da Vinci Code and maybe I’ve just had my fill of these ‘bible code’ conspiracy theories for the moment, even if this Infocalypse was ‘Old Testament’ rather than ‘New Testament’. But also, the puzzle itself is solved, and the ending can be seen coming long before you actually get to it.
I liked the Metaverse as it was described and I’m sure it is coming soon as a successor to the Internet. I liked his solution for stray dogs as supersonic isotope powered Rat things, the skateboard ‘pooning Kouriers, sacrifice zones, Uncle Enzo’s CostaNostra Pizza Inc., and the bizarre future political and military structure of the USA and fragmentation of its society.
I also liked the Ng railgun weapon called ‘Reason’, as in: “I told you they’d listen to reasonâ€, even if it is only the beta version. Ultima ratio regum – The Last Argument of Kings
In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizzas; promotes a rock band, with roommate Vitaly Chernobyl; is a stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation; does a little computer hacking, and lives in a U-Stor-It cargo container at the side of the airport; but in the Metaverse he is a warrior prince, and he wrote the code for the Black Sun, the coolest meeting place in the metaverse. It helps your sword fighting a little when you also wrote the rules for virtual combat.
He is plunged headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, and he races to defeat Raven, a shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about Infocalypse, when his old girlfriend disappears and the virus hospitalises her new boyfriend, and hacker guru, Da5id.
Hiro is helped by streetwise, 14 year old, Y.T., a Kourier for a company called RadiKS, who rides on a futuristic skateboard, with a futuristic protection suit, and whose mother works for what remains of the Federal government. He is also helped by his employer, the Mafia, headed by lovable but ruthless Uncle Enzo; Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, now the owner of large tracts of the USA; and Mr. Ng of Ng Security Industries.
Stacked up against them are Raven, in reality Dmitri Ravinoff, a crazed harpooning Aleut out for nuclear revenge against all Americans; billionaire fibre-optic monopolist Bob L. Rife and his ‘raft’ of boat people surrounding the USS Enterprise; Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates chain of Pentecostal churches, and even the President of the USA.
The virus itself is really a machine code hack for humans. The Sumerian languages, and other deep structure-based languages, were superior languages to anything that came after them because they were binary code languages that spoke directly to our brainstems. These original instructions, or me , were controlled by en , powerful priests who watched the skies and dispensed the ‘me’ at the correct season of the year. One priest, Enki, was especially good at his job and had the ability to write new code – he was a hacker. He was the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us. He realised that for the human race to advance, they had to break free of this pre-programmed society. He created the ‘nam-shub’ of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the ‘me’. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language. After Babel, people began to develop higher languages that were not just instructions that commanded us to carry out tasks, but were more generalised. We began to think about abstract issues and it was the beginning of rational religion.
To create some order in society, Enki and his son, Marduk, wrote a code of laws –The Code of Hammurabi. It was partially successful, and modern religions resulted, except for the particularly tenacious cult of Asherah. They passed on their own virus by exchange of bodily fluids that passed through cell walls and went to the cell nucleus, altering the DNA so that they are more susceptible to ‘me’ and more apt to speak in tongues.
L. Bob Rife discovered that he could control both a huge workforce Pentecostal converts of illiterates and alliterate TV watchers from the Burbclaves, using ‘me’, and also the smaller, but extremely literate power elite who inhabit the Metaverse, in a much more violent fashion by damaging their brains with binary viruses. He saw a way of taking over complete control of the world.
Snow Crash is a drug; it is an injectable biological virus, and also a computer virus that comes on a HyperCard; it is dangerous, and it must be stopped.
Snow Crash went straight to the top of the fiction best-seller charts upon its release and established Stephenson as a major science fiction writer for the 1990s. Bruce Sterling called him ‘the hottest science fiction writer in America’ and that Snow Crash was ‘without question the biggest SF novel of the 1990s.’
Like many post-modern novels, Snow Crash has a unique style and a chaotic structure which many readers find difficult to follow. Like Stephenson’s other books, it is packed full of subtle references to geography, politics, anthropology, philosophy, history, and computer science, which many find they do not appreciate until several readings.
The book began life as a possible computer generated graphic novel collaboration with the artist Tony Sheeder, and maybe that is the reason why the various scenes seem so well defined, life-like and colourful.
I liked this book; I liked all the asides, the jokes and the set-pieces, but I didn’t rate it much as a sci-fi thriller. It was advertised as a ‘gigathriller of the information age’. It didn’t grip me and make me turn every page as Cryptonomicon had done. Partly, I have to put that down to having also just read The Da Vinci Code and maybe I’ve just had my fill of these ‘bible code’ conspiracy theories for the moment, even if this Infocalypse was ‘Old Testament’ rather than ‘New Testament’. But also, the puzzle itself is solved, and the ending can be seen coming long before you actually get to it.
I liked the Metaverse as it was described and I’m sure it is coming soon as a successor to the Internet. I liked his solution for stray dogs as supersonic isotope powered Rat things, the skateboard ‘pooning Kouriers, sacrifice zones, Uncle Enzo’s CostaNostra Pizza Inc., and the bizarre future political and military structure of the USA and fragmentation of its society.
I also liked the Ng railgun weapon called ‘Reason’, as in: “I told you they’d listen to reasonâ€, even if it is only the beta version. Ultima ratio regum – The Last Argument of Kings
In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizzas; promotes a rock band, with roommate Vitaly Chernobyl; is a stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation; does a little computer hacking, and lives in a U-Stor-It cargo container at the side of the airport; but in the Metaverse he is a warrior prince, and he wrote the code for the Black Sun, the coolest meeting place in the metaverse. It helps your sword fighting a little when you also wrote the rules for virtual combat.
He is plunged headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, and he races to defeat Raven, a shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about Infocalypse, when his old girlfriend disappears and the virus hospitalises her new boyfriend, and hacker guru, Da5id.
Hiro is helped by streetwise, 14 year old, Y.T., a Kourier for a company called RadiKS, who rides on a futuristic skateboard, with a futuristic protection suit, and whose mother works for what remains of the Federal government. He is also helped by his employer, the Mafia, headed by lovable but ruthless Uncle Enzo; Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, now the owner of large tracts of the USA; and Mr. Ng of Ng Security Industries.
Stacked up against them are Raven, in reality Dmitri Ravinoff, a crazed harpooning Aleut out for nuclear revenge against all Americans; billionaire fibre-optic monopolist Bob L. Rife and his ‘raft’ of boat people surrounding the USS Enterprise; Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates chain of Pentecostal churches, and even the President of the USA.
The virus itself is really a machine code hack for humans. The Sumerian languages, and other deep structure-based languages, were superior languages to anything that came after them because they were binary code languages that spoke directly to our brainstems. These original instructions, or me , were controlled by en , powerful priests who watched the skies and dispensed the ‘me’ at the correct season of the year. One priest, Enki, was especially good at his job and had the ability to write new code – he was a hacker. He was the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us. He realised that for the human race to advance, they had to break free of this pre-programmed society. He created the ‘nam-shub’ of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the ‘me’. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language. After Babel, people began to develop higher languages that were not just instructions that commanded us to carry out tasks, but were more generalised. We began to think about abstract issues and it was the beginning of rational religion.
To create some order in society, Enki and his son, Marduk, wrote a code of laws –The Code of Hammurabi. It was partially successful, and modern religions resulted, except for the particularly tenacious cult of Asherah. They passed on their own virus by exchange of bodily fluids that passed through cell walls and went to the cell nucleus, altering the DNA so that they are more susceptible to ‘me’ and more apt to speak in tongues.
L. Bob Rife discovered that he could control both a huge workforce Pentecostal converts of illiterates and alliterate TV watchers from the Burbclaves, using ‘me’, and also the smaller, but extremely literate power elite who inhabit the Metaverse, in a much more violent fashion by damaging their brains with binary viruses. He saw a way of taking over complete control of the world.
Snow Crash is a drug; it is an injectable biological virus, and also a computer virus that comes on a HyperCard; it is dangerous, and it must be stopped.
.
