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スノウ・クラッシュ

新規レビューを書く⇒みなさんの感想をお待ちしております！！

【この小説が収録されている参考書籍】

スノウ・クラッシュ〈上〉 (ハヤカワ文庫SF)

スノウ・クラッシュ〈下〉 (ハヤカワ文庫SF)

Snow Crash

スノウ・クラッシュ〔新版〕上 (ハヤカワ文庫SF)

スノウ・クラッシュ〔新版〕下 (ハヤカワ文庫SF)

スノウ・クラッシュの評価: 4.10/5点レビュー 1017件。 Cランク

書評･レビュー点数毎のグラフです

平均点4.10pt

絞込み：

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Amazonサイトに投稿されている書評･レビュー一覧です

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全116件 101～116　6/6ページ

<<123456

Engaging theme, initially interesting plot, bad ending.

I will next read Neuromancer (get ready, Amazon) after I found myself strongly agreeing with Psychlist's review of Jan 3, '15. I felt that Snowcrash had a good theme, which to me was based on an extreme overextended analogy between Computer viruses, memes or mind viruses, and the old fashioned DNA/RNA kind. That is what speculative sci/fi is supposed to trade on anyway. But like most all the successful writers of future history, the author only extends popular and famous trends to their extreme ends. It kinda reminds me of novels about the 21st century, written at the same time as this book (1989-1992), in which the Soviet Union played a prominent role.

The tech displayed in Snowcrash is dated now, as other reviewers observed. Action scenes are well-written and engaging. The book starts off like Hollywood, with the reader dropped into a crazy action scene in which some of the basic tenets of the book are laid out. The over-the-top action is self deprecating where it needs to be to maintain suspension of disbelief. The fist half of the book reads like a 'who-is-doing-it' thriller as the funky good guys learn more of what is going on and make contacts with the good honchos whose work they are inadvertently doing. Protagonist (yes, that is the family name of the main character) also gets to know the violent bad guys and their special powers as the first half of the story unfolds.

Spoiler Alert
The mid section is dominated by discussions between Protagonist and a Watson-like archival program, called the Librarian, who informs Protagonist of the connection, down through history of between various viruses; starting with a space borne "metavirus" that seeds all life; going to an improbable theory that, in the beginning, human language tended to coalesce rather than fragment; turning to Sumerian myths and a putative Enki, who was a neurolinguistic hacker who wrote a mind blowing incantation that literally tore the fabric of his culture to pieces, causing Babel and the break up of humanity into competing tribes (something deemed good because unity was causing stagnation): then on to classical antiquity in which champions of the old unity battled those who liked the competing/warring states state of affairs; finally to the present in which the big bad guy has gotten his mitts on the Ancient Sumerian written viruses and is using them to reestablish a unified world of babbling fools under his power. He infects computers with advanced malware, and infects hackers directly with a bitmap that hits their optic nerves, because they have "bits and bytes wired into their psyche" after lifetimes of coding. The rest of us he can mumble the Sumerian verbal malware to and it goes right to our brain bios and scrambles our internal logic.

Where is the Government of the United States of America in all this? It has apparently become a willing and minor accomplice to the big bad guy, and the US Navy is nowhere about when a flotilla of millions of his infected South and East Asian refugees (called 'refus") are about to be dumped onto CA by him. The language used at first to describe this made me wonder if a bit of "Camp of the Saints" was coming at me, but given that Protagonist is black/Korean and the big bad guy is a Texan who goes by the name "L. Bob," this was a false supposition. The author even throws in a scene in which a straw-man racist-bigot becomes sushi at the end of Protagonist's katana.

L. Bob and the President of the US, who no one recognizes until he reminds them, are in the plot together, and are trying to disempower the good guys--the Mafia and a Hong Kong magnate (I assume Triad, for the power he wields) who just want a peaceful breakup of the country and world in "franchulates," sovereign little territorial bits of turf. I forgot to diagram the plot as I read. This would have helped keep things in perspective.

The book did end all too abruptly with L. Bob, and presumably the nondescript POTUS, dying on the LAX runway as their getaway jet is smashed by a good "rat-thing," a dead dog, reanimated like RoboCop, and able crack the sound barrier when excited (here, fido, lets play your favorite, chase and catch the 9mm bullet). Our Protagonist had exited the book many pages earlier after thwarting a logic bomb attempt to fry the minds of the World's code writers. A tertiary character, the head of the good Mafia, though an old man, defeats L. Bob's best, glass knife wielding, henchman extraordinaire on the tarmac, and then the secondary character, a girl named "Y.T." walks out of LAX to get a ride home with her mom in the last sentence. It just felt like an editor told the author that he had to end the novel before it passed 500 paperback pages. The novel could have used a summary chapter to explain how his future world was ordered, and just what was the 'good' outcome, the events leading up to it, we could anticipate, and a bit on how all the main characters lived happily ever after, I'm so old fashioned.