スノウ・クラッシュ

Many novels that deal with technology make the mistake of bragging about specs for a setup - like how many megabytes or MegaHertz something is. This book is very savvy in that it does not do that. As such, it ages well today and doesn't feel like some outdated relic. The story starts a bit slow. I wasn't a big fan of the first ~20 pages - many authors seem to put too much effort into describing every minute detail of a new story (not unique to this author)... again just my opinion and it makes it a chore reading the book. But after that, the story moves along at a good pace throughout and it was a very good read.

Really, really, fun read. You can clearly see this was one of the inspirations for Ready Player One as a book/movie.

Read this book 20 years ago or so.

Glad it was rereleased in Kindle format.

I read ebooks’ exclusively.

I have a 64 GB iPhone I read my kindle and ePub books on. My iPhone has over 1000 books on that iPhone.

I reread this book recently, and was surprised that a 25 year old book could hold up so well. Speculative fiction can often be overtaken by reality, but there were few examples of that in Snow Crash.

The book offers a lot for a reader who wants some real substance in fiction. The backstory of the "Snow Crash" virus (about 2/3 the way through the book) was perhaps the longest pure exposition section I've ever seen in a work of fiction, yet I was riveted by it. Neal Stephenson is perhaps the smartest person writing fiction today, and it shows in the way he can research a topic, comprehend it deeply, and then render an entertaining explanation in the context of a story.

It takes amazing chutzpah to name your main charcter "Hiro Protagonist", but Stephenson pulls off what others probably couldn't, and Hiro is indeed an excellent protagonist. A man of multiple and amazing talents, nevertheless the book opens with him delivering pizzas. Early on, Hiro seems to just blunder into key events, but eventually he rises to be more pro-active and becomes a true hero.

The dystopian society is at times all too plausible. It seems Stephenson saw in advance the breakdown of our institutions in the 21st century. (That also helped him generate a completely different dystopia in The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) , which you should definitely read if you like Snow Crash.)

If Stephenson has one flaw as a writer, it's that most of his books have abrupt endings. This one leaves a few loose ends. Without spoiling things too much, I'll mention one example. A main character possesses a nuclear warhead and rigs it to protect himself from attack, yet we never see that resolved in the ending. It's not clear for a couple of the main characters whether they even survive or not.

So I wish his books has at least a minimal denouement. But I'll take that flaw for some of the most entertaining and though-provoking books I've ever read.

That is how I describe fiction with tons of narrative and very little dialog. About 1\2 way through the book I started to feel as I did when reading Stranger in a Strange Land. Just another author using his characters and the world he created to espouse his views. Now I'm not so sure. The book did pick up the latter third and I almost started to care about the characters. Almost. Ultimately I adopted Y.T.s flippant attitude towards them.

to yield a satisfying conclusion. After much detail and intense scenes the author choose to leave resolutions of each story arc up to implication.

recibí el producto a mi entera satisfaccion

It stays with you after you're done. The way he writes is mesmerising. Absolutely brilliant, but you'll enjoy it only if you're a sci fi fan. I recommend it. Will try his other books.

Fun to read, writen several years before Real Player One. Snow Crash covers a lot of interesting thoughts on a possible future if we continue to allow corporattons to controls the world.

Neal had some incredible insights into the future when he wrote this. As usual, a very detailed, character driven, tech novel as only he can produce (maybe W. Gibson).
Another must read!

STILL BRILLIANT

This earned a solid 4 stars. I would probably rate the story at 3 stars but the world it was set in was so original and entertaining that I have to bump it to 4. I would recommend this one to readers with an open mind looking for a fun read.

Hugely entertaining and block-buster imaginative. Lots of visual filmic sequences like it was written for the big screen behind the eyes.
Soon to be adapted for Amazon Prime by Joe Cornish of Attack the Block fame apparently.

The Bad:

Tonal shifts. “Snow Crash” starts with some legendary levels of satire, but the consistency for said tone drops off after 50 or 60 pages. The satire remains, but the more the novel progresses, the more an afterthought that satire seems. In the middle of the book, the tone becomes one of ‘discovery/revelation’ that persists until the end… at which point the tone graduates to ‘let’s get this over.’ The shifts are never quite abrupt, but are somewhat stark.

Changing voice. “Snow Crash” never quite feels like it’s written by three different people, but the beginning, middle and end all feel radically different from one another. Some difference is to be expected as a story nearly 500 pages in the telling is unraveled… but there’s a difference between progression of events having a subtle impact on how the story is told and the feeling that the author is changing how they’re drafting the story in their own mind.

Wandering plot. Why did Hiro need to go to Oregon to learn that thing about Raven? The Raft was cool, but did it need to occupy so much time or focus for the reader to grasp its significance or otherwise appreciate the information Stephenson was offering? There are a couple of other plot points that beg the question ‘why that’ or ‘why present it this way,’ but the goal is to remain as spoiler-free as possible, so those points will remain unmentioned. There is a fair amount of wandering/meandering in the storytelling that’s hit or miss; for every enjoyable moment of superfluous world building or character development, there is a head-scratching moment to offset it.

The Good:

The Deliverator (the first ~50 pages, really). Y.T. The ideas behind Babel, protolanguage and religion, in general.

The Takeaway:

Entertaining if a bit dated (as far as many of the technical predictions or conventions are concerned). “Snow Crash” was no doubt a hell of a read when it was released: immensely entertaining; rife with observations and commentary regarding the era in which it was written (much of which is still shockingly relevant); offering statements about how we got to where we are; great observations about people, their hopes, dreams and motivations.

Recommended for: fans of cyberpunk; those interested in a topical examination of neurolinguistics; people looking for a wild, trippy ride that will trigger some fierce 90s nostalgia. Anyone that enjoyed “Neuromancer” or “Lexicon” may want to give “Snow Crash” a shot.

“It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.”

“Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year old men feel decrepit.”

“To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.”

“The Deliverator lets out an involuntary roar and puts the hammer down. His emotions tell him to go back and kill that manager, get his swords out of the trunk, dive in through the little sliding window like a ninja, track him down through the moiling chaos of the microwaved franchise and confront him in a climactic thick-crust apocalypse. But he thinks the same thing when someone cuts him off on the freeway, and he’s never done it-yet.”

“They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many self-described Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It’s a postrational religion.”

Great sci fi, not dystopian but very different

I recall reading this story back in the late 90's thinking how cool and freaky-futuristic it was ... I re-bought it recently and re-read it and ... wow, the tech in this story has not aged well at all.

The biggest problem I have is with timelines ... without ever giving us any explicit dates for the storyline, it's relatively easy to extrapolate once you put the clues together ... the main character is approximately 30 years old (he tells us), there are constant references to his father being in WW2, and by reference to a peer-age character, we can determine he was born in the 1970's ... so the events of this story take place somewhere between the late 90's and the early 2000's.

America has deconstructed itself, become a hodgepodge of mini city-states that are actually business franchises, each franchise being a wholly independent and sovereign nation yet non physically contiguous. How a massive nation-state republic could devolve in such a manner is not hard to imagine what with the populist Republican mantra being that only business is good and government is bad, but the speed at which such dis-integration of the nation could occur ... it would take decades for government to unwind, not the paltry 5 to 10 years between when Stephenson wrote the story and the presumed timeline in the story.

Some of the tech he imagined in this story is nearly prophetic ... his descriptions of virtual reality are almost dead on with what is currently state of the art today, however much of the tech available in his 'real world' is sadly too futuristic to fit. Supersonic cyborg dogs; armorgel uniforms that are bulletproof, fit like spandex, and have self contained defensive weaponry; 'smart' skateboards with radar/lidar and wheels that change shape and size every millisecond in order to keep the ride smooth even over broken concrete/bodies/other rough terrain; other stuff that is mildly interesting and often unrealistic. We certainly don't have that tech today, let alone 15 or so years ago when this story seems to have taken place.

His story goes off the deep end with the main thrust being neuro-linguistic hacking based on ancient Sumerian mythology. I'm sure Stephenson researched a lot of actual info on Sumer, but the way he puts the pieces together is entirely his own creation. And after all is said and done, it basically fails the logic test. Near the end of the story, the main character (I'm trying to avoid saying "protagonist" ... because the character's name in the story is actually "Protagonist" ... Hiro Protagonist ... arg! funny, but still ... ) puts the whole concept together in one big expository scene and while all the little nubs we saw throughout the course of the story could have been reasonably accepted (suspension of disbelief) once the whole concept was explained is was blindingly obvious to me how unrealistic and irrational the idea was. It utterly and completely failed the logic test.

Oh well. This is one of Stephensons earliest novels, and his biggest reach into cyberpunk genre that I'm aware of (his other novels having some cyberpunk attitude are mostly hard historical fiction/hard sci-fi) so I won't totally dismiss this story. It's a fun read, has some interesting and entertaining characters, and lots of cool action scenes, so if you can ignore the timeline issue and get past some of the illogic, you should be able to enjoy this book.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite sci-fi writers

There are parts of this book that are brilliant-funny-imaginative-thought provoking. There are parts that get a little bogged down/boring when he gets into the religious and psychological stuff. But the good parts are definitely worth reading the book for.

Snowcrash is a classic choice full of energy. As a fan of Ready Player One, I enjoyed this earlier look at virtual reality and digital forecasting of the future.

This book came highly recommended by someone who purchases every copy they can find just to hand out to people. I can see why. It's very entertaining and well-written. I wish it was a series so I could read more of it.