スノウ・クラッシュ

Sumerian myth. Tower of Babel. Virtual Reality. Making puppets of people controlled by radio. Programmers vulnerable to a destroyer visual signal. Mafia, Religious fervor based on a privately owned aircraft carrier and an Inuit with a hydrogen fusion bomb that surfs ocean waves to get around the world. Oh yeah, and some stuff I forgot, like the story's protagonist, Hiro. But I can't tell it all like Neil does, no way.

Fast, funny, inventive. The Metaverse sequences are like Tron on crack. I highly recommend it.

A fun read.

I chose to read this book after a suggestion from a friend and it has definitely been a pleasant surprise. Although, I primarily read techno-thriller novels this book has certain aspects such as its technical jargon I really like.

there was a beautiful "masque of the red death" esque imagery set towards the end that i loved.

Slow start but picked up steam along the way and was interesting enough to see it through. I really enjoyed it...

Love this book. Got it for my son

Second time for me. I re-read this after reading all of,his other books. I still dig it, you will too.

Many of the reviews here already sum this book up nicely. It is a fast paced, whacky comic book romp with some (imho) excellent vision of a cyber-future considering that it was written in the early '90s. There are the usual Neal Stephenson components - excellent characters that you grow to really like, crazy action and a complicated geeky main premise that can make your head hurt. A good read that sucks you in but doesn't quite deliver the neat ending(s) I was hoping for

I really enjoyed reading Snow Crash. The first couple of chapters were painful though. Just get through the first couple, and the book goes in a much better direction.

The main plot was really interesting and made me think a lot.

It's an incredibly cool book. If you love the first chapter you'll love the book because it keeps that whole awesome tone the whole book.
The book's only problem is the three or four chapters spent educating the reader's on ancient Sumerian religions. I would recommend that you skim or skip literally every chapter that has Hiro talking to the librarian. To say that they're detailed is putting it mildly.
I honestly think the book would be perfect if those chapters were completely removed.

Anyway awesome book apart from that.

It's a great story. I REALLY wish they'd make a movie about this one. The writing is top notch.

Phenomenal

SFの中でもこのジャンルはとりわけ特殊なものとなります。
用語が時に記号のようになってしまいますので
コミックのような感覚で読んだほうがよいかもしれません。

どうやらこのスノウ・クラッシュをばら撒いたものたちは
あるとてつもないことを企てていたようです。
もしもそれがかなってしまえばそれを企てた人間が
すべてを掌握するという恐ろしい事態となるのです。

ヒロとY・T。それぞれがその恐ろしい計画を阻止するために
動き始めます。

結構ページ数はありますが
決着はあっけなく付いてしまいます。
ただし、どうしてそうなったかは
重要でない事柄(些細なエピソード)程度にしか
出てこないので要注意。

ただいえるのは、ギブスンの作品よりは
読みやすいといえます。

love this book!

A cyberpunk classic, Snow Crash is a bizarre combination of sci fi, religion, computation, history, linguistic and action. Stranger still, it works.

The story follows Hiro Protagonist, a hacker, swordsman and pizza delivery guy for the mafia. He ends up allying himself to Y. T., a teenage extreme skateboarder, as they face a conspiracy involving a cult that has a kind of computer virus that infects flesh and bones people.

And if characters like a “hacker, swordsman and pizza delivery guy for the mafia” sounds ridiculous is because they really are, and Stephenson seems to revel in this. Perhaps the most strange one is a giant whale hunter and mercenary called Corvo that moves around in a Harley Davidson armed with a nuclear bomb and has the words “NO EMOTIONAL CONTROL” tattooed on his forehead.

The story is set in a futuristic Los Angeles in which the USA government collapsed and got split in several “franchise-countries”. A place where McDonald’s can become an autonomous nation, with it’s own law, police and currency. Snow Crash was released in 1992 and by then the cyberpunk style crystallized in the 80’s had moved into self-satire. In a way Snow Crash does to cyberpunk what a movie like Kill Bill does to kung fu flicks of the 1960’s and 1970’s. It’s an over the top and absurd version of the original source material that at the same time satirizes and celebrates it.

The book popularized several computer terms, like “daemon”, a computer program that emulates human behavior, and “avatar” as a virtual representation of users in a metaverse. You could also say Stephenson also kinda predicted some future technologies, like a Librarian that seems like a Google precursor and human “gargoyles” that film everything, much like our present reality of omnipresent smartphones.

Snow Crash is a sci-fi novel set in California, where the world has turned into a conglomeration of corporate entities, with a parallel Matrix-like world called the Metaverse. Hiro Protagonist, the main character, is a hacker who finds himself needing to save the world from a virus that infects both humans and computers alike.

Snow Crash was well thought out and researched. The plot zips along, but not so fast that the reader can't follow. There were a couple parts where it got bogged down, specifically in the beginning when the author sets up the world Hiro lives in, and later when Hiro does some research, but otherwise it was thoroughly entertaining.

Snow Crash was hard to put down, but packed with a long story. I hope this book becomes a movie!

This book is a masterpiece. Really that's all I can say. How Neal Stephenson can combine history and stories of ancient Sumerian, Tower of Babel, etc, with cyberpunk is beyond me. The idea that the brain can be directly programmed and linking that back to historical events is awesome. Snow Crash is a classic in my book, a genre maker. Snow Crash is a must read, not just for Sci Fi fans, but for everyone who enjoys reading. Stephenson coins terms to write this book, metaverse, avatar, he imagined a world so unique he had to reshape what language currently existed to fit the needs of the story. He also imagined a world so unique, it influenced the real world, the earth software from the novel is now a reality, Google Earth.

I felt the characters were pretty solid, I felt YT's character was developed well and a little more creative than Hiro. Reading this book many years after it was written and reading other books that were probably heavily influenced by this one, perhaps has influenced me, maybe Hiro was a more compelling character back when it was written. But that small criticism aside, you should read this book! It is one of my all time favorites, by my all time favorite author.

Classic cyberpunk