After so many years of rereads (this book now has the distinction of being the only audiobook I've so far listened to *twic*), it's still such an amazing ride. Hiro and YT versus Raven and L. Bob Rife in a tale of anarcho-capitalism and America as high-tech third world dystopia and much neurolinguistic hacking! Both hilarious and absolutely brilliant, there's few reads as good to me as the hyperactive cerebral mindfuck that is the legendary post-cyberpunk roller coaster of Snow Crash.

Don´t do drugs, cyborg metaverse cyberpunk ghetto kids

High VR AR and finally only reality.
What would VR and AR be without being hooked on a potentially fatal wonderdrug, as the only chance to escape bleak reality, in an anarcho neoliberal nightmare controlled by corporations, organized crime, and the rest of government mutated into a bizarre self satire of bureaucracy without any real power.

Not like his second milestone, Diamond Age.
In contrast to the somewhat Dickensian Diamond Age, this one is pure cyberpunk without biopunk elements, accelerating the badass dystopian transhumanist ideals to degenerated turbo capitalistic free market terror.

Humor as black as the world
I had some of the best laughs with the hidden easter egg black comedy. Be careful not to miss them! Kool Aid, lol. This is by far Stephensons`funniest novel, I don´t know why he didn´t continue to expand this element.

Remember the mutating memes
One of the most famous, best, important, and mind boggling ideas of this work is that any ideology, memes, manifestations of epigenetic and cultural evolution in progress, sadly often faith and sick ideologies, are parasitic, viral information, infecting the minds of humans as a first, single, abnormal mutation in the brain of just one, possibly a bit incestuous, ape with full borderline bipolar schizophrenic potential. I don´t want to discriminate against incest proponents, I´m already insulting enough other favorite target audiences, it´s just that one of the many, negative side effects is mental illness.

Action, philosophy, linguistic theories mixed with faith origin ideas, and quick cuts between pure fun and sophisticated mind penetration that will leave one blown away.
Mix this all with the cool, quick writing style, extreme high complexity and density of ideas, philosophy, switching between action scenes and deep, linguistic introspections, inner monologues, dialogues, and social criticism, and one has a milestone of sci-fi and literature in general.

Who combined humanities, tech, and economics first?
I wonder how many sci-fi movies have been influenced by literature, someone should consider making a list, because I watch close to no TV and will thereby never be able to compare it. In this case, I am not even sure if Gibson, Stephenson, or a forgotten, unknown author was the first one to mix economic criticism with VR and humanities.

Cherry pick wisely
I´ve said this before, don´t read all of Stephenson´s work if you aren´t really into sci-fi or like to skim and scan lengthy passages, because Diamond Age and Snow Crash aren´t like many of his other novels. These are often more something like hard-science fiction, space opera, philosophical theory hybrids that are really exhausting to read, don´t care about writing conventions, and could have been much better, if just reduced to an acceptable length and included in a normal, suspenseful plot. Instead of just egomaniacally letting the author drivel about whatever comes to his mind in the form he thinks is cool, that is what sadly made his brick books like Anathem and Cryptonomicon unreadable for many people.

In a parallel universe, Stephenson could have evolved into a readable sci fi superhero
Instead, Stephenson sabotages himself and his legacy, by being too much focused on the high brow, deep, art aspect and forgetting that he once was one of the prodigies of cyberpunk and sci-fi itself before becoming unreadable for a vast majority of the bibliophiles, even sci fi holics like myself. I´ve read many of his works and enjoyed them, but won´t reread them, because the best genre of them all is my lifeblood, but I couldn´t find another author who got so hypercomplex, interwoven, and difficult or impossible to understand as Stephenson with his close to 1k page behemoths of books. Yes, they offer unique and intelligent insights and revelations, but this would taste much less bitter without the knowledge that most readers, for completely understandable, logical, and appropriate reasons, won´t ever become comfortable with it.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

It had great world building, great concepts, and great satire, but story wise the last 20% completely falls apart. I was a little disappointed by the ending. Also, I had a hard time with the active voice used throughout this book. Reading it felt like a friend pitching a movie to me.

The language-as-programming concept was terrific though, even though I think that Max Barry (obviously influenced by this book) wrote a much more compelling story using the same high concepts when he wrote Lexicon.

My Neal Stephenson reading has been all backwards. The first one I read was Cryptonomicon, then the Baroque Cycle and then Anathem. So going back to one of his earlier and 'simpler' novels seemed like it'd be a breeze after having to practically learn a fictional language to finish Anathem.

While Snow Crash may have some more familiar sci-fi tropes (hackers, skateboarders and virtual reality are now almost stereotypes although I'm sure it seemed fresh in '92 when this was written), it still has the brain-bustin' Stephenson style theories in it.

In this case, his whole premise of ancient Sumerian languages as an audio virus was definately something that took a lot of explanation, and it's those types of intricate ideas that make Stephenson one of my favorites.

But the other thing I love about Stephenson is that he can explain this crazy theory for page after page until you forget about everything else in the book, and then the next chapter will have an epic action scene with swords, gatling guns, and a variety of other near-future weapons.

Terrific book. And I think there's probably a lot of material written or filmed since '92 that should probably cut Stephenson a royalty check. I'm looking at you, Matrix!

-¿El Young Adult Cyberpunk más conocido y que por tanto se adelantó a su tiempo?.-

Género. Ciencia-Ficción.

Lo que nos cuenta. Hiro Protagonist trabaja en Los Ángeles como repartidor de pizzas (no se confíen, que ese reparto en el siglo XXIII no es cosa de chiste), es un hacker, un esgrimista de alto nivel y, en sus ratos libres pasa el tiempo en el Metaverso, en cuyo diseño participó, entre los avatares del resto de los habitantes. T. A. es una jovencita muy madura y de ideas claras que trabaja de mensajero (otro empleo peligroso en esa época) que le hace un favor a Hiro e, indirectamente, a la mafia que regenta el negocio de pizzas.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

DNF.

What a disappointment! I enjoyed the beginning of the novel very much (granted, the whole virtual reality thing is a bit outdated, but the book was written in 1992) but the book pretty much comes to a halt after the first half. Stephenson gives a tedious lecture on Sumerian mythology, Hebrews, Pentecostals... It just got too boring for me and I just couldn't finish the book.

2.5 stars. I'm sorry I'm giving this book such a low rating. Writing is smooth, characters are interesting, story is intriguing and all that in cyberpunk-ish setting. So what went wrong?

Well this book reminds me of serial procrastinator. It losses track of what it supposed to be doing for the most part and at some point authors remembers that there was actually story that was supposed to happen hundred pages ago and tries to make up the lost time with bunch of exposition and info dumps and then loses track again which results in cycle repeating again. There are whole chapters that are just for infodumping. In this large page count worldbuilding could have been done more naturally through character PoV. Natural comparison would be Gibson's Sprawl series but those book do so much more of everything in half the page count. On the other hand writing is far more fluid than Gibson and when this book is good it's very good but those moments are too far between.

n  Neal Stephenson'sn characters and I seem share quite a few interests (some of which are, admittedly, not for everybody). Though n  n    Snow Crashn  n seems to be Stephenson's most popular book, I wouldn't give it the kind of universal recommendation status merited by the likes of n  n    Zodiacn  n. However, I think it would appeal to a broader audience than say, n  n    Cryptonomiconn  n, or n  n    Reamden  n (only in part due to the fact that those two each clock in at over 1,000 pages).

So, let's get that snow crashing! Ok, so it's not an avalanche survival story, but what do I really have to contribute to the body of Snow Crash commentary out there if not vaguely related Archer clips?
n  n

Our protagonist, appropriately named n  Hiro Protagonistn, is a freelance hacker, and pizza delivery guy (which, given that pizza is a mafia-run industry which takes its promise of delivery in 30 minutes or less very seriously, is not an occupation without risk). He's also the Greatest Swordfighter in the World. Hiro's imaginary report card would read:

n  n    “Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.”n  n

The gear in this futuristic world is really half the fun. Hiro (aka n  The Deliveratorn) has a uniform made of an n  “arachnofiber weave”n that would put the tactical turtleneck to shame any day. Even the relatively lame n  Metacopsn get to have night vision goggles.
n  n

Hiro's cooperation skills are put to the test when our other lead character, 15-year-old courier n  YT n(it's supposed to stand for Yours Truly, but Michael Jackson's PYT kept getting stuck in my head), saves his skin by bailing him out of a near-miss pizza delivery. Couriers, of course, travel by skateboard, “pooning” passing cars to speed about the city.
n  n

I don't even know where to begin with the whole n  cyborgn situation (a certain world's greatest secret agent would be decidedly uncomfortable in this Stephenson verse). I'll just say that there are some, and not all of them are good (duh). I mean, can you really even kill those things?
n  n

Science or Fiction?
As in the other Stephenson books I've read, the sheer power of his intellect is on display in this one. After complaints from the reading public that Stephenson failed to cite sources with respect to Riemann Zeta function cryptography, Stephenson sent an email to “real life” mathematician/cryptography expert Michael Anshel in which he noted n  “that many readers of fiction underestimate just how much of a novel's content is simply made up.”n

But, guess what Stephenson? There's a reason “that many readers seem to have [difficulty] in identifying the boundary between fact and fiction” in your books. And, for my money, that's not necessarily a bad thing! Sure, I should probably go and check out some of the bits about n  Sumerian etymologyn before I go tossing them around as fact, but at least now I'm interested enough to do so!

Wow.

Wow, wow, wow.

I had thought that William Gibson’s Neuromancer was the alpha male of the cyberpunk genre; the template upon which all others would be drawn. Turns out, Gibson was the prophet, but Stephenson was the barbarian, breaking ground with a riveting, relentless new age thriller.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is a wild trip.

A fun conglomerate of Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick, Anthony Burgess and John Brunner, written 8 years after Neuromancer and 19 years before Ready Player One this is a bright light on the cyberpunk literary landscape. Set in a near alternative future, Stephenson introduces a world where governments have collapsed and societies are held loosely together by anarcho-capitalism.

The book was nominated for a Prometheus Award but what could be a libertarian dream may also be seen as a laissez-faire nightmare. This is a blitzkrieg of ideas, a cacophony of sci-fi, techno-socio-economic observations, a kaleidoscope of theological and philosophical concepts thrown together in a Mark Twainian fantasy hopped up on Red Bull and amphetamines.

Above all this is an intelligent, modern adventure that expertly weaves in elements of pre-history and archeological thrill seeking. If Bladerunner led to The Matrix, then this is what’s next. And, if Stephenson had not boiled it all together enough into a steaming cup of Have At You!, then he also has the best name for a lead character of all time: Hiro Protagonist.

A very, very Goodread, five stars, two snaps and a bag of chips.

** 2018 addendum - it is a testament to great literature that a reader recalls the work years later and this is a book about which I frequently think. As great a hero as Hiro is, the scenes between Raven and YT are those that I recall the most and Raven is a character about whom more could be written. The casting of Ravinoff by Jason Momoa would be a good one.

*** 2023 reread -

Love this book, truly one of the great science fiction novels of all time.

This has lost none of its potency in the 30 years since its publication, if anything its message has renewed relevancy with the inclusion of its cautionary message about centralized information gathering and dissemination.

While the most organic comparisons will be to Neuromancer and Ready Player One, this has been wildly influential on many works since and a consequential legacy of many works before it, Snow Crash is a high water mark in this genre.

Actually, when I think of this book in terms of other works like Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five, this is not just great SF but great literature and we can find that Stephenson, writing in the early 90s, has provided to us a work unique for its time and place.

The anarcho-capitalist setting and socio-economic observations subtly screaming out on most every page also made me consider a comparison with Howard Chaykin’s work on his American Flagg series from the 80s.

Stephenson’s characterization was delicious, making this work on many levels; Uncle Enzo and Raven, and the man with the glass eye teaming up with Hiro and YT to make this so much fun. I did not realize it last time, but this is told from the perspective of an omniscient but chatty storyteller so we can hear Stephenson’s own voice mischievously breaking the fourth wall here and there, and again with the comparison to Chaykin.

This can also be funny and with a long list of humorous elements scattered throughout the narrative that made me consider an oblique comparison to Trevanian. Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise is as much fun as the Fosterites from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

Finally I will add this great book to my list of all time favorites. As of this addendum I have published over 1800 reviews and this makes the tenth book on that exclusive list. It’s that good.

Did you ever have a kid at school who tried to appear smart and as the font of all knowledge by catching on to the tail-ends of things while listening to adults, absorbing some of it, and then spouting forth in front of an assembly of kids, his (or her, --let's be fair here) own regurgitation of what he had heard in the adult quarter, which would often make most of the other kids hang on to his/her every word simply because they themselves didn't have a clue what he was talking about?

Well, with Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson is that kid grown up. Stephenson latches on to all kinds of ideas and then regurgitates his reductionist, lopsided version of them in 'novel' form. The effect it had on this reader, is similar to what the screeching of chalk on a board does to most people; it set my teeth on edge.

There are so many lopsided, half-developed ideas with huge holes in logic in them, in this novel, that I cannot mention them all and remain as brief as I am sure that you, dear reader, would prefer me to be. Most of them pertain to Stephenson's lopsided extrapolation of how a virtual reality world would work, and his (to me loopy) ideas on neurolinguistics, ancient history and religions.

I was ambivalent about his snarky depiction of capitalism taken to the extreme. In the Snow Crash world, everything is privatised to the point that civil services such as police and prisons are privatised, and 'burbclaves' (small city states) have their own laws and services to the point that America doesn't have federal law anymore--yet there are still Feds! The latter institution is highly satirised by Stephenson, with regard to the typical bureaucratic yards of red tape and the tech and intel gathering overkill and so on. I admit that I found these bits humorous. I reckon Stephenson is, by their inclusion into a state that has no laws, and where the federal government seems merely a token from days gone by, saying that the FBI was superfluous to start with in any case, hah. But the overall effect of the Snow Crash background setting is that of an almost schizophrenic collage of bits and pieces stuck together to create a highly disjunctive world.

I enjoyed the action sequences and I very much enjoyed his two female protagonists; slightly less so the male one.

In this early novel, Stephenson shows faint glimmerings of promise. His clumsy explanations of the tech aspects of the world is jarring and often nonsensical, so the main little points of light lie with the action sequences and the characterization, the latter which I found not too bad since many of his stereotypes were slightly more rounded than actually stereotypical and many of the characters were relatively believable and even likeable in spite of the clumsiness. The hero Hiro, (or shall I say, Hiro Protagonist, the protagonist) did feel paper-thin however, like just a another piece of deus ex machina.

So, four stars for the fact that the novel passes the Bechdel test, and for having created the eminently likeable character Y.T.
But minus a star for the jarring racism and lack of cultural and ethnic sensitivity, and minus another star for setting my teeth on edge with his loopy ideas and his lopsided, cartoony projections into a future consisting of what feels like a world constructed of cardboard cutouts.
(And minus a virtual star for positing that patriarchal religions are more rational than matriarchal ones. )
Oh, and pretty important to me is to mention the subtraction of another virtual star for the sex with a fifteen year old girl, and her 'relationship' with a mass murderer more than twice her age.
Add half a star back for the humor.

Many people credit Stephenson with being the first person to think of a cyberverse in which humans could participate represented by avatars, but by his own admission,  Lucasfilm with Habitat  was there before him. ;)

In fact, it might not be an overstatement to say that Stephenson had pretty much gypped his idea off of developers Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar. (Please be my guest and Google them.)

In his book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold writes in Chapter Six:

In Austin, Texas, in 1990, at the First Conference on Cyberspace, I met the two programmers who created the first large-scale, multi-user, commercial virtual playground.

In their address to the conference, and the paper they later published, "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat," Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer recounted their experience as the designers and managers of a virtual community that used computer graphics as well as words to support an online society of tens of thousands. Much of that conference in Austin was devoted to discussions of virtual-reality environments in which people wear special goggles and gloves to experience the illusion of sensory immersion in the virtual world via three-dimensional computer graphics.

Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar stood out in that high-tech crowd because the cyberspace they had created used a very inexpensive home computer, often called a toy computer, and a cartoonlike two-dimensional representation to create their kind of virtual world. Farmer and Morningstar had one kind of experience that the 3-D graphics enthusiasts did not have, however--the system they had designed, Habitat, had been used by tens of thousands of people.

Source: http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/6.html

Papers presented by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar :

http://www.stanford.edu/class/history...

Some fascinating thoughts on the internet as a marketplace:
http://www.stanford.edu/class/history...

PS. I relented and added a half star for making YT female and such a fun character and subtracted a quarter star for making her blonde, then added back a quarter star for the way in which NS made fun of the FBI bureaucracy.

A friend just gave me back my ages-old copy of this book, three years after I had forgotten that I had lent it to him. I am overjoyed to have this back in my possession. So much so that I feel compelled to immediately reread it. That is just how good this book is.

***Post reread***
The problem with reading Neal Stephenson is that you can not help coming to the realization that, no matter how hard you try, how dedicated to the craft you become, you will never write anything as fully formed, as intricately detailed and impeccably researched or as purely fun as Snow Crash. Give up, all ye purveyors of mediocre science fiction, Stephenson owns you. At least that was the impression that I had while reading the book. All of my own half-hearted attempts all stand out as poor homages to this masterwork.

From the postnational aspect of citizenry to civilization's basis in codified behavior to brain-twisting explanations of the physics of virtual samurai duels, Stephenson has thought everything through down to the pico level of detail and left no loose ends dangling. When he is describing Nuclear Fuzz Grunge, you have to believe that somewhere in his office there exists an evolutionary chart that traces the development of this niche musical genre, much as Tolkien formed the intricate lineages of his elves.

Anyone familiar with Stephenson's more recent books, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem, or Cryptonomicon, is well aware of his skill at cramming as much as possible detail into every page, but it's here in Snow Crash (and his follow-up, The Diamond Age) where he really just lets loose and has fun. A pissed off Aleut who drives around on a motorcycle with a hydrogen bomb sidecar, a smart-mouthed skater chick who rides the miles of highways in LA, the Mafia as a quirky group of good guys- Stephenson is clearly having a great time while writing this, nearly as much as any reader will have. I really don't think that I could recommend this book any higher.

derisively laugh to me for opportunities of full and cringe-worthy and tedious equally be to found i which, Against A Dark Background beloved the disliked who jackass of kind the am i that mind in keep also should you, seriously review this take you before but. FAIL. hipness insouciant of display a with audience its dazzle to designed lie a - lie brazen some of middle the in worship i someone catching like was it, one this with was i disappointed how express can't words. nowhere go but brilliant seem that (business Sumerian that like) ideas many so. cyberbullshit confusing of full too, snarky too, shallow too. finish couldn't i that (far so) book Stephenson Neal only the.

one extra star for being incredibly ahead of its time.