Cyberpunk with the typical Stephenson tropes: Linguistics, computer science, some obscure Sumerian religious conspiracy theory. That catnip of glossolalia, xenoglossy at Pentecost, the etymological ramblings, or Nam-shub from Sumerian history let me purr the whole time, especially the information dumps which might scare away readers with a different education background or reading preferences than me.
At the same time it was a nostalgic trip back to the 80s. Back then, the sociological model of Cyberpunk was still valid with all its defunct states and corporations taking over. That background doesn't transfer well into our times, and PostCyberpunk adapts to that. If one can't abstract from Cyberpunk background, I'd recommend The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer which is set some 80 years later in the same world and linked by one of the two main characters: Teenager Y.T. is there the aged neo-Victorian Miss Matheson.
Snow Crash is a quite late addition to the Cyberpunk movement. The term was first brought up by Bruce Bethke who wrote the eponymous short story (you can read it here) published in 1983. It had ancestors with Brunner's The Shockwave Rider which sits in somewhere between New Wave and Cyberpunk. Aesthetics was defined by the movie Blade Runner from 1982 (which was based loosely on P.K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). The Encyclopaedia Britannica gives Gardner Dozois the honour to have popularized the term. Then Neuromancer went in like a bomb but don't forget Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker's 1982 Software, Pad Cadigan, just to name a few.

I've seen voices that the science isn't up to date anymore. It is 25 years later now, and some of the technological innovations are exactly up-to-date; just yesterday, I read about Adidas producing shoes made of artificial spider silk which mirrors Arachno threads shooting Y.T. - I thought that this 80s techno darling was just over but now, it seems to get a renaissance. Also, MMORPGs or Google Earth resemble Stephenson's technical elements.
The reprogramming of minds using a linguistic virus wasn't exactly a new theory, and I think it was executed better in Samuel Delany's Babel-17. Also, the model of hackers as "understanding and thinking in byte code" was wrong - most of the hackers that I knew at that time didn't work at machine level. I think that Stephenson modeled the programmers that way to path his way to the plot. This path to the very open ending is typical Stephenson and meanders through various excursions. Some of them were hilariously kafkaesk like the exact procedure to read through a work procedure at the FBI. The tension arc is certainly various: Sometimes, the information dumps drag, on other occasions, the mixture of action and creativeness is on top speed, like the very first chapter which is a race against the time of pizza delivery. I loved the two protagonists - Katana wielding Hiro Protagonist and "Yours Truly" 15 years old Y.T - as well as all of the antagonists, first of all Aleutean Raven.

Snow Crash isn't a smooth ride, and I can see where other readers wouldn't like it, loose traction. For me, it fit perfectly. Only a few narrative glitches let me substract one star.

I didn't expect this. I expected something cheesy. I don't know why. It had style, and punk, and nineties culture talk, cyberpunk matrix kind of stuff, humor, great characters, action, guns, blades, hand to hand combat. Loved it.

Read it!

Nīla Stīvensona "Lavīna" (Snow Crash) ir fantastikas klasika, viens no kiberpnaka žanra stūrakmeņiem. Ir (ne pārāk tāla) nakotne, Amerika ir sadalījusies mazās korporāciju valstīs un, lai vieglāk pārdzīvotu sūro ikdienu, cilvēki lielu daļu laika pavada Metaversā (virtuālajā realitātē). Mūsu galvenais varonis - Hiro Protogonists (kas par vārdu!) ir picu piegādātājs, izcils hakeris un pasaules labākais samurajzobenu vicinātājs. Kad notiek šķietami neiespējamais un viņa čoms Multiversā saķer vīrusu un nonāk komā, Hiro metas galvu reibinošā piedzīvojumā, kas ietver mēlē runātāju sektu, picu piegādes uzņēmumu Cosa Nostra a.k.a mafija, Baboloniešu mītus, kas pārtapuši bībeles stāstos, aleutu harpūnistu-asasīnu, peldošu trešās pasaules migrantu pilsētu, kas Dombravam naktīs neļautu gulēt, robotsuņus, kas uzbrūk skaņas ātrumā, ukraiņu atomgrandžu, padomju atomzemūdenes, bezgala seksīgu pusaugu kurjeri-skeiteri, FIB tualetes papīra lietošanas instrukciju un daudz cita lieliska ārprāta. Lai gan noslēgums Stīvensonam padevies tāds, ka par to kaunētos pa Stīvens Kings, tas neliedz izbaudīt šo lielisko ārprātu. Iesaku!

2.5

Needlessly long-winded. Strange as it may sound, I was intensely bored. The ideas that Stephenson plays with here are all highly thought-provoking, but they are (amateurishly and without inspiring the tiniest spark of suspension of disbelief) exploited to put together a thriller-ish, treasure-hunt-ish kind of plot that only succeeds in giving life to an uninteresting unfolding of the story and a host of predictable and cartoonish characters that I certainly won't miss. The idea of 'linguistic virus' is better deployed, in my opinion, in Delany's Babel 17.

I feel almost churlish for not giving this 5 stars. It is, after all, the definitive cyberpunk novel, and I write in the margins of the genre (Yes, yes, I know about Neuromancer...).

Stephenson's language is lyrical and poppy. And his treatment of memetics and neurolinguistics is marvelously novel. If you like fun, psychedelic-inspired ideas about religion, you'll love Snow Crash.

Where the novel falls a bit short is in the ending and the characterization. YT is the most fully-developed character. The rest seem more like vessels for Stephenson's admittedly fascinating ideas.

I recently re-read the novel after a 15 year hiatus. It held up surprisingly well. Not so much in terms of the technical details, but in terms of the overall "vibe." Snow Crash is literary experimental jazz.

Quintessential cyberpunk: a real "sex-death-&-metalhead"-type sci-fi sensory storm. Better grounded than Gibson's Neuromancer (not a high bar), but as a similarly prophetic Tome of the Internet-To-Be, belongs on the same shelf.

When our main character, Hiro Protagonist (yes, really), finally gets all the way down to uncovering the kernel of the story, you realize the whole thing is built on the sort of germ of a premise that only someone spending way too much time coding at a flickering terminal during the early morning hours of the Computer Age would have given half-a-second's credence to. But you won't care, because if you've made it that far the insatiable action must be seen through. And you'll be relieved, because the WHAT IS GOING ON and THEY CAN'T BE ALLOWED TO GET AWAY WITH THIS is leaning over the back rail of your frontal lobe to shoot spitballs at your medulla, which is returning fire with WHAT IF IT COULD HAPPEN and MAYBE WE SHOULD CONSIDER OUR SURVIVAL OPTIONS.

Needless to say, this book was a lot of fun.
And often a bit gross, in every sense of the word.

First published in 1992, Snow Crash is considered one of the seminal cyber-punk novels. I wasn’t even sure what that meant when I picked it up; I plucked it from the stacks at the used bookstore with the vague feeling this was one of those classics I’m supposed to have read. For once, the inside voice was right–this was a book I didn’t want to miss.

The opening scene of a mad-cap pizza delivery quickly draws the reader in. Hiro Protagonist (cringe), thirty year-old hacker, chronically unsuited for the career-track, has now found his longest term employment delivering pizzas for the Mafia, who now run pizza chains along with more dubious enterprises. He’s racing against the clock, trying to get the pizza delivered so Uncle Enzo, spokesman and Don, doesn’t have to apologize and give up a whole wad of cash. His delivery credentials get him through most of the gated suburbs, but a short cut lands him in deep water. Thankfully, a skateboarder who was hitching a lift using a special skater harpoon takes pity on him and completes the delivery with seconds to spare. Her actions bring her to the attention of Uncle Enzo. Hiro’s actions, unfortunately cost him his job, but it isn’t long before his genius ex-girlfriend recruits him to find a virus that’s wiping computers clean–and hackers’ minds.

That’s just the first few pages. It goes on to involve a shared computer simulation, religious evangelicals, an ear-destroying rock concert, a sociopath on a motorcycle, a fusion-powered attack dog and a floating raft-like armada.

Three and a half static-y stars

*********************************

Unfortunately, my windy and critical review will have to be continued someplace permanent, where it won't be deleted.
Find it at:


http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2014/0...

or

http://carols.booklikes.com/post/7602...

One of the premiere cyberpunk novels, it embodies everything that's best about the genre.
I generally have very little tolerance for the hackneyed "stop the evil drug pushers" type of plotline, but Stephenson manages to do it with a degree of originality - not to mention wit and verve - that overcomes any possible objections I might have had. The mix of near-future 'underground' high-tech and ancient Sumerian mythology is also an aesthetic combination that really appeals to me.
Of course, the basic premise behind that mix - which is essential to the plot - isn't one I'm really logically going to get behind. (Can't really discuss it without spoilers. All I can say is that it seems that Stephenson read some fairly theoretical stuff on the origins of human consciousness - and ran with it from there.) However, I don't believe Stephenson means for it to be taken as a serious 'what if' scenario - just as he does not truly expect the Mafia to be a major world power/corporation/gang in the near-future... but his exaggerated portrayals make incisive - and funny - social commentary. Nearly 15 years down the line, some of it feels a tiny bit dated - but it's still a great book.
The opening scene alone (the pizza delivery) would make reading this book worthwhile...
And the team of Hiro Protagonist ("Stupid name." "But you'll never forget it.") the unemployed hacker/virtual samurai/wanna-be rock band manager - and the precocious teenager Y.T. (imagine the secret life of every kid who has to pretend to be a 'good girl' at home - x10)- simply rocks.
That's kinda the secret to Snow Crash's success. It's well written - fairly literary even - reasonably complex... but it's also just simply cool.

If you haven't read it - you really ought to.

Like all good speculative fiction novels, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is brimming with big ideas—ideas on epistemology, memetics, the nature of myth, and the difference (if there is one) between ideology and virulence. It’ll make you think, if you haven’t already, about things like Chomskyan linguistic theory. It’s also one hell of a ride, pin-balling back and forth between a near-future L.A. filled with holographic corporate “loglos” and the distortion-heavy music of nuclear fuzz-grunge, a slick virtual-reality world called the “Metaverse,” and the ancient, ziggurat-filled capitals of Babylon and Sumer. Needless to say, it’s a novel full of head-spinning twists and turns, narrative peaks and loops and a wildly accelerating plot-line—all delivered in Stephenson’s unique and indelible style, which is by turns acidly satirical, outrageously funny, and introspectively philosophical.

Set mostly in a trippy, frabjously futuristic vision of L.A.—a kind of fun-house-mirror reflection of a possible tomorrow dominated by corporate franchises and their endlessly expanding chains of “franchulates,” which both cater to and ruthlessly exploit a fractured, sprawling patchwork of gated “burbclaves”—it’s a vision that is at once surreal and terrifying.

The burbclaves (a portmanteau of “suburban” and “enclave”) operate as de facto neighborhoods-cum-nation-states, independent of any overarching laws or societal norms, in the wake of an unexplained governmental collapse. Infrastructure is still somewhat intact, kept (mostly) operational through the sheer force of the materialistic needs of the populace and the capitalistic instincts of the corporate bosses.

Some of these bosses are, well, “bosses”—like Mafia don Uncle Enzo, a political powerbroker and head of the Nova Sicilia pizza franchise where our hero and protagonist, cheekily and aptly named Hiro Protagonist (yes, for real), works delivering pizzas at the outset of the story. Happily, Hiro is not our only hero, or our only protagonist. Our other hero/protagonist is a young girl named Y.T., who works as a “Kourier” (a skateboarder who carries out freelance deliveries), and teams up with Hiro toward the beginning of the novel.

There is a long, variegated and incredibly colorful cast of characters, but the adventures (and misadventures) of Hiro and Y.T., as they get pulled ever deeper into an existential fight against unknown and sinister forces, are what keep the action both sky-high-trippy and fast-paced, surrealist and hyper-realist, dramatic and funny. Stephenson takes his characters seriously, but that doesn’t mean they take themselves seriously, and this keeps both the internal monologues and inter-character dialogue leavened with an earnestness-free irreverence that’s missing from a lot of sci-fi of this era (the early 90s).

What makes the story continually fascinating, though, is Stephenson’s creative masterstroke: the dazzlingly unique mixture of dystopian setting, early hacker culture, and ancient, mystic Sumerian/Babylonian mythos. To say much more on that front would spoil the fun that first-time readers will have in discovering for themselves how it all ties together. Suffice to say, it’s pretty mind-blowing.

Upon reflection, one of the most surprising aspects of Snow Crash is that it is, technically, a “dystopian novel,” although it absolutely doesn’t read like one at all. Because despite the grim backdrop of perpetually battling tribes (in Snow Crash, this means franchulates and burbclaves), cynical corporate exploitation, a total lack of law and order, and the requisite dog-eat-dog survivalism inherent in all pessimistically/realistically imagined futures (in short, all the standard tropes of dystopian science fiction), Snow Crash is a FUN book! I mean this both in the sense that it is fun to read, and in the sense that it is genuinely funny, even laugh-out-loud hilarious at times.

I put this down to Stephenson’s utterly sui generis style, both as a prose stylist and and as a storyteller. He thrusts the reader into a world of chaos and suffering, no doubt, but its characters are so bonkers, its setting so wildly surreal, the fight scenes such over-the-top Grand Guignol spectacles of bloodletting, catharsis, and (yes!) hilarity—that it somehow manages to pull off the nearly impossible: a dystopian novel that is all at once sneeringly serious, compulsively funny, and batshit insane. The only other book I can think of that fits this bill is Walter M. Miller’s brilliantly satirical nuclear holocaust masterpiece (have those words ever been put together in the same sentence before?), A Canticle for Leibowitz. And that’s some truly legendary company to keep. Real rarefied air, as they say.

Still, Snow Crash most frequently draws comparisons to William Gibson’s (earlier) magnum opus of early-hacker-culture, the brilliantly conceived Neuromancer. And rightly so. Stephenson is both the heir and inheritor of the cyberpunk genre pioneered by Gibson in the early 80s. With this novel, though, Stephenson was not merely paying homage to Gibsonian cyberpunk, but expanding on its larger themes and ideas to create something altogether new and bracingly fresh.

I need to re-read this book soon, as from time to time I think of it, the wild plot, the strange characters, which when I first read it seemed sci-fi absurd (but great!), but now seem real. At times I think we are living in the metaverse which Stephenson coined. And the homeless (sort of, as he lived in a U-store-it container) hero who connects to the metaverse because it is so much better than his "real" life. A classic already.

Kitaplığımda, yıllardır okunmayı bekleyen kitaplardandı. Günümüzde çok popüler olan "metaverse" kelimesinin ilk olarak bu kitapta geçtiğini bildiğimden, artık okuma zamanının geldiğine karar verdim. Açıkçası daha önce okumamış olduğuma pişman oldum. William Gibson'ın Neuromancer ile çizdiği çizgilere hayli sadık kalan, cyberpunk kavramının hakkını tam olarak veren bir roman. Mükemmel olduğunu söyleyemem, okurun bazı noktaları çocukça bulması çok olası, üstelik anlatı boyunca ortaya konan bazı alt öykülerin hiçbir şeye bağlanmadan bırakılması da rahatsız edici. Hatta belki de en rahatsız edici olan, yazarın sanki artık yazmaktan sıkılarak anlatıyı 4-5 sayfada toparlayıp bitirmiş olması. Önemli karakterler ve öykü araçları finalde hiçbir sonuca bağlanmayarak öylece bırakılıyor. Bu telaşlı, acil bitiriş bana oldukça garip geldi açıkçası.

Sonuçta, hem okurken keyif aldım, hem de bir şeyler öğrendim. Yazarın bir diğer kitabı olan Diamond Age'i okumak için sabırsızlanıyorum.

This was a diffrent kind of read for me and I didn't know what to expect from it. Hut it was a very interesting read and I enjoyed it. It was cool that it was written in 1992 but it didn't always feel like it was.