I absolutely LOVED this book. In a way, I'm glad that I didn't read it back when it was first published, because I never would've "gotten" it. It's hilarious and mind-blowing. From the first page to the last, I was amazed at just how much influence this book has had in TV, movies, etc.

This is definitely one of my "OMG, you HAVE to read this!" books.

me lu lu mu al nu um me en ki me en me lu lu mu me al nu um me al nu um me me mu lu e al nu um me dug ga mu me mu lu e al nu um me...

Snow Crash is now my second book from Neal Stephenson following in the wake of his superb Anathem. It is an interesting and thought provoking book, but I did not think it as polished an offering as Anathem was.

Snow Crash was written in 1992 and NS was still polishing his writing skills. The "big picture" is here and the story is a mind blowing one. There are concepts here, that looked at in the light of 2017, are quite remarkable and forward looking. Sadly the story gets jumbled due to the complexity of the world building. NS tries to show us so much, and provides a social commentary, that it sometimes becomes a jumbled mess of concepts. Especially in the conversations. Still this was a great and original read.

Hiro Protagonist is not only a pizza driver, an expert sword fighter but he is also a hacker. Set in a dystopian cyberpunk setting it is a sarcastic look at the future of America and the world. There is a virus called "Snow Crash" that is frying the brains of hackers. Who made it? What is it? This starts us on a journey through neurolinguistics, Sumerian language, "transmission" of religion, a decades ahead of its time look at the "Metaverse" and the use of avatars. It's that last tortuous sentence that encapsulates the brilliance of this book. Yes it is a bit of a mess. But the underlying ideas are grand.

The concept of a "virus" and how it spreads and then relating that to religion and languages is brilliant. The thoughtful analysis of the entomology of common religious terms was also quite elucidating. A nod of respect to NS knowing the proper way to strike with a katana (snap the blow off vs follow through). But it is in his description of the Metaverse and avatars that I was truly impressed. This was written in 1992, long before the rise of MMORPGS and Minecraft, and is quite brilliant in describing something that is rather common now.

The story is out there. Hiro and Uncle Enzo are awesome characters. Raven was interesting, but rather strange. YT had her moments, but I found her annoying. The story is out there and reading it is not for everyone. His style and the jumble that can be the plot (one exists, trust me, just give it time) often leads people to dislike his work. please bear in mind this was one of his first works. Don't read it for the writing. Read it for the ideas. The "big picture" behind this tale is quite fascinating. It truly made me think about the concept of language and how the learning patterns are set. I am always respectful of any book that makes me think.

All in all-this was a fun read. Yes, there is some difficult prose but well worth the effort to figure out the principal ideas driving this plot. I will admit this book is not for everyone. But if you like bold, challenging ideas and concepts that make you think-then you will like Snow Crash.

Written in the present tense, which is awkward and unengaging, brimfuls of technological deus ex machina remove all tension from an already slow plot-line.

The characters are interesting, hence the two stars, but even they felt lacking and emotionally disengaged from their own story, which had the futile makings of something original.

The ending is atrocious, preceded by wastelands of chapter-length explanation, and a fairy-tale misinterpretation of neurolinguistics that seems to have been written solely to remind us that not everyone is cut out to be a scientist, as some people grow up to write pop-fiction.

If you're looking for cyberpunk, read Altered Carbon or Electric Angel

"Verás, el mundo está lleno de cosas más poderosas que nosotros. Pero si sabes cómo cabalgarlas, te llevan a sitios."

¿Qué fumaste, Stephenson?

Okay, el worldbuilding es magnífico. Toda la idea del Metaverso y las leyes que lo rigen son alucinantes. La mezcla mitos+software+lingüística+religión es para sacarse el sombrero. La analogía entre el lenguaje máquina y el neurolinguístico me puso la piel de gallina. ¿Enki, el hacker sumerio? Vaya, vaya, vaya. Sí, está repleta de ideas provocadoras. Entiendo por qué a muchos esto les parece una genialidad.

Para mí "Snow Crash" ha sido buena pero, mierda, por momentos parece que Stephenson tiene tantas ideas en la cabeza que llega a confundir, como si conforme fuera escribriendo se le ocurrieran un millón de cosas más y te usa como una suerte de conejillo de indias de la literatura. Por momentos se me hacía muy lenta. Comencé abrumado por tanta información, me gustó mucho una tercera parte del libro, todo lo del medio, y el final volvió a caer dejando mucho que desear para mi gusto. Si lo ponemos en binario eso sería como un 010, pero dejémoslo en 3.5 estrellas. ¿Habrá más Stephenson para mí en el futuro? Sí.

Tal vez con esto me gane el infierno del cyberpunk, pero me gustó más lo de Richard Morgan en Carbono modificado. Soy un profano en lo que respecta al cyberpunk, lo siento.

Thankfully, I can report that I quite enjoyed this one, and had none of the bumpy ride that Cryptonomicon gave me. The casual misogyny was nowhere in sight, thank goodness. Also, at only 400 pages, this was a much tighter story, and better because of that. Stephenson's still packing in a million ideas a minute, but that's okay, I can deal with that. In fact, I quite enjoy that.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

“If you know how to catch a ride, you can go places.”

Super entertaining ride through dystopia and pizza delivery (as if there was any real difference in the two), ancient Sumerian mythology, computer and religious viruses, hacker groups and some very strange and creepily familiar communities in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash! And that really is just the beginning. Absolutely loved the inventiveness (and here is my caveat) until at least the first half or three quarters mark. While I plan to reread this book (because I’m sure I will get more out of a second or even a third reading), I lost sight of the plot. To be fair, I don’t believe this was ever meant to be a plot-driven novel. All the same, as I approached the end, it felt less like the book was coming to a conclusion and more like it was running out of energy.

Even though it has an edgier, science fiction feel to it, Snow Crash reminds me of one of my favorite novels, Thomas Pynchon’s V (as well as a Pynchon novella, The Crying of Lot 49). Ideas are spilled across every landscape and community Stephenson describes as well as every sentence he writes. Inventiveness applies to characters as well. The naming of his main character, Hiro Protagonist, master swordsman, hacker and pizza deliveryman, was perfect! There were other likeable characters like the young skate punk, Y.T. Despite some issues down the stretch with the plot, I really enjoyed Snow Crash! 4.5 stars.

As someone currently addicted to Second Life (a virtual world where you live represented by an avatar) I loved this book.

“And even the word ‘library’ is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.”

“…When you live in a shithole, there’s always the Metaverse, and in the Metaverse, Hiro Portagonist is a warrior prince.”

“Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people’s minds.”

“Sometimes it’s all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you’ve got.”

ETA: Listened to the audio of this for no reason other than wanting to read it again, January 2012. Still as good as ever, and listening made me actually pay more attention to the librarian and Sumerian parts.

This book created the term metaverse and for that, it deserves lots of credit. As for the writing, sort of Hunter S Thompson on speed, I'd say. Its character development is thin, but the dim picture of this particular mafioso dystopia was relatively unique (think of Biff's paradise in 2015 in Back to the Future) and frankly pretty fun to read. There is some humor here, but the most enjoyment is just some of the ideas around virtual reality and then reflecting on how he sort of nailed it from a technology point of view: this book was written in 1992 and predicted the metaverse, facebook, mobile phones, instagram, facetime, apple watch, hoverboards, etc. As for the corporate ownership of America, I guess it depends where you fall on the political spectrum, but from my point of view, he isn't all that far off, another 4 years of dump and we would probably be even closer.

A typical quote:
The old central neighborhoods are packed in tight below an
eternal, organic haze. In other cities, you breathe industrial
contaminants, but in L.A., you breathe amino acids. The hazy
sprawl is ringed and netted with glowing lines, like hot wires in
a toaster. At the outlet of the canyon, it comes close enough
that the light sharpens and breaks up into stars, arches, glow-
ing letters. Streams of red and white corpuscles throb down
highways to the fuzzy logic of intelligent traffic lights. Farther
away, spreading across the basin, a million sprightly logos
smear into solid arcs, like geometric points merging into curves.
To either side of the franchise ghettos, the loglo dwindles
across a few shallow layers of development and into a sur-
rounding dimness that is burst here and there by the blaze of a
security spotlight in someone's backyard.

I thought this one was also great:
"He wants to be Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look, it's simple: Once he converts you to his religion, he can control you with me. And he can convert millions of people to his religion
because it spreads like a fucking virus--people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about religion,people aren't rational enough to argue about this kind of thing, Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling on TV is easy to convert. And with Snow Crash as a promoter, it's even easier to get converts.

A good and entertaining read!

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Lo siento, pero no. Reconozco que lo he terminado para poder hablar con propiedad y porque soy incapaz de abandonar un libro, pero si lo hubiese sabido, no habría gastado ni el dinero, ni el tiempo.

Empecemos por los puntos positivos: el metaverso, la idea de la torre de Babel, la sociedad anarquista-mafiosa que plantea y Fido, la criatura rata, totalmente desaprovechada. Con este planteamiento uno suspende su incredulidad y se mete en ese submundo de pizzas y katanas. La historia no tiene ni pies ni cabeza, nada es consecuencia de nada. Los mismos personajes de cartón-piedra que reparten pizzas son supermanes que conducen motos a 16.000 km/hora, derriban submarinos atómicos y hackean lo que no está escrito. Así que claro, la incredulidad retorna. Vale, se dice uno, no me creo nada, pero es divertido como unos dibujos animados. El problema es que semejante refrito de imágenes ni siquiera funciona así. El autor mete tropecientas páginas de wikipoedia sobre los sumerios y el código de Hammurabi ¿para justificar qué?

No es mi primera novela de ciencia ficción (habré leído cerca de 200), ni mi primer cyberpunk. Ni siquiera es mi primer libro del autor (al que había etiquetado -probablemente de manera injusta- como poco interesante y tendente a alargar las historias con un exceso de páginas). No sé. Quizá puedan hacer un video juego delirante de semejante truño, pero una novela, lo siento, pero no.

Hey Mr. Stephenson, Metaphors be with you! Sorry, couldn't help using the cliche!

OK, let me start by listing some of my favourite things from the book:
- Raven
- Technology and it's maniacal usage in the book
- Humour that would go well while drinking with buddies
- Uncle Enzo's Mafia philosophy
and last but not the least
- Technology and it's maniacal usage in the book

My favourite characters in a descending order:
Raven > Uncle Enzo > Ng > Librarian > Hiro > Y.T.

So here is a summary of the book as cited from the book itself:

"Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"
Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"

Wow, Mr. Stephenson!

Summary babble:

Snow Crash has one of the best opening chapter that I have read in recent times. An ultimate, adrenalin-filled, psycho-geeky narrative of a Pizza Deliverator. This Deliverator is the same chap 'Hiro Protagonist'. (A name that will stay with you for a long, long time.) Yes, it does look like Stephenson is being ever-so-sarcastic by coming up with names like Hiro and Y.T.

I have heard a lot that Stephenson bombards you with info, facts, and factually-fabricated fiction in a manner that appears like an iceberg. The tip is just 1/8th of the actual monster. And yes, it is true. (All those have read his other books, specially Anathem, can snigger now and call me naive!) But, steer your ships safely.
Here are a few buoys and lighthouses that might (or might not) guide you if you feel like picking up Snow Crash:

- Do you love (I repeat, LOVE) science and technology. Not just brief allusions that appear once in a while; not just computer science, but chemistry, biology, geology, and linguistics too; but almost every paragraph brimming with highly obvious or slightly obfuscated allusions.

- Do you dig reading about things like Metaverse (even though this is not so difficult to fathom since we have seen it materialise already, but written in '92 Stephenson has described a lot of facets of virtual reality, avatars (first usage of this term to define entities in VR) and more, in a splendid detail) or his brimming love for factually presenting information like:

"Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us 'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,' which have obvious connections to the concept of separation."?

- Can you identify when MSG when "Chinese food without MSG" is mentioned?

No, that was not for you Heisenberg!

- Do you think of petting a radio-isotopic dog, ever?

- Do you love (or don't mind) the bustling overflow of technologically-whacky metaphors:

"logos with a lot of bright, hideous yellow in them, and so Alameda Street is clearly marked out before him, a gout of radioactive urine ejected south from the dead center of L.A."

or

"track him down through the moiling chaos of the microwaved franchise and confront him in a climactic thick-crust apocalypse."

or

"when the temperature has greenhoused up to a hundred and ten degrees".

(I would like to cite some more of them whacky ones, but why don't you check them out yourself?)

- Do you like reading about awesomely described (Oh and one of my most favourite) bad-ass bad guys? A world-class-bad-guy nominee! The sure shot winner of the Nobel (I will shred you in) Pieces (before you blink your eyes) prize. Sir-Kicks-Ass-Aleut. The ultimate-weapon wielder and kick-ass fighter chap: Raven. Raven, the last of the true Gentleman.

- Do you want to keep wondering about Hiro's objective purpose apart from being cool, sword fighting, making a fool of himself in front of Juanita (or stopping her from outwitting him), writing microcode and so many other things? Do you, eventually, want to conclude that when your name is Hiro, heroism is a given?

- Do you like mythology imbibed in technology and would like to read the long ramblings of Hiro with the Librarian about the same? How does weaving facts around fiction or the other way round sound like?
To cite an example, here is something about the Sumerian stuff:
Thi siswhe re nea lstep he nson pla ysw ith yo urb eli efs an dtr ies tos scr ew yo urb rai nso mem ore.

- Do you not mind reading about an annoying side-kick? Yeah, Y.T.

- Do you not mind a conclusion of a book that feels like you are dreaming about swimming in the vast Amazon and then you suddenly wake up to the splashing you are making in your half-filled bath tub?

If the answer to most of these questions is 'Yes', or you want to go ahead, read the book and nuke my review, I will offer you a nuclear submarine.

The rest is up to you.

---

Post-read update: After reading Snow Crash, I was geeked out. I wanted to take up a very human book. Just humans talking to humans and them talking to other humans. Personally. So I took up Norwegian Wood.

Technology is easier to understand. Humans are complex. Being one of them Humans. Sigh.

Snow Crash is definitely unlike anything I've ever read. The novel is fast paced with moments of dialogue and original writing that made me laugh out loud (okay, perhaps just chuckle quietly in appreciation). I appreciate the book's originality and can only imagine how surreal it must have been to read when it was originally published in 1992 (by today's standards, the technology that plays an integral part throughout the book is eerily familiar, especially given the book's context).

While I was sometimes lost during the technical discussions among the hackers about how computers work, I was still able to piece together what was going on (albeit, probably not at the level that someone with more knowledge about computer programming could). To me, the truly fascinating part of the novel involved its incorporation of Sumerian mythology and the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, providing a creative explanation as to the relevance of these ancient stories to a modern and technology based culture. While I enjoyed the novel, parts of it felt disjointed and it suffered a bit from the hype that surrounds it as this resulted in my having certain set expectations before I began reading the book. Otherwise, it was an enjoyable read that I think would be better served by a second reading.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder