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.

This book felt like a really good idea. One of those really good ideas that you know will make a good novel (or whatever it is you think about making), and you have all these other really good details so you add them to your good idea. And you come up with some more characters and they are really good and some awesome organizations and maybe have another good idea or two and you just keep adding them on, like paint in some Clement Greenberg adored jizz-fest of painting, layer upon layer and more layers you have all this great stuff going on, and then you realize you have to make it all do something. And something happens and it's really pretty unspectacular, like in the painting analogy there is all this great layering going on and what is produced is some big yellow smiley face, but this book is better than that but it was still something of a let down when you realize that all the build up, all the different organizations and people and neat ideas were all just so that what happened could happen in the book.

Oh and then as soon as the plot stuff climaxes the book comes apruptly to a halt, like if Star Wars cut to credits right as the Death Star started to explode (not that the stuff left in the movie after that was anything great, but it would still feel very abrupt).

Yeah, that is what this book felt like. Great ideas. Great build up, and then, 'oh, that's it?' *

*don't give me this Neal Stephenson was prophetic shit in defense of why this book should get 5 stars or more. Yeah, he named some things, but it's not like he predicted things existing, he just influenced things being named.

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.

3.5 Stars
This modern cyberpunk classic is smart, funny and oh-so-cool. I loved the setup with a pizza delivery hacker who is literally named "protagonist". The story is intentionally over the top as it satirizes the cyberpunk subgenre. I adored the beginning, but I thought the story was unnecessarily long. I think the novel would have had a stronger, sharper narrative if it had been a few hundred pages shorter. While not perfect, I would definitely recommend this novel to science fiction readers.

-¿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/...

Neal Stephenson is a fascinating author. A master of the craft of writing, he is also a completely inept storyteller.

In a world where anarchism and capitalism have seemingly joined forces to dispose of concepts like government and law, Snow Crash tells the tale of the unbelievably stupidly named Hiro Protagonist and his adventures in and out of the virtual reality known as the Metaverse. It is a cyberpunk novel involving everything from computer hacking to linguistics to Sumerian mythology. Like any Stephenson novel, it’s a trainwreck.

But Stephenson can create such beautiful trainwrecks. If you look away from the unfortunate fact nobody has apparently told him how a story works, or how to create a somewhat multi-dimensional character, you can appreciate the marvel that is a Stephenson setting and the love of knowledge that shines from the pages.

This particular novel is a chaotic blend of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, clean and messy. It can be considered a masterpiece with obvious flaws, or an overrated waste of paper with equally obvious virtues. Take your pick.

I did not find this very enjoyable, mostly because I simply didn't enjoy the setting as much, and ran across some pretty annoying flaws. Still, every Stephenson book I read takes him closer to becoming one of my favourite authors, even this one.

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!

There is a certain kind of joy that comes when you stumble across an author who instantly becomes one of your favourites. Particularly when they already have a lot of books for you to read. I’d heard good things about Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash in particular and, I’ll be honest, this book had been on my to-read list for over five years by the time I finally got around to reading it. I’m my fellow Goodreaders are familiar with that particular issue but, hey, what a great problem to have, am I right?

Anyway, this is a great slice of SF/Fantasy. I normally hate SF and Fantasy being lumped together in the same category but in this case you can’t really call it anything else, as this is definitely as much Fantasy as it is SF. It also has a large comedic element, which took me by surprise as I hadn’t seen it mentioned as a comedy anywhere. I mean, don’t get me wrong; it’s not Douglas Adams but Stephenson has a great sense of humour and absolutely cannot resist a pun (an affliction I also suffer with... well, the people I spend time with suffer with my inability to resist a pun more than I do, to be fair).

It deals with a near-future Earth where large corporations and organised crime (and what’s the difference, anyway, eh?) have mostly kicked official governments to the curb and people spend as much time on the Internet (never called by that name in this book, interestingly) via their VR interfaces as they do in the ‘real’ world. Our protagonist, who goes by the hilarious moniker of ‘Hiro Protagonist’, starts out as a high tech pizza delivery boy and ends up, in the time honoured heroic tradition, saving the world. Well, parts of it, anyway.

It’s more about the journey than the destination, though, and that journey involves a feisty courier, mob bosses, the last dregs of the federal government, hitmen with nuclear weapons, the history of the world going back to Sumerian times, physical, technological and magical viruses and cyborg dogs who can break the sound barrier. There’s a bunch of other stuff in there, too. It’s great.

I absolutely loved this one and will definitely be checking out more of Stephenson’s work.

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.

Great read, and yet unfortunately not my kind of novel. I guess cyberpunk just isn't my thing, but hey, I had to give it a try to find out, right?

And ultimately, I'm glad I did. After finishing Snow Crash, I totally understand why this book is considered Stephenson's greatest classic. Awesome characters, awesome world, and especially awesome concepts/philosophies. I just wish I had a little more interest in some of the latter, but I could still grasp and recognize their merits and appreciate them for that alone.

For obvious reasons it was hard for me to become fully immersed in the novel, but between bouts of ambivalence there were definitely some high points which had me riveted. If nothing else, I found this book fascinating and fun.

The behemoth that more or less peaked cyberpunk while simultaneously taking the piss out of it in slaphappy fashion. Even William Gibson never afterwards quite wrote or treated these themes the same: witness Virtual Light and the remainder of the Bridge Trilogy, which tried to incorporate the humorous style that Stephenson IMO wielded to far better effect herein. Snow Crash just has so much going on—and all with the breathless pace and visual flair of the video games the author must surely have had in mind during composition—that even the harshest critic should find something to like inside. As for myself, I was highly entertained and impressed, and even though I failed in fully comprehending the evolutionary Sumerian linguistic virus angle, what I did grasp struck me as farfetchedly brilliant. Which phrase can actually be liberally applied to the entirety of Stephenson's genre (b)ending book, beginning with what everybody first notices: that Hiro Protagonist works when, by any measure, it should have tripped the author up flat right there on the first page. Indeed, the fact that Hiro and his skateboard dude pizza-delivery persona, together with the other oddball-casted crew set within a United States so compartmentalized that even Atlas might not deign to shrug, fits seamlessly into the cartoon panel-paced, frenetically amplified fun is a testament to Stephenson's skills as a novelist, one who can just reign in his predilection for info-dumping ere it abrades the reader and/or topples the story bearing its mushrooming mass.

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.