Un presente ma diverso. Una rete digitale chiamata Metaverso. Hacker e drogati, Mafia e fattorini della pizza, bombe atomiche portatili e virus linguistici.
Qui si ride di gusto. Evitate pure di sforzarvi nel cercare significati nascosti tra le righe, tipo alienazione sociale, dipendenza dalle droghe, il potere dell'informazione, ecc.. soliti temi cyberpunk. Anche se presenti sono del tutto secondari. Questa è la folle parodia di una ucronia anarchica e un filo distopica.

Partiamo dai due protagonisti: uno si chiama Hiro Protagonist, già il nome è tutto un programma, un incrocio tra John Wick, Neo di Matrix e la Sposa di Kill Bill, hacker che se ne va in giro armato con due katane micidiali. L'altra protagonista è una quindicenne che sfreccia con il suo skateboard super tecnologico sulle autostrade arpionando i veicoli in corsa facendo slalom come una surfista per portare pacchi in giro.

Un vero fumetto o cartone animato su carta che coinvolge e rapisce per la sua follia dilagante.
Sembra un romanzo di Dick, Gibson e Pratchett mescolati con LSD e steroidi.

La prima metà è un delirio, da applausi meritati.
Peccato ci sia un pesante calo nella seconda metà, complice la lunghezza eccessiva del romanzo, i totali cambi di ritmo durante le tediose spiegazioni da enciclopedia sulla natura del virus e una risoluzione sotto tono dell'intera vicenda. Se fosse rimasto al livello della prima metà lo avrei apprezzato maggiormente, invece Stephenson si sente in dovere di dare spiegazioni a valanga.

Il Metaverso ma soprattutto la trovata linguistica è interessante, seppur troppo pedante nell'esposizione anche per me che sono un simpatizzante delle stravaganti teorie di Zecharia Sitchin ed ho divorato tutti i suoi saggi. Se questi argomenti vi stuzzicano, vi consiglio caldamente di leggere il "Dodicesimo pianeta", o tradotto in italiano "il pianeta degli dei" per approfondire.

Adatto per trascorrere ore in allegria, ridendo di pancia delle folli trovate di Stephenson nel presentare questo mondo alternativo tra Mafia, droghe, virus e anarchia.
Il rap di Sushi K. mi è entrato nel cervello e mi ha steso.

------------------------------
A present but different. A digital network called Metaverse. Hackers and drug addicts, Mafia and pizza delivery men, portable atomic bombs and linguistic viruses.
Here we laugh heartily. Also avoid trying to find hidden meanings between the lines, such as social alienation, drug addiction, the power of information, etc. usual cyberpunk themes. Even if present they are completely secondary. This is the crazy parody of an anarchic and slightly dystopian uchronia.

Let's start with the two protagonists: one is called Hiro Protagonist, the name itself says it all, a cross between John Wick, Neo from The Matrix and the Bride from Kill Bill, a hacker who goes around armed with two deadly katanas. The other protagonist is a fifteen-year-old who speeds with her super-technological skateboard on the highways, harpooning moving vehicles, slaloming like a surfer to carry packages around.

A real comic or cartoon on paper that involves and captivates due to its rampant madness.
It sounds like a Dick, Gibson and Pratchett novel mixed with LSD and steroids.

The first half is a frenzy, worthy of applause.
It's a shame there is a heavy decline in the second half, thanks to the excessive length of the novel, the total changes of pace during the tedious encyclopedia-like explanations on the nature of the virus and a subdued resolution of the entire story. If it had remained at the level of the first half I would have appreciated it more, but instead Stephenson feels obliged to give an avalanche of explanations.

The Metaverse but above all the linguistic invention is interesting, although too pedantic in its exposition even for me who am a fan of Zecharia Sitchin's extravagant theories and have devoured all of his essays. If these topics excite you, I highly recommend you read the "Twelfth Planet", or translated into Italian "the planet of the gods" for further information.

Suitable for spending happy hours, laughing heartily at Stephenson's crazy ideas in presenting this alternative world of Mafia, drugs, viruses and anarchy.
Sushi K.'s rap got into my brain and knocked me out.

Snow Crash: So much more than just “cyberpunk,” and funny as hell
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) is probably my favorite SF/cyberpunk novel of all time. It runs the gamut of the Metaverse and avatars, skate punks, an anarcho-capitalist Balkanized United States, super-cool technology, neurolinguistic viruses, hacker communities, burbclaves, ancient Sumerian mythology, Aleutian harpoonist super assassins, the Church of Happyology, and last but not least, Uncle Enzo’s Cosa Nostra Pizza, where your pizza is delivered in less than 30 minutes or Uncle Enzo, a Mafia boss, will fly by helicopter to apologize to you in person. And the driver’s life is forfeit.

The opening chapters feature Hiro Protagonist, Last of the Freelance Hackers and Greatest Swordfighter in the World, as he strives to deliver a Pizza with 20 min already on the clock, in his black, kick-ass Deliverator vehicle, which sounds like Batman’s car. That’s because America can only do four things well in the 21st century: music, movies, software, and high-speed pizza delivery.

I challenge anyone to name a better, more hilarious, cooler opening to a SF novel than Snow Crash. Every quip, every description, and the narrator’s cool, ironic delivery is so perfect that I want to stand up and give a fist-pump. It was great in 1992, and it still holds up well in 2015. I also chose Snow Crash for my first Audiobook, and it’s great to hear it read aloud.

The plot of Snow Crash is complicated and wide-ranging, featuring ironic descriptions of American cultural decline, info-dumps, lessons in linguistics, religion, ancient Sumerian mythology, hacker culture, a brilliant description of the utter futility of a government job, a ridiculous religious cult that encourages speaking in tongues, and a giant floating group of refugees on rafts intending to invade the US in search of a better life.

Is there a plot, you say? Well of course there is. Just don’t ask me to describe it! It does involve a virus targeting hackers called Snow Crash, which is also being spread by the Church of Happyology, which is owned by fiber-optic mogul L. Bob Rife, and attempts to use the nam-shub of Enki to counteract the ancient Metavirus spawned by the Sumerian goddess Asherash. Does that clear it up any? Didn’t think so.

It doesn’t really matter, because the joy of this book is in the telling and the characters. Hiro Protagonist the hacker and swordfighter, Y.T. the young skate punk and courier, Raven the Aleutian super-assassin, Uncle Enzo the kindly mob-boss. What more could you ask for? And the snarkiest, geekiest, and most interesting character is Neal Stephenson, the author. All his crazy ideas are wonderfully embedded in every chapter, every sentence. You always know when you are reading a Stephenson novel, because his narrative voice is unique. And unlike William Gibson’s Neuromancer, he has a great sense of humor and doesn’t take himself so seriously. I doubt any of you reading this haven’t already read this essential work of 1990s cyberpunk, but if you are (seriously?!?!), then get cracking.

Straight up, I did not like this book.

It’s not quite worthy of the one star treatment, though, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because the actual construction of his sentences, the literal writing, is not bad. Second, because the underlying story remains one I think interesting to explore in book form. And third, because I truly believe that one star ratings should be reserved for books that really go beyond the pale in their awfulness, not just slapping that on there because I didn’t happen to like them.

I know Snow Crash belongs in this category, even though I do believe my criticisms of it are legitimate, because many, many of my friends (who are intelligent people with good taste) love this book. Sometimes books and readers just do not go together, for no explainable reason. The chemistry isn’t there*, and you can’t force it.

*What’s interesting about this is that sometimes you go back to a book you either loved or hated at one time, and the chemistry has changed, and so does your reaction to the book. Pride and Prejudice remains the single best example of this phenomenon for me. I hated that book the first three times I tried to read it. Found it utterly incomprehensible. Then I picked it back up years later for a class and fell instantly in love.

It also may be helpful to note that I read this book in audio form, and rather quickly came to the conclusion that the problems I had with it were aggravated by the process of listening. The story, which was coming across as disjointed and confusing, and which featured characters I did not connect with at all, felt even more distant and hard to connect to because I was listening to it rather than digesting the words with my eyeballs. (The narrator isn’t great, either, and the direction/sound production is super weird, with all these chimes and random vocalizations separating chapters and sections. The quality of the audio is pretty poor; it’s muddy and full of white noise. But the recording was made rather a long time ago, so I suppose that’s not really its fault.)

For me, though, this book lost me entirely in its execution. After the first three chapters, Stephenson had me hooked with interesting concepts and a world I felt he never fleshed out enough. I never cared about any of the characters or what was going on. Most of the book was dense in a not fun way, and confusing in a way that made me not care very much at all to try to unravel the webs it was spinning. Character relationships are weak and built on the thinnest of threads. Scenes end abruptly and there are almost no transitions. A large portion of the book relies on some super weird connections that Stephenson makes between ancient Sumerian languages, mythology, religion, computers, and viruses, and he doesn’t do a good enough job explaining it so that it becomes something plausible that might happen in the world he created. Believing the explanation of the main plot in this book as a reader felt to me like being asked to jump from street level to the top of a thirty story building. No fire escapes, no cars to jump from, no ladders or levers or those weird platforms painters and window cleaners use in the movies. And it was too much for me.

About twenty percent in to the book, I realized I wasn’t going to connect with it and just wanted it to be over already, but I pushed through, hoping things would change. And even if they didn’t, I don’t like not finishing books. So I sped up the speed of the audio to 1.5x, then 2x, then 2.5x, until the narrator was speaking chipmunk gibberish. Even doing this*, it still took me almost two months to finish.

*The human brain is amazing. I can’t believe I could listen to that book at 2.5x speed and still understand every word.

I have been told that other Neal Stephenson books are much better and more accessible than this one. I do eventually plan on picking up more of his stuff, and I hope it’s just a case of wrong book, wrong reader and not wrong author, wrong reader. That would be sad. I hate missing out on a party, especially if it's one full of nerds.

A visionary Cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson (author of the wonderful Baroque Cycle) which not just popularised the term Avatar to mean online virtual bodies - but also invented the term Metaverse.

The book is set in the near-future, America as a nation state has mainly broken down in hyperinflation and economic collapse (apart from Federal agency). World is a world of franchises – including a patchwork quilt of franchise quasi-states (not least Greater Hong Kong) as well as various franchises of competing suburban estates (kind of like gated communities).

The sword carrying wannabe Samurai Hiro Protagonist starts as a pizza deliverer for the mafia but after wrecking his car (and meeting YT – Yours Truly - who saved the delivery and hence started a partnership with Hiro and attracts the friendly care of Uncle Enzo the mafia chief) his main job becomes to download information to the central intelligence computer (he then gets paid if anyone reads it). YT is a skateboarding courier who often gets round by harpooning passing cars.

Hiro was one of the architects of the MetaVerse – a kind of virtual reality world where the global elite carry out much of their lives and interactions – as the architect he has certain powers but he sold his stock in the idea and so unlike many of the other architects is rich and powerful only in the MetaVerse not in reality.

He finds – partly through his ex girlfriend and a library she downloads for him of the threat of a drug called Snow Crash which seems to function in both MetaVerse and reality. Eventually he concludes that the drug is heavily related to the ancient world of Sumer and the cult of Asherah.

Hiro discovers that before Sumer the world was (since the events depicted in the fall) infected not just with disease viruses but also with viruses of belief and behaviour– the most powerful of which was the cult of Asherah (also passed on as a literal virus by temple prostitutes).

These viruses accessed the primeval language part of the brain and reached their height in the highly ordered world of Sumer where all beliefs and knowledge was encoded in laws passed on by priesthood. The “God” Enki realised this and unleashed a counter virus, which prevented people understanding these primeval language, and led to the explosion in and divergence of advanced languages (the Tower of Babel) as well as the beginning of rationality and consciousness, an understanding of world/spirit dualism and rational religions.

Judaism (as well as the codified Babylonian law and Islam – another law of the book) is explained as a way of keeping free from viral contamination by the strict reproduction of written law – but the Pharisees started to reproduce the old ways. Jesus opposed these – but Pentecost was an infection of old ways (speaking in tongues is effectively this primeval language) and Jewish cabbalism was related and this came back in early 20th century revival.

There are lots of comparisons of this virus and the ideas to computer viruses (e.g. the primeval language is like machine code, dualism is like binary).

Now the communications monopolist L Bob Rife has discovered the virus (from astronomical monitoring of radio waves as well as archaeological excavation) and is using it in a number of ways to build his control over people: in biological form transmitted to the inhabitants of a huge raft of refugee boat people by vaccination and blood transfusions; by religion (he backs a Pentecostal style cult) and by a computer virus to which hackers are extremely susceptible. He is supported in this by Raven, an Aleutian psychopath with razor thin glass knives and a Nuclear Weapon strapped to his motorcycle, whose ambition is to destroy America in revenge for nuclear testing in his homeland. Raven is in league with some Russian religious fanatics.

Hiro and YT – together with the Mafia and Lee oppose this plan (it is not entirely clear why they all get involved).

After the above is summarised in a large explanation the final scenes of the book become increasingly hard to follow and the ending is abrupt.

The booker is much weaker than Stephenson’s later writing but does contain the combination of rip-roaring action and historical discussion (like an encyclopaedia crossed with a thriller) as well as his attempts to embed the Internet in history.

The most compelling parts of the book is his portrayal of the franchise society – reading a few pages in advance the action seems almost incomprehensible with the weird society and associated jargon and yet the book flows freely, compellingly and as comprehensively (in this respect like David Mitchell’s futuristic writing in “Cloud Atlas” but not in “Ghostwritten”).

Even the MetaVerse description is mostly coherent and non-contradictory especially when explaining the link with reality.

I have a little SAT analogy to help you understand how awesome this book is: Snow Crash is to Books as The Matrix is to movies (with only the absolute BEST parts of Tron and Da Vinci Code thrown in). I'm not talking about all the commercialized Matrix-saga and the weird hype... I'm talking about the first time you sat in the movie theater and saw that chick in the Matrix spin around in suspended animation and kick the crap out of a bunch of cops and thought, "What the #@*%??? COOL!" That's pretty much how this entire book reads. I actually had to add it to my "favorites" list. Can't believe I'd never heard of it before?! (my thanks for suggesting it, Erich)

I guarantee there is not a sentient male breathing who won't count this among their top 20 at least. As for you fellow females, if you enjoy a great action romp like I do... and I don't mean the stupid, dime-a-dozen shoot-em-ups, we're talking Die Hard I/Aliens/Terminator 2 (and aforementioned Matrix) caliber here... then you'll love it, too. It has everything: Mafia pizza delivery tycoons, robot dogs, samurai fights, brainwashing hackers, ancient Sumerian gods, hydrogen bombs, hallucinogenic drugs, punk skateboarders... SWEET, as J.T. would say.

My favorite parts: Stephenson's out-of-this-world unique writing style, the analogy of hacking into a persons brain using language in the same way people hack into computers using code, the amazing action sequences, use of the second person (you/we) to directly connect to the reader, the sections written from the robot dog's perspective, the use of binary code-type language in terms like "hacker" and "harpooning" (for example, the hero can both "hack" into a computer AND "hack" your body to pieces with a katana). BRILLIANT!

A couple tiny complaints: There wasn't nearly enough of Raven, the villain. He ranks right under Hannibal Lector and that guy from the movie Serenity to me... everything a villain should be: a sexy, terrifying brute of a nuclear mutant who rips people to pieces with glass knives. Also, Hiro Protagonist wasn't much of a... well, hero protagonist. He did a little too much research and not quite enough slashing people with his katana for my taste. Raven's foil, Y.T., stole the show--TOTALLY. Not like I minded. I'm all for a 15-year-old skater chick saving the world. SWEET!

(Rated R for an isolated sex scene, medium violence, and consistent swearing.)

FAVORITE QUOTES:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest mother****** in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime... Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer had to worry about trying to be the baddest mother****** in the world. The position is taken.

He turns off the techno-**** in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.

BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements--this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped off.

Interesting things happen along borders--transitions--not in the middle where everything is the same.

[We've:] got millions of those Young Mafia types. All destined to wear blazers and shuffle papers in suburbia. You don't respect those people very much, Y.T., because you're young and arrogant. But I don't respect them much either, because I'm old and wise.

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

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.

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

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

Crazy, strange, exciting, visionary, action-packed, sexy. Reading this book is like watching the Matrix for the first time. Though it may lack pretense of more complex literature, it asks vague and interesting enough questions to match The Bard's sophistry.

Beyond that it is just a great read. It shows a vision of the future that seems eminently likely, but unlike 1984 or Brave New World, has not started to feel stilted. It also lack the long-winded philosophical diatribes and allegories that stagnate that breed of classics. Gibson may have invented Cyberpunk, but Stephenson takes the genre out for a joyride and loses a hubcap on a bootstrap turn.

It was originally planned as a graphic novel, but when that got scrapped, Stephenson filled it out and got it published. Perhaps this is why his other works never match Snowcrash's frenetic teenage energy and sensuality. I wish there were more books this interesting and enjoyable.

I read “Snow Crash” when it first came out in paperback nearly 15 years ago. Then, I had a really hard time getting through it. But, I kept thinking about different concepts in it over and over again. I never forgot the bimbo boxes—slang for minivans driven by suburban housewives. Talk about a book telling the future!

Upon re-reading the book, I now understand why it was so difficult. First, there’s that tricky slang problem. Stephenson invented a lot of slang for the book and that made reading it like trying to follow a teenager’s text-messaging conversation. Second, the Metaverse, while undeniable fascinating, was a totally foreign concept to a person who was using a computer with DOS-6, a CGA monitor and no mouse. Third, and probably most importantly, the book is just way too full of exposition. There’s a whole “character” devoted to exposition; a computer construct called “Librarian.” Librarian has a tendency to ramble on and is constantly changing the course of his conversations with the protagonist, aptly named “Hiro Protagonist.”

“Snow Crash” is usually placed in the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. I think that’s a bit simplistic. It’s so much more than cyberpunk. It’s an action thriller. It’s full of information about linguistics, brain function, religion, corporate greed, government employees, rock & roll, and the Mafia. Overall, I found “Snow Crash” to be a more enjoyable read in 2008 than I did in the mid-Nineties. I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind being bombarded with a gazillion disparate ideas.

I tried. I really, really did. Everyone kept telling me I'd love it, that is was so seminal to recent sci-fi that I just had to read it if I was to truly appreciate the genre… And then I did and I was like… "Meh!" To be fair, a lot of elements of "Snow Crash" are flipping cool. I for one, look forward to the day and age where pizza-delivery mafias will replace the governement; can't be worse than what's going on now. The origins of language and how language shapes the human mind is such a fascinating subject, as is the Sumerian mythology used to bring these concepts on. But these things are so overwhelmed by male-adolescent fantasy-fulfilling elements that the good bits end up too little too late for me.

A katana-wielding hacker/pizza delivery boy who goes by the name of Hiro Protagonist (I am not even kidding) is recruited by his corporation-running-genius ex-girlfriend to find and destroy a computer virus named Snow Crash that destroys the minds of the hackers plugged into the Metaverse who come in contact with it. He partners up with YT, a daredevil skateboarding teenage girl with a serious attitude problem. Hiro will soon find a link between the Snow Crash, which turns out to be a neuro-linguistic virus, and a religious organization who seeks to use it as a tool for mass population control.

The uneven pace, the huge piles of exposition, chase scenes that are as useless as one infamous pod-race, the clumsy way Stephenson tries to make YT's chapters sound more like her by dumbing down his writing (if I see the word "thingy" one more time, so help me…): all these things were so annoying that while I can appreciate what he was doing, I did not have a good reading experience slugging my way through "Snow Crash". I'm sorry Neal: I know you were trying really, really hard, but I think that might just be your problem, trying too hard.

Of course, now I know where "The Matrix", "Ready Player One" and a ton of other books and video games got their ideas from, and that's great. I am glad I read it, but I won't be re-reading it; if language related sci-fi is your thing, check out "Embassytown" by Mieville, which is dense, but at least it's gorgeously written.

This was a tough read but I stuck with it and finished because I hate to DNF.

I finished it just there and damn, what a drag!

In this one Neal Stephenson writes like he's describing a dream he's had, I'm not into that.

The characters weren't likeable and the story was all over the damn place and never made much sense to me.

Worst book I've read in a long time.

Just not for me.

I'm not giving up on this author though, I'll try Seveneves at some point.

I feel like I need some easy reading now, my brain is like gravy.