15 ms·

Snow Crash Revisited: Grokking a Satire of Mimesis

111 points by amk_ 10y ago

throwanem 10y ago
I can see that a lot of thought went into this review, but I have to admit I can't see what came out of it. Perhaps someone with a clearer understanding than I might lend a hand?
- Animats 10y ago
  The book, or the review? The book outlines a world where franchisers run everything, including jails. It's a cookie-cutter world; instances of each franchise are very standardized, and this is a plot point. The hero delivers pizza for the Mafia run pizza franchise, when he's not hacking code. The heroine is a 15-year old skateboarding courier girl with a really good skateboard. There's a big virtual world, run partly by the Special Interest Group on Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery. The VR world is a lot like Second Life but with VR and better graphics; you can buy real estate and build. The hero spends a lot of time in there, but that's not where the plot happens. The Big Bad is a mega-preacher who has a visual data pattern which allows him to take over, or at least crash, human brains. This involves info from ancient gods and such. He's trying to take over the world. It's a great exercise in literary world-building; the plot isn't much and there's little character development. A movie was in development, but it didn't happen. It would be great to see it done it today, now that the graphics are good enough. Would definitely have been better than Tron 2.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    The review, sorry - I know the book of old. I've edited my prior comment for greater salience.
    - 888uuii 10y ago
      Your salience is delicious. - A fan
    - stephenpiment 10y ago
      Author of the essay here. I've found that Snow Crash is one of those books that pretty strongly divides readers. Some people are very fond of it; others bounce off of it, often commenting that something about it rubs them the wrong way. Not many readers are in the middle. I'm definitely in the former camp, even though I can see the book's weaknesses from a writing perspective. In the essay, I wanted to express some thoughts on why the book's fans respond to it, to the point that it has been rather influential in the world beyond fiction.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Heh, yeah. Tron 2 was disapointing to day the least. Stephenson's novels in general are like this, although Cryptonomicon for one certainly has better character development than Snow Crash: they're a disorderly jumble of whatever ideas Stephenson thought were interesting at the time, wrapped in a skin of plot, and enfleshed in the characters that surround, encounter, and explore them. Stephenson sometimes jumps the rails entirely, writing long monologues, dialogues, and digressions that barely refer to the characters or plot at all, just because he thought the ideas were neat (most of Randy and Pontifex's discussions in prison, The mathematics of Alan's bicycle chain, a good stretch of Hiro's discussions with the Librarian (although nowhere near all of them), and Hiro's adventures in Flatland on the raft (you can just feel the seeds of In The Beginning Was The Command Line, struggling to get out)), or for reasons known only to him (probably because he thought it was funny) (the TP memo, the stockings/Van Eck... thing). To some people this may be seen as a disjointed, overhyped, overcomplicated mess, but to the right sort of mind, it's an almost magical experience. Curiously, these sorts of people tend to be heavily into computing, which is why Stephenson pervades that culture. Or that's wrong, and I'm just completely mad. That's also a possibility.
    - gbhn 10y ago
      I think you are right, and I've at times struggled to explain why I enjoy his books as much as I do. I think ultimately he leans regularly on a facet of SF that in that genre, ideas and abstractions can be the equal subjects of character development. Cleverly developing an idea (e.g. mind virii) and circling back on those ideas, exploring how different facets connect in different ways, is the kind of thing one does with a human character, but can also do with an "idea character" in SF. Obviously the craft and virtue of that kind of thing is in the relationships of the concept to other elements of the tale, both human and non-human. This I think Stephenson does very well, but I can appreciate that for someone who doesn't extend subjectivity largesse to abstractions, it can be tedious to read wikipedia-like explositions, no matter how well done. :-)
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Just so you know, I love Stephenson. I've heard his critics complain about this, amd I'm not sure they realize it's what makes him popular.
  - ihuman 10y ago
    >Would definitely have been better than Tron 2 At least we got a good Daft Punk album out of it
  - kordless 10y ago
    Makes me wonder if people with Aphantasia would be immune to the Big Bad's pattern.
n00b101 10y ago
I read Snow Crash when I was 13. Then I lost countless hours trying to "live the dream" with Active Worlds [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds
- Harelin 10y ago
  It was Cybertown for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown
- ccvannorman 10y ago
  Oh dear god. I'm working on a virtual math world video game, and so I was obliged to check out Active Worlds which you linked to. It truly feels lost in the 90s.. I can't say I could appreciate the UX. I probably won't be dabbling there. :/ Still, it's pretty cool that it's the oldest online multiplayer 3D world and still apparently has a friendly user base! (They helped me out when I started spouting wwwwwwawsd in the chat whilst trying to move my avatar)
- BatFastard 10y ago
  Interesting how "new" build your own reality worlds have just started reappearing after an 8 year drought. VR has brought them back, but VR is just a new interface to the same way of creating things.
- L_226 10y ago
  I once toyed around with the idea of making a browser based virtual world for 4chan when I still used it regularly (~2008ish). Heavily inspired by Gibson and Stephenson. Each board would be it's own green wireframe building off a main avenue with shape and size corresponding to the volume of content - and thus would change over time. You would be able to fly around the 'city' and enter buildings to view the threads. I wrote a lot of notes, but no code... Of course, being a teenager I named the browser 4skin :)
  - Vivtek 10y ago
    This has me giggling. I guess one never really grows out of being a 14-year-old, ultimately.
eggy 10y ago
I like Stephenson, but I guess Snow Crash was late to the party for me, having already read Neuromancer and a bunch of other cyberpunk books as well as a lot of cyberpunk-themed movies before finding it. I enjoyed Snow Crash, but I am more a fan of Cryptonomicon and Anathem. I stumbled upon Cryptonomicon in the bookstore, because of the intriguing title. That and the Perl script for Solitaire in the back of the book. I wish Cryptonomicon had been made into a movie pre-Bitcoin and Snowden; I hope they still make a movie of it.
vertis 10y ago
The reason I love books from Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Charles Stross, is that, for me at least, they're massive catalysts to my own thoughts and imaginations of what might be possible. If I had to pick one book above others from Neil Stephenson it would be Diamond Age. I just keep going back to it. It's got a lot to say, and I wouldn't mind seeing a similar analysis by the Author of this post.
- lowglow 10y ago
  Yesssss. Diamond Age really is a boss book. We're pulling a lot of inspiration from these same authors to build Asteria. Heck, even Charles Stross retweeted Asteria last night. It was pretty epic. Check it: https://getasteria.com/ https://getasteria.com/
- sosuke 10y ago
  I was all in to Diamond Age until the ending. It felt like he ran out of steam, gave up, or had someone else write the ending it was such a departure from the rest of the book in pace and perspective. I'll have to revisit it to see what I missed.
  - yoodenvranx 10y ago
    > It felt like he ran out of steam, gave up, or had someone else write the ending it was such a departure from the rest of the book in pace and perspective. The same happens in "Seveneves". I love the first part of the book but when he switches to the new story line it feels like he ran out of time. That book should have been at least 2 or 3 books but for some reason he crams everything into 1 book.
    - celticninja 10y ago
      I felt the same, the final group of people was hardly explored. It could easily have been a 2 part series.
    - InclinedPlane 10y ago
      See my other answer for some additional commentary on this style in general. For Seveneves I think there's a combination of factors at play. Maybe he didn't know exactly how to finish it, and maybe (probably) he wanted to leave things open enough for a sequel. Mostly though, I think he was just trying to be subtle. There are a few moments through the climactic scenes that are very easy to miss but have a big impact on the plot line. Overall, I like that some authors have the guts to finish a book without wrapping up everything in a tidy bow (which can often be cliched and overwrought).
zem 10y ago
i love lots of bits of snow crash, but i do not like the book as a whole. i did not feel like the (admittedly excellent) ideas and snippets were stitched into a coherent whole in a particularly satisfying way. on the other hand, "diamond age" is truly a masterpiece, and i strongly recommend that one to any of stephenson's fans. it's the book of his i'd rate the highest, though my favourite is "cryptonomicon" just because that's comfort reading.
menssen 10y ago
Downvote me: Infinite Jest is Snow Crash for adults. (But seriously: similar vision of a corporate-controlled near-future; and IJ is great, read it.)
- rfergie 10y ago
  I've been trying to decide whether to bother with Infinite Jest or not. I've heard very good things about it, but also that it is a pretty tough read. I think your comparison with Snow Crash has swung it for me; IJ is definitely on my reading list now
  - nnethercote 10y ago
    > I've heard very good things about it, but also that it is a pretty tough read. Give it 100 pages. If you don't like it by then -- or at least significant chunks of it -- then you probably won't like the whole thing.
    - krylon 10y ago
      Hehe, that is exactly what I did. By page 100 I was hopelessly hooked. It's not an easy book, but I thoroughly enjoyed how it was both intellectually stimulating and extremely funny.
- vertis 10y ago
  For those that have never heard of Infinite Jest, it's a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace[1]. It's now on my to read list. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest
carlesfe 10y ago
I just finished Snow Crash and found it too pretentious and convoluted, like the turn that Diamond Age does towards the ending. Besides that, it introduces a few interesting concepts, but I feel that similar ideas are developed much better in DA. For me, Stephenson's masterpiece is Diamond Age, hands down -- minus the ending, if that could be a thing. The last chapters are too obscure just for the sake of obscurity, I've read it three times and I can't get any "deep" meaning to it, just a bunch of wow-cool-but-irrelevant text. Regarding Cryptonomicon, the first three books, they're straigtforward, interesting, and with a lot of references and trivia but it doesn't try too hard like the "Gods" part of Snow Crash. I really, really enjoyed them. Unfortunately, I found the Cryptonomicon prequels a nice adventure book in the traditional sense, but the characters were too flat and un-relatable, and it bored me. Anyway, that's my opinion. Diamond Age introduced me to cyberpunk and, to date, it's my favorite novel of the genre. I've recommended it to many people and they've always liked it. I still dream of the day when we have matter compilators, and victorians look like a bunch of hipsters to me, which is both funny and very realistic. In a world full of technology, rich people will want to go back to a more... simple and comfortable age. It blew my mind.
- _98fj 10y ago
  It's 12 years since I've read Diamond Age, but the way I remember the ending is that it gave me a feeling like a camera zooming out of the world. Everything drifts into distance, goes diffuse and becomes, with all it's importance, unimportant.
- jeeva 10y ago
  Have you tried Daemon and Freedom, a small series by Daniel Suarez?
  - vertis 10y ago
    Amazing books. I was pleasantly surprised by Kill Decision as well, not quite in the same league, but more interesting than I expected. That, and Ramez Naam's Nexus, Crux, Apex are recent additions to my collection of awesome books.
  - 10y ago
jhbadger 10y ago
What I find either funny or depressing (can't decide), are the number of younger people (as in too young to be using computers in 1992) who read "Snow Crash" before reading any other cyberpunk and 1) fail to get that it is actually is a satire of Neuromancer, etc. and 2) think that Stephenson was amazingly prophetic, not realizing that a lot of what he was writing about already existed, albeit in simpler forms. 3D avatar environments are really just an aesthetic improvement over MUDs (Multi User Dungeons/Domains), which were multi-user text-based games that were all the rage in 1992.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  He was pretty prophetic, just not with that. However the reason he was prophetic is that he inspired reality. See Google Earth.
- sevensor 10y ago
  I don't read Snow Crash as a Neuromancer parody. Stephenson has too many of his own ideas for that. When it comes to ideas, Stephenson is unusually playful. (See also the Enlightenment philosophers in the Baroque cycle.) He's not great on plot or characterization, or structuring a novel in general, but Stephenson can write one hell of a sentence, and he often keeps it up for a paragraph at a time. Gibson, whose books I also adore, has basically nothing at all to do with Stephenson. The only thing connecting them is that some of their books are set in dystopian near-futures. Gibson at his best is bracingly bleak. Cyberpunk was a marketing term for publishers and critics who couldn't get their heads around him. Early Gibson is pure punk. Even more than Neuromancer, read the stories in Burning Chrome for their hard, angry edge.
- usrusr 10y ago
  It must be even worse when people are reading the Baroque Cycle after having watched Pirates of the Caribbean, as the Jacks are exactly the same person. Surprisingly, both had been in writing before the other was published.
pjc50 10y ago
"Taken literally, this backstory might remind one of an arcane thriller written by an over-enthusiastic autodidact." That's the rest of Stephenson's work. I'm not sure Snow Crash is really a satire on cyberpunk per se. It's classic SF over-extrapolation of current trends in a funhouse mirror to shed light on things. The first of which is over-privatisation: everything in Snow Crash is a "franchise", including core parts of the government. When YT is arrested she's given a choice of privatised jail providers and justice systems, straight out of the libertarian playbook. The "burbclaves" are what happens when a HOA and gated community upgrades to an armed microstate. And so on. The other of which is weaponised memes: if these things can be said to be "viral", can you produce a meme or image that's actually an exploit against human wetware? The review criticises the book for "missing" Google, which I think says more about the reviewer's position in the world. Yes, the world of SC is not dominated by SV companies, but that's not important. The book does contain a souped-up realtime Google Earth, and a "gargoyle" who's a human version of the streetview car. (Stross takes "weaponised ideas" in a different direction in the Laundry Files, which are essentially Yes Minister/Lovecraft crossover fiction)
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Although Stross's default stance in the Laundry Files seems to be that everything is a weapon, or could be one. Camera? Weapon. Smartphone? Weapon. Pidgeon's foot? Weapon. Your own brain? Weapon. Violin? At least one of them is a weapon.
  - Pamar 10y ago
    Unlike I am mistaken the pidgeon foot is defensive/camouflage but cannot be used to cause damage to a target.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      You missed some dialogue. You can relatively simply extend the HOG from an defensive weapon to an offensive weapon (all it takes is a mirror, IIRC). The pigeon foot is a HOG, and can be used in the same way. It's just that Bob rarely does so.

111 points by amk_ 10y ago

I can see that a lot of thought went into this review, but I have to admit I can't see what came out of it. Perhaps someone with a clearer understanding than I might lend a hand?

Animats 10y ago
The book, or the review? The book outlines a world where franchisers run everything, including jails. It's a cookie-cutter world; instances of each franchise are very standardized, and this is a plot point. The hero delivers pizza for the Mafia run pizza franchise, when he's not hacking code. The heroine is a 15-year old skateboarding courier girl with a really good skateboard. There's a big virtual world, run partly by the Special Interest Group on Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery. The VR world is a lot like Second Life but with VR and better graphics; you can buy real estate and build. The hero spends a lot of time in there, but that's not where the plot happens. The Big Bad is a mega-preacher who has a visual data pattern which allows him to take over, or at least crash, human brains. This involves info from ancient gods and such. He's trying to take over the world. It's a great exercise in literary world-building; the plot isn't much and there's little character development. A movie was in development, but it didn't happen. It would be great to see it done it today, now that the graphics are good enough. Would definitely have been better than Tron 2.
- throwanem 10y ago
  The review, sorry - I know the book of old. I've edited my prior comment for greater salience.
  - 888uuii 10y ago
    Your salience is delicious. - A fan
  - stephenpiment 10y ago
    Author of the essay here. I've found that Snow Crash is one of those books that pretty strongly divides readers. Some people are very fond of it; others bounce off of it, often commenting that something about it rubs them the wrong way. Not many readers are in the middle. I'm definitely in the former camp, even though I can see the book's weaknesses from a writing perspective. In the essay, I wanted to express some thoughts on why the book's fans respond to it, to the point that it has been rather influential in the world beyond fiction.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Heh, yeah. Tron 2 was disapointing to day the least. Stephenson's novels in general are like this, although Cryptonomicon for one certainly has better character development than Snow Crash: they're a disorderly jumble of whatever ideas Stephenson thought were interesting at the time, wrapped in a skin of plot, and enfleshed in the characters that surround, encounter, and explore them. Stephenson sometimes jumps the rails entirely, writing long monologues, dialogues, and digressions that barely refer to the characters or plot at all, just because he thought the ideas were neat (most of Randy and Pontifex's discussions in prison, The mathematics of Alan's bicycle chain, a good stretch of Hiro's discussions with the Librarian (although nowhere near all of them), and Hiro's adventures in Flatland on the raft (you can just feel the seeds of In The Beginning Was The Command Line, struggling to get out)), or for reasons known only to him (probably because he thought it was funny) (the TP memo, the stockings/Van Eck... thing). To some people this may be seen as a disjointed, overhyped, overcomplicated mess, but to the right sort of mind, it's an almost magical experience. Curiously, these sorts of people tend to be heavily into computing, which is why Stephenson pervades that culture. Or that's wrong, and I'm just completely mad. That's also a possibility.
  - gbhn 10y ago
    I think you are right, and I've at times struggled to explain why I enjoy his books as much as I do. I think ultimately he leans regularly on a facet of SF that in that genre, ideas and abstractions can be the equal subjects of character development. Cleverly developing an idea (e.g. mind virii) and circling back on those ideas, exploring how different facets connect in different ways, is the kind of thing one does with a human character, but can also do with an "idea character" in SF. Obviously the craft and virtue of that kind of thing is in the relationships of the concept to other elements of the tale, both human and non-human. This I think Stephenson does very well, but I can appreciate that for someone who doesn't extend subjectivity largesse to abstractions, it can be tedious to read wikipedia-like explositions, no matter how well done. :-)
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Just so you know, I love Stephenson. I've heard his critics complain about this, amd I'm not sure they realize it's what makes him popular.
- ihuman 10y ago
  >Would definitely have been better than Tron 2 At least we got a good Daft Punk album out of it
- kordless 10y ago
  Makes me wonder if people with Aphantasia would be immune to the Big Bad's pattern.

n00b101 10y ago

I read Snow Crash when I was 13. Then I lost countless hours trying to "live the dream" with Active Worlds [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds

Harelin 10y ago
It was Cybertown for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown
ccvannorman 10y ago
Oh dear god. I'm working on a virtual math world video game, and so I was obliged to check out Active Worlds which you linked to. It truly feels lost in the 90s.. I can't say I could appreciate the UX. I probably won't be dabbling there. :/ Still, it's pretty cool that it's the oldest online multiplayer 3D world and still apparently has a friendly user base! (They helped me out when I started spouting wwwwwwawsd in the chat whilst trying to move my avatar)
BatFastard 10y ago
Interesting how "new" build your own reality worlds have just started reappearing after an 8 year drought. VR has brought them back, but VR is just a new interface to the same way of creating things.
L_226 10y ago
I once toyed around with the idea of making a browser based virtual world for 4chan when I still used it regularly (~2008ish). Heavily inspired by Gibson and Stephenson. Each board would be it's own green wireframe building off a main avenue with shape and size corresponding to the volume of content - and thus would change over time. You would be able to fly around the 'city' and enter buildings to view the threads. I wrote a lot of notes, but no code... Of course, being a teenager I named the browser 4skin :)
- Vivtek 10y ago
  This has me giggling. I guess one never really grows out of being a 14-year-old, ultimately.

eggy 10y ago

I like Stephenson, but I guess Snow Crash was late to the party for me, having already read Neuromancer and a bunch of other cyberpunk books as well as a lot of cyberpunk-themed movies before finding it. I enjoyed Snow Crash, but I am more a fan of Cryptonomicon and Anathem. I stumbled upon Cryptonomicon in the bookstore, because of the intriguing title. That and the Perl script for Solitaire in the back of the book. I wish Cryptonomicon had been made into a movie pre-Bitcoin and Snowden; I hope they still make a movie of it.

vertis 10y ago

The reason I love books from Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Charles Stross, is that, for me at least, they're massive catalysts to my own thoughts and imaginations of what might be possible. If I had to pick one book above others from Neil Stephenson it would be Diamond Age. I just keep going back to it. It's got a lot to say, and I wouldn't mind seeing a similar analysis by the Author of this post.

lowglow 10y ago
Yesssss. Diamond Age really is a boss book. We're pulling a lot of inspiration from these same authors to build Asteria. Heck, even Charles Stross retweeted Asteria last night. It was pretty epic. Check it: https://getasteria.com/ https://getasteria.com/
sosuke 10y ago
I was all in to Diamond Age until the ending. It felt like he ran out of steam, gave up, or had someone else write the ending it was such a departure from the rest of the book in pace and perspective. I'll have to revisit it to see what I missed.
- yoodenvranx 10y ago
  > It felt like he ran out of steam, gave up, or had someone else write the ending it was such a departure from the rest of the book in pace and perspective. The same happens in "Seveneves". I love the first part of the book but when he switches to the new story line it feels like he ran out of time. That book should have been at least 2 or 3 books but for some reason he crams everything into 1 book.
  - celticninja 10y ago
    I felt the same, the final group of people was hardly explored. It could easily have been a 2 part series.
  - InclinedPlane 10y ago
    See my other answer for some additional commentary on this style in general. For Seveneves I think there's a combination of factors at play. Maybe he didn't know exactly how to finish it, and maybe (probably) he wanted to leave things open enough for a sequel. Mostly though, I think he was just trying to be subtle. There are a few moments through the climactic scenes that are very easy to miss but have a big impact on the plot line. Overall, I like that some authors have the guts to finish a book without wrapping up everything in a tidy bow (which can often be cliched and overwrought).

zem 10y ago

i love lots of bits of snow crash, but i do not like the book as a whole. i did not feel like the (admittedly excellent) ideas and snippets were stitched into a coherent whole in a particularly satisfying way. on the other hand, "diamond age" is truly a masterpiece, and i strongly recommend that one to any of stephenson's fans. it's the book of his i'd rate the highest, though my favourite is "cryptonomicon" just because that's comfort reading.

menssen 10y ago

Downvote me: Infinite Jest is Snow Crash for adults. (But seriously: similar vision of a corporate-controlled near-future; and IJ is great, read it.)

rfergie 10y ago
I've been trying to decide whether to bother with Infinite Jest or not. I've heard very good things about it, but also that it is a pretty tough read. I think your comparison with Snow Crash has swung it for me; IJ is definitely on my reading list now
- nnethercote 10y ago
  > I've heard very good things about it, but also that it is a pretty tough read. Give it 100 pages. If you don't like it by then -- or at least significant chunks of it -- then you probably won't like the whole thing.
  - krylon 10y ago
    Hehe, that is exactly what I did. By page 100 I was hopelessly hooked. It's not an easy book, but I thoroughly enjoyed how it was both intellectually stimulating and extremely funny.
vertis 10y ago
For those that have never heard of Infinite Jest, it's a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace[1]. It's now on my to read list. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest

carlesfe 10y ago

I just finished Snow Crash and found it too pretentious and convoluted, like the turn that Diamond Age does towards the ending. Besides that, it introduces a few interesting concepts, but I feel that similar ideas are developed much better in DA. For me, Stephenson's masterpiece is Diamond Age, hands down -- minus the ending, if that could be a thing. The last chapters are too obscure just for the sake of obscurity, I've read it three times and I can't get any "deep" meaning to it, just a bunch of wow-cool-but-irrelevant text. Regarding Cryptonomicon, the first three books, they're straigtforward, interesting, and with a lot of references and trivia but it doesn't try too hard like the "Gods" part of Snow Crash. I really, really enjoyed them. Unfortunately, I found the Cryptonomicon prequels a nice adventure book in the traditional sense, but the characters were too flat and un-relatable, and it bored me. Anyway, that's my opinion. Diamond Age introduced me to cyberpunk and, to date, it's my favorite novel of the genre. I've recommended it to many people and they've always liked it. I still dream of the day when we have matter compilators, and victorians look like a bunch of hipsters to me, which is both funny and very realistic. In a world full of technology, rich people will want to go back to a more... simple and comfortable age. It blew my mind.

_98fj 10y ago
It's 12 years since I've read Diamond Age, but the way I remember the ending is that it gave me a feeling like a camera zooming out of the world. Everything drifts into distance, goes diffuse and becomes, with all it's importance, unimportant.
jeeva 10y ago
Have you tried Daemon and Freedom, a small series by Daniel Suarez?
- vertis 10y ago
  Amazing books. I was pleasantly surprised by Kill Decision as well, not quite in the same league, but more interesting than I expected. That, and Ramez Naam's Nexus, Crux, Apex are recent additions to my collection of awesome books.
- 10y ago

jhbadger 10y ago

What I find either funny or depressing (can't decide), are the number of younger people (as in too young to be using computers in 1992) who read "Snow Crash" before reading any other cyberpunk and 1) fail to get that it is actually is a satire of Neuromancer, etc. and 2) think that Stephenson was amazingly prophetic, not realizing that a lot of what he was writing about already existed, albeit in simpler forms. 3D avatar environments are really just an aesthetic improvement over MUDs (Multi User Dungeons/Domains), which were multi-user text-based games that were all the rage in 1992.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
He was pretty prophetic, just not with that. However the reason he was prophetic is that he inspired reality. See Google Earth.
sevensor 10y ago
I don't read Snow Crash as a Neuromancer parody. Stephenson has too many of his own ideas for that. When it comes to ideas, Stephenson is unusually playful. (See also the Enlightenment philosophers in the Baroque cycle.) He's not great on plot or characterization, or structuring a novel in general, but Stephenson can write one hell of a sentence, and he often keeps it up for a paragraph at a time. Gibson, whose books I also adore, has basically nothing at all to do with Stephenson. The only thing connecting them is that some of their books are set in dystopian near-futures. Gibson at his best is bracingly bleak. Cyberpunk was a marketing term for publishers and critics who couldn't get their heads around him. Early Gibson is pure punk. Even more than Neuromancer, read the stories in Burning Chrome for their hard, angry edge.
usrusr 10y ago
It must be even worse when people are reading the Baroque Cycle after having watched Pirates of the Caribbean, as the Jacks are exactly the same person. Surprisingly, both had been in writing before the other was published.

pjc50 10y ago

"Taken literally, this backstory might remind one of an arcane thriller written by an over-enthusiastic autodidact." That's the rest of Stephenson's work. I'm not sure Snow Crash is really a satire on cyberpunk per se. It's classic SF over-extrapolation of current trends in a funhouse mirror to shed light on things. The first of which is over-privatisation: everything in Snow Crash is a "franchise", including core parts of the government. When YT is arrested she's given a choice of privatised jail providers and justice systems, straight out of the libertarian playbook. The "burbclaves" are what happens when a HOA and gated community upgrades to an armed microstate. And so on. The other of which is weaponised memes: if these things can be said to be "viral", can you produce a meme or image that's actually an exploit against human wetware? The review criticises the book for "missing" Google, which I think says more about the reviewer's position in the world. Yes, the world of SC is not dominated by SV companies, but that's not important. The book does contain a souped-up realtime Google Earth, and a "gargoyle" who's a human version of the streetview car. (Stross takes "weaponised ideas" in a different direction in the Laundry Files, which are essentially Yes Minister/Lovecraft crossover fiction)

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Although Stross's default stance in the Laundry Files seems to be that everything is a weapon, or could be one. Camera? Weapon. Smartphone? Weapon. Pidgeon's foot? Weapon. Your own brain? Weapon. Violin? At least one of them is a weapon.
- Pamar 10y ago
  Unlike I am mistaken the pidgeon foot is defensive/camouflage but cannot be used to cause damage to a target.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    You missed some dialogue. You can relatively simply extend the HOG from an defensive weapon to an offensive weapon (all it takes is a mirror, IIRC). The pigeon foot is a HOG, and can be used in the same way. It's just that Bob rarely does so.