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Hmm, I read Snow Crash a few years back, mainly due to the praise. It was certainly a good book, but quite honestly I felt it was overrated. I'm in my late 20s
by oarabbus_ 7y ago
Hmm, I read Snow Crash a few years back, mainly due to the praise. It was certainly a good book, but quite honestly I felt it was overrated. I'm in my late 20s, and it's very possible the book was revolutionary and groundbreaking in 1992, but it does show some age nowadays.
- Sharlin 7y agoI guess the context is pretty important. Snow Crash is something of a deconstruction of the cyberpunk of the eighties, taking some of the genre’s tropes to their logical conclusion and subverting or inverting many others. It was one of the first influential works of the new wave of science fiction that came to be called post-cyberpunk (a genre notoriously hard to define beyond the obvious ”after cyberpunk”). The clear shift in narrative style after the prologue functions as a boundary of sorts, informing the reader that they are not in Kansas anymore. (Stephenson does this again, even more explicitly, in The Diamond Age!)
- maire 7y agoSnow Crash came out about 8 years after Neuromancer and 17 years after Shockwave Rider so I don't think it was groundbreaking. Having said that, I did enjoy it and I do see modern weak knock-offs of Snow Crash that have gotten praise from the pundits in the last couple of years. Cryptonomicon was awesome but too long. I wish it was cut down. I loved Diamond Age. I still think about it.