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Heaven forbid anyone read the Hackernews darling, Snow Crash in a similar light. I sometimes get put in a position where i state my favourite book. Snow Crash.

Heaven forbid anyone read the Hackernews darling, Snow Crash in a similar light. I sometimes get put in a position where i state my favourite book. Snow Crash. What's it about they ask? Well there's a guy who delivers pizza, 'a deliverator' they call him but his name is Hiro Protagonist (yes seriously that's the main characters name folks). It's set in the dystopian future where you have to deliver pizza in under 30minutes or face public execution for the entertainment of the people who didn't get their pizza in time. He uses a skateboard and grappling hooks to get around and has samurai swords because he studies the way of the blade. He logs into the metaverse where he's a hardcore hacker by night. He ends up meeting a biker who has a nuclear bomb in a sidecar with a tattoo on his forehead that reads POOR IMPULSE CONTROL... (i could ramble on for a while like this trying to explain what it's about but you probably get a sense for it). I actually think Neil Stephenson was intentionally trying to write the most ridiculous book possible but the truth is the book is FUN. I don't care about clever plots or prose. I want FUN. Da Vinci code is similar. It's an Indiana Jones movie in book form.

lxgr 2y ago
Different levels of self-awareness about ultimately not taking themselves too seriously, arguably. (Doesn’t mean one can’t enjoy both, of course!)
hi_hi 2y ago
I recently watched a new show called Prime Target. Watching it frustrated me as some aspects just didn't hold together, or were totally overstated. The wife would get frustrated with me in turn when I would point these out. "How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine". I wasn't sure how to answer that at first, but I think your comment solidifies it. I can accept ridiculous and unrealistic scenarios as long as they are fun, and held together within an equally ridiculous world. Theres a fine line between something that is clearly a dramatisation being frustrating or just fun.
- skydhash 2y ago
  I read Wuxia (chinese cultivation novels) which can go on for over thousand chapters. And often the plot is repetitive and thin, but I like it over cheap dramatisation that can be solved if the two parties decided to talk to each other (when there's no other reason that prevent them other than not wanting to). I'd take talking and not agreeing or being powerless over not talking and creating misunderstanding every day. Especially when the plot is all about not creating the chance to talk.
  - dmichulke 2y ago
    "Not talking" is the laziest plot generator and, sadly, it rules out 80% of movies and books (for me) these days.
  - senkora 2y ago
    I was curious about what a “cultivation novel” is and found this blog post that explained it and wuxia / xianxia: https://www.mylifemytao.com/xianxia-wuxia-cultivation-and-more-a-small-explanation/ https://www.mylifemytao.com/xianxia-wuxia-cultivation-and-mo...
- bsder 2y ago
  > "How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine" Marvel and Star Wars aren't fine--the writing is execrable whenever they aren't outright plagiarizing something else. Star Wars was schlock meant to sell toys that just happened to become huge. Marvel is pretty much just straight up garbage across the board (some characters are interesting--the stories and world though are pretty uniformly trope-ridden crap). Modern movies also have the problem that a lot of their revenue comes from overseas--China in particular. They can't risk having writing that is either too subtle for a foreign audience or cover themes that might get them banned by the government. Thus we get Michael Bay syndrome--spectacle after spectacle and the minimum writing necessary to connect them. (To be honest--this is nothing new to Hollywood--Michael Bay can trace his roots the whole way back through "Towering Inferno" to "Noah's Ark", etc.)
  - hi_hi 2y ago
    Haha, I love this. Strong opinions strongly held. Obviously you're not wrong, and I'm not arguing against this (mostly because I agree), but I do also think _some_ of the Marvel work can be quite....inspired (not sure thats too strong a stance, hear me out!), mostly around the animated medium. The What If series has been good, and I've loved the Spiderman animations, very similar to the recent TMNT movies. Just want to add the new Transformers animated movie was very enjoyable, which I wasn't expecting. So yeah, the Michael Bay-esque style gets old quickly in real life movies, but it can work really well when animated. I'm sure alot of this can be traced back to Manga roots.
    - bsder 2y ago
      I was thinking more along the lines of simply the Hollywood movies where the dynamics are set by the enormous market forces which basically filters against anything which isn't lowest common denominator. When you get down to comic books and animations, the market forces aren't quite so vicious and your "10% okay vs 90% of everything is crap" doesn't get so filtered out. Consequently, you get more of the standard curve--some stuff is bad, most stuff is average, some stuff is good, and a few gems poke up every now and then.
  - blobbers 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
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SubGenius 2y ago
If you want the Snow Crash version of Da Vinci Code, then you might like The Illuminatus Trilogy. Robert Anton Wilson is something else. Umberto Eco's book Foucault's Pendulum is a slightly different vibe, but very entertaining read.
- bena 2y ago
  I've read most of the first two books. They're difficult because there's often no real structure to them. It's like written acid. Everything just jams together and you'll read all of the words, but somewhere along the line you'll notice you've started with a cop investigating a crime and now you're in the submarine of a crazy rich person. It's an interesting book, and it does engage, but it is also quite the trip.
- AnotherGoodName 2y ago
  While we’re at it as the op of the post I’d also suggest people give ‘murderbot diaries’ a read. Lighthearted fun books is my jam and these are right up that alley.
- sevensor 2y ago
  I’m convinced Dan Brown read Foucault’s Pendulum and thought “cool idea, I’ll write two dozen sequels where the Plan is real and nobody is punished for their epistemological sins. Also what the hell is a semiotician? My hero will be a Symbologist!”
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - razakel 2y ago
    Umberto Eco claimed that Dan Brown was a character he invented.
    - sevensor 2y ago
      Beautiful
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
titanomachy 2y ago
> He uses a skateboard and grappling hooks to get around and has samurai swords because he studies the way of the blade. It's been a minute, but I think Hiro Protagonist gets around on a motorcycle with wheels that deform to adapt to the terrain. The story does have couriers that use skateboards and grappling hooks, though.
- pikminguy 2y ago
  The super bike is later in the book and temporary. When delivering pizzas he has a car so cool and intimidating it makes other drivers get out of the way so he can deliver pizza faster. But he actually wrecks it and looses the delivery job near the start of the book. For most of the story he doesn't have any iconic means of transportation.
croissants 2y ago
The book also has a sex scene featuring (spoiler, I guess) a 15-year-old girl. It's probably possible to write something like that in a way that isn't gross, but Stephenson definitely didn't pull it off. I like Stephenson, he's written some great stuff, but even ignoring that scene, Snow Crash is IMO just a bad book to read once you're out of high school.
- kadoban 2y ago
  It is kind of gross, but so are many things in many books, including in that one (eg all of the disembowelings) For me it is less problematic than it could have been, because: YT is shown to be naive, reckless and impulsive, and Raven (is that his name? I think so) is an awful person just in general. The author is in no way implying that sex for those two is a good idea, in any way. It's just a thing that happened in the book. It's also not a sexy scene, so it's not written to be titilating (IMO), and it's short and it does ~something for the plot.
- sevensor 2y ago
  Stephenson at the time Snow Crash was published could write brilliant sentences, so he took ten thousand of them and strung them together into a novel. He matured a lot after that, although I think it took writing the Baroque Cycle to work through his syntax obsessions.
calmbonsai 2y ago
Am I gonna' be that guy? sigh I guess I am. Hiro doesn't use a skateboard you're thinking of "YT" the courier. Hiro uses a high-performance pizza-delivery-specific car early on and then later a motorcycle that has wheels that aren't even continuous discs, but made up of many individually coordinated linear actuators with grip-pads on the end.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- arcwhite 2y ago
  YT's skateboard introduces the telescopic contact smartwheels pretty early on as a Courier essential. I don't recall Hiro's motorcycle being much a part of the story, it might also have had the smartwheels but isn't discussed until later...
  - calmbonsai 2y ago
    Yep. His motorcycle is introduced in great detail and then afterwards Stephenson deliberately trolls us with "...after that, it's just a chase scene" and it's never mentioned again. ;)
- arrobbiato 2y ago
  And then YT makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Stephenson's follow-up book, "The Diamond Age."
  - calmbonsai 2y ago
    Woah! I'll have to re-read that.
egypturnash 2y ago
The edition I read had an afterword noting that it started life as a comic book script. Which really explains a lot about it.
_yb2s 2y ago
Snow Crash is so hilariously, and intentionally seemingly low effort it couldn’t be pulled off without a lot of actual skill and effort. It’s literary modern art, and it is fun.
- MR4D 2y ago
  And yet, when we look around the world around us…it seems…prescient. Excellent book that still delivers 3 decades after it came out.
johnfn 2y ago
Yes, but "Hiro Protagonist" is objectively hilarious.
- acheron 2y ago
  YT: "Stupid name." Hiro: "But you'll never forget it."
peterarmstrong 2y ago
When you realize it was supposed to be a graphic novel, that makes the over-the-top scenes make so much more sense. It's a comic book without the comics. (I also think it's great, btw.)
__rito__ 2y ago
It was the stuff about Sumerian mythology and its analog virus that made it interesting to me.
- kurisufag 2y ago
  the idea of an 0day for the brain via optic nerve stimuli in the same vein as adversarial failure cases for neural nets was the interesting bit for me. i'm not really sure i grokked the whole 'sumerian is machine code for mankind' thing. might have to re-read it, my last go-through was in high school.

lxgr 2y ago

Different levels of self-awareness about ultimately not taking themselves too seriously, arguably. (Doesn’t mean one can’t enjoy both, of course!)

hi_hi 2y ago

I recently watched a new show called Prime Target. Watching it frustrated me as some aspects just didn't hold together, or were totally overstated. The wife would get frustrated with me in turn when I would point these out. "How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine". I wasn't sure how to answer that at first, but I think your comment solidifies it. I can accept ridiculous and unrealistic scenarios as long as they are fun, and held together within an equally ridiculous world. Theres a fine line between something that is clearly a dramatisation being frustrating or just fun.

skydhash 2y ago
I read Wuxia (chinese cultivation novels) which can go on for over thousand chapters. And often the plot is repetitive and thin, but I like it over cheap dramatisation that can be solved if the two parties decided to talk to each other (when there's no other reason that prevent them other than not wanting to). I'd take talking and not agreeing or being powerless over not talking and creating misunderstanding every day. Especially when the plot is all about not creating the chance to talk.
- dmichulke 2y ago
  "Not talking" is the laziest plot generator and, sadly, it rules out 80% of movies and books (for me) these days.
- senkora 2y ago
  I was curious about what a “cultivation novel” is and found this blog post that explained it and wuxia / xianxia: https://www.mylifemytao.com/xianxia-wuxia-cultivation-and-more-a-small-explanation/ https://www.mylifemytao.com/xianxia-wuxia-cultivation-and-mo...
bsder 2y ago
> "How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine" Marvel and Star Wars aren't fine--the writing is execrable whenever they aren't outright plagiarizing something else. Star Wars was schlock meant to sell toys that just happened to become huge. Marvel is pretty much just straight up garbage across the board (some characters are interesting--the stories and world though are pretty uniformly trope-ridden crap). Modern movies also have the problem that a lot of their revenue comes from overseas--China in particular. They can't risk having writing that is either too subtle for a foreign audience or cover themes that might get them banned by the government. Thus we get Michael Bay syndrome--spectacle after spectacle and the minimum writing necessary to connect them. (To be honest--this is nothing new to Hollywood--Michael Bay can trace his roots the whole way back through "Towering Inferno" to "Noah's Ark", etc.)
- hi_hi 2y ago
  Haha, I love this. Strong opinions strongly held. Obviously you're not wrong, and I'm not arguing against this (mostly because I agree), but I do also think _some_ of the Marvel work can be quite....inspired (not sure thats too strong a stance, hear me out!), mostly around the animated medium. The What If series has been good, and I've loved the Spiderman animations, very similar to the recent TMNT movies. Just want to add the new Transformers animated movie was very enjoyable, which I wasn't expecting. So yeah, the Michael Bay-esque style gets old quickly in real life movies, but it can work really well when animated. I'm sure alot of this can be traced back to Manga roots.
  - bsder 2y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of simply the Hollywood movies where the dynamics are set by the enormous market forces which basically filters against anything which isn't lowest common denominator. When you get down to comic books and animations, the market forces aren't quite so vicious and your "10% okay vs 90% of everything is crap" doesn't get so filtered out. Consequently, you get more of the standard curve--some stuff is bad, most stuff is average, some stuff is good, and a few gems poke up every now and then.
- blobbers 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

SubGenius 2y ago

If you want the Snow Crash version of Da Vinci Code, then you might like The Illuminatus Trilogy. Robert Anton Wilson is something else. Umberto Eco's book Foucault's Pendulum is a slightly different vibe, but very entertaining read.

bena 2y ago
I've read most of the first two books. They're difficult because there's often no real structure to them. It's like written acid. Everything just jams together and you'll read all of the words, but somewhere along the line you'll notice you've started with a cop investigating a crime and now you're in the submarine of a crazy rich person. It's an interesting book, and it does engage, but it is also quite the trip.
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
While we’re at it as the op of the post I’d also suggest people give ‘murderbot diaries’ a read. Lighthearted fun books is my jam and these are right up that alley.
sevensor 2y ago
I’m convinced Dan Brown read Foucault’s Pendulum and thought “cool idea, I’ll write two dozen sequels where the Plan is real and nobody is punished for their epistemological sins. Also what the hell is a semiotician? My hero will be a Symbologist!”
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- razakel 2y ago
  Umberto Eco claimed that Dan Brown was a character he invented.
  - sevensor 2y ago
    Beautiful

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

titanomachy 2y ago

> He uses a skateboard and grappling hooks to get around and has samurai swords because he studies the way of the blade. It's been a minute, but I think Hiro Protagonist gets around on a motorcycle with wheels that deform to adapt to the terrain. The story does have couriers that use skateboards and grappling hooks, though.

pikminguy 2y ago
The super bike is later in the book and temporary. When delivering pizzas he has a car so cool and intimidating it makes other drivers get out of the way so he can deliver pizza faster. But he actually wrecks it and looses the delivery job near the start of the book. For most of the story he doesn't have any iconic means of transportation.

croissants 2y ago

The book also has a sex scene featuring (spoiler, I guess) a 15-year-old girl. It's probably possible to write something like that in a way that isn't gross, but Stephenson definitely didn't pull it off. I like Stephenson, he's written some great stuff, but even ignoring that scene, Snow Crash is IMO just a bad book to read once you're out of high school.

kadoban 2y ago
It is kind of gross, but so are many things in many books, including in that one (eg all of the disembowelings) For me it is less problematic than it could have been, because: YT is shown to be naive, reckless and impulsive, and Raven (is that his name? I think so) is an awful person just in general. The author is in no way implying that sex for those two is a good idea, in any way. It's just a thing that happened in the book. It's also not a sexy scene, so it's not written to be titilating (IMO), and it's short and it does ~something for the plot.
sevensor 2y ago
Stephenson at the time Snow Crash was published could write brilliant sentences, so he took ten thousand of them and strung them together into a novel. He matured a lot after that, although I think it took writing the Baroque Cycle to work through his syntax obsessions.

calmbonsai 2y ago

Am I gonna' be that guy? sigh I guess I am. Hiro doesn't use a skateboard you're thinking of "YT" the courier. Hiro uses a high-performance pizza-delivery-specific car early on and then later a motorcycle that has wheels that aren't even continuous discs, but made up of many individually coordinated linear actuators with grip-pads on the end.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
arcwhite 2y ago
YT's skateboard introduces the telescopic contact smartwheels pretty early on as a Courier essential. I don't recall Hiro's motorcycle being much a part of the story, it might also have had the smartwheels but isn't discussed until later...
- calmbonsai 2y ago
  Yep. His motorcycle is introduced in great detail and then afterwards Stephenson deliberately trolls us with "...after that, it's just a chase scene" and it's never mentioned again. ;)
arrobbiato 2y ago
And then YT makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Stephenson's follow-up book, "The Diamond Age."
- calmbonsai 2y ago
  Woah! I'll have to re-read that.

egypturnash 2y ago

The edition I read had an afterword noting that it started life as a comic book script. Which really explains a lot about it.

_yb2s 2y ago

Snow Crash is so hilariously, and intentionally seemingly low effort it couldn’t be pulled off without a lot of actual skill and effort. It’s literary modern art, and it is fun.

MR4D 2y ago
And yet, when we look around the world around us…it seems…prescient. Excellent book that still delivers 3 decades after it came out.

johnfn 2y ago

Yes, but "Hiro Protagonist" is objectively hilarious.

acheron 2y ago
YT: "Stupid name." Hiro: "But you'll never forget it."

peterarmstrong 2y ago

When you realize it was supposed to be a graphic novel, that makes the over-the-top scenes make so much more sense. It's a comic book without the comics. (I also think it's great, btw.)

__rito__ 2y ago

It was the stuff about Sumerian mythology and its analog virus that made it interesting to me.

kurisufag 2y ago
the idea of an 0day for the brain via optic nerve stimuli in the same vein as adversarial failure cases for neural nets was the interesting bit for me. i'm not really sure i grokked the whole 'sumerian is machine code for mankind' thing. might have to re-read it, my last go-through was in high school.