Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)

Submitted by Reviewer (not verified) on Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 23:35

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Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash

Author	Neal Stephenson
Made	Spectra
Date	2000-05-02
Media	Paperback
Catalog	Book
Sales Rank	994
Availability	Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price	US$15.00
Our Price*	US$10.20

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Amazon.com US$10.20

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Reviews:

Rating 4.0/5 from 547 reviews

Mediocre

Rating: 2/5 2008-12-09

In Snow Crash, Stephenson is very playful with his language, and is often witty. Then again, he is often hackneyed and silly. The plot is very exciting from the beginning, but halfway begins to degenerate into unnecessary history recitals that last five to ten pages at a time, repeatedly. Ignoring these virtually unreadable portions, the story continues to entertain throughout, right up until the end. The conclusion is relatively sudden, extremely predictable, and does nothing to reward the reader for trusting Stephenson enough to plow through the pages of Library research.

Prospective readers should be aware that toward the end of the novel, Stephenson describes in graphic detail a consensual sexual encounter between a fifteen year old girl and a forty-something year old man. The plot does not benefit from this encounter, but Stephenson's constant focus on the child's rear end every time she stood up made it almost inevitable. I found it to be distasteful.

I would not recommend the book - it was enjoyable in parts, but there are many authors who research a novel, then craft a plot with skill from beginning to end, instead of attempting to cram in every bit of research into the novel.

An amazing read

Rating: 5/5 2008-11-29

This is a fantastic book, with Stephenson's usual thought provoking teaching mixed in.

Highly recommended to everyone.

Cyberpunk as Cultural Satire/Commentary

Rating: 5/5 (2 out of 4 think this is helpful) 2008-11-22

Snow Crash is a subversive, postmodern romp through a world defined by computers, religious fanaticism, commercialism, and near-anarchy. Hacker Hiro Protagonist delivers pizzas for a living for the now-respectable Mafia until a mishap unites him with a fifteen-year old, futuristic skateboarder named Y.T. Hiro falls back on what he knows best -- hacking and gathering intelligence that he can sell to the former C.I.A., now a private corporation -- with Y.T. as his eyes. When his friend and former business partner Da5id opens a mysterious hypercard/drug called Snow Crash and becomes instantly catatonic, Hiro realizes the danger: all hackers, this new world's most valuable resource, are vulnerable. He sets out to stop the malicious forces that threaten to reduce the population to a babbling, unthinking mass. As Hiro and Y.T. make their way toward the deadly Raven, an Aleut armed with glass knives and a nuclear bomb, and L. Bob Rife, a New Age cult leader (a send-up of L. Ron Hubbard) at the center of a flotilla of rafts and refugees afloat in the Pacific, they uncover the "truth" about viruses, language, computers, mythology, and the core of the human brain.

The most amazing aspect of this novel is Stephenson's ability to imagine in 1992 (really, before that, since that's the year it was published) what today's world has become; the cultural satire and commentary in Snow Crash has become more relevant today with the internet/World Wide Web, privatization, dependence on computers, policy-shaping religious leaders, Second Life, and a global economy. Although Stephenson's parallels between computers and the human brain are not new, what he suggests, that our DNA contains an informational/language virus based in our Sumerian roots, is both weirdly original and thought-provoking. His revision of mythology and religion (here, both language and religion are viruses) is rooted in research and then takes off in improbable but intriguing directions. Like Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, this novel connects religion from multiple cultures, from ancient times to the present, to form the heart of a conspiracy.

Except for the sections detailing Sumerian mythology and history, this novel moves forward at a brisk pace, with both humor and suspense. For another cyberpunk novel, the first, see William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Half-baked concepts and absolutely dreadful writing.

Rating: 2/5 2008-11-13

Something good:
This book, written before the Internet was little more than a government and university project with a few commercial interests throw in, presents an almost precognitive look at a world interconnected via the computer. Some of the technology described, even if slightly off-base, rightly predicts what we are using and developing today.

Something bad:
I won't delve too much on the absurdities described with a supposedly ancient "hacker" algorithm being made to free mens' minds from the entrapment of a hypothetical space "virus". Nor will I go into the rancid historical references used to back up this laughable proposition (there are more intelligent people than me who have detailed this in reviews here already.) But to suppose that by 2012 (this is a guess based on evidence in the story since the date isn't listed anywhere I could see) that the entire US government would be minimalized to the point of vestigial worthlessness because of over privatization, and that society would be fractured into competing commercial "franchises", run by agencies such as the Mafia none-the-less, is just silly. Sure there's room for satire (I'm pretty sure Stephenson was not a fan of the Reagan era), but an author has to at least give a more realistic time line to work with. This is supposed to be a natural deterioration here, not even post-war, yet, somehow, all democratic society withered away in 20 years.

Something awful:
Contrived plots and silly ideas are one thing. Writing them down in such a poor and inconsistent manner is inexcusable. There are times when the characters will completely shift their narrative and their personality. Just going from the first chapter to the next couple presented such a fundamental change that I have to believe that the first was written years apart from the rest of the book.

Later in the book Stephenson can't seem to find a better way to express his largely contrived ideas than to expound upon them in a fashion that I can only relate to a Socratic dialogue (in tone if not in substance.) First there's the main character, Hiro, talking back and forth with an AI librarian for chapters at a time trying to formulate this Sumerian plot point, then later we get the same type of performance except now we have the heads of a few of these world controlling franchises playing the parts of the librarian. Stephenson couldn't think a better way to get his ideas across than to create lengthy (and quite boring) dialogues?

To conclude, I'm not sure why this book is so beloved. The writing is immature, and the ideas supporting the plot are untenable. If it wasn't for his view of an interconnected virtual world this book would be worthless.

Snowblind

Rating: 2/5 2008-11-10

I started reading Snow Crash with high hopes. It was picked by Time Magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels and two friends had recommended it to me. It seemed like a safe bet.

Woops.

Snow Crash is a nonsensical stew of crackpot ideas and sophomoric escapist fantasies. If you want well-drawn characters and an engrossing plot, look elsewhere. This book is nothing but a jumbled assortment of "cool ideas" strung together in a ridiculous plot filled with two-dimensional caricatures. It's the literary equivalent of a lowbrow Hollywood blockbuster: a bilious torrent of pseudo-intellectual sensory overload spewed at the audience to no particular effect.

If you're a twelve year old boy or a fan of crackpot philosophy then you'll probably love this story about samurai hackers riding around on motorcycles chopping up zombies infected with a religious virus. If that doesn't sound totally freakin' awesome to you, save yourself the 468 page effort and skip this turd.

Stephenson earns two stars for prescience, but this book is a loser.

Editorials:

Product Description

Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison--a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about Infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous...you'll recognize it immediately.

Amazon.com Review

From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet--incarnate as the Metaverse--looks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible.

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