Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy.In his 1999 essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash'". Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of the main influences on Snow Crash.The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According …
Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy.In his 1999 essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash'". Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of the main influences on Snow Crash.The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program, which he called a nam-shub, that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).
Stephenson originally planned Snow Crash as a computer-generated graphic novel in collaboration with artist Tony Sheeder. In the author's acknowledgments (multiple editions) Stephenson recalls: "it became clear that the only way to make the Mac do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept..."
Snow Crash was nominated for both the British Science Fiction Award in 1993 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994.
I suspect that I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I'd read it 30 years ago. Reading it now, the cyberpunk stylings all feel incredibly dated and are unable to paper over the many problems with this novel. Starting with the characters, who amount to a collection of one-dimensional stereotypes about which it is impossible to care.
The plot doesn't feel like it's going anywhere for much of the time and when Stephenson starts talking about technology, everything starts to become increasingly ludicrous. This book really hasn't aged well.
My girlfriend lent me this to read on the plane when I had a long flight. Overall entertaining, I didn't feel like I was slogging through (mostly), but it takes itself Way too seriously for a book whose main character is named Hiro Protagonist.
Wrote a whole long review about why I didn't like it, but got bored of my own opinion.
In short:
While clever, the linguistic virus, Sumerian, and religion lessons were long and dull Characters unbelievable, and didn't really invest in them. Sex with a minor scene - didn't want that
Did like: the world the technology the prologue bit about pizza delivery. Loved that world building, really great opening! Then the main story wrecked it (for me).
