Book details of 'Snow Crash'

Title	Snow Crash
Author(s)	Neal Stephenson
ISBN	0553380958
Language	English
Publisher	Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd Pap)

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Snow Crash':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
"Snow Crash" has been lauded for its accurate portrayal of technology and its contribution to the expanding cyberpunk genre. What most reviewers have neglected to mention, or perhaps didn't notice, is that Stephenson can be very funny when he wants to be. We first meet our hero--or protagonist--Hiro Protagonist in, as the cover blurb has it, "a future America so bizarre, so outrageous ... you'll recognize it immediately." That future is of ever- expanding strip malls crowded with international franchises and franchise nations, where pizza "deliverators" spent four years at Cosa Nostra Pizza University learning the trade and were then assigned the fastest cars on the road, a bullet proof black uniform and a sidearm that plugs into the cigarette lighter and can take down a telephone pole with one round. This is not an addition to cyberpunk, this is a parody of it. Well, perhaps not entirely. The punk side gets a good working over, but Stephenson seems to play the technical side pretty straight. In fact, this often seems like two books running in parallel; the lighthearted look at an absurd future and a computer thriller which takes itself very seriously, indeed. Stephenson tells us in the acknowledgements that he is a programmer--but that is obvious from fairly early on. He understands what computers can, and can't do. He understands bandwidth. He understands protocols. He understands that graphics are pretty--but words get the work done. You may not necessarily agree with where he goes from there, but the technically literate will at least not have to suspend disbelief regarding the base technologies. The Snow Crash of the title is, in different forms, drug, virus and information virus. It is a universal virus, similar to the postulated universal computer virus, which spreads through minds rather than computer systems. As proposed by Stephenson, this uses a means of universal communications based upon the underlying structures of the brain. Thus, it can be spread either by a biological vector or an informational one. According to the story, this universality of communication was once a part of the human race, but a factor of it allowed a program to be written to destroy itself (giving rise to a new form of consciousness). The villain of the piece now wishes to return humanity to the former status, after which he will have total control. Hackers are a particular threat to this plan because of their mental discipline, but are also at risk since their familiarity with machine coding makes them susceptible to a particular graphical display. Stated baldly like that it sounds extremely implausible. Stephenson, however, brings in a mass of research into Sumerian civilization, linguistics, higher Biblical (particularly redaction) criticism, and so forth. (He also brings in a modified form of the "cosmic seeding" theory of the origin of life.) Given the extensive research and Stephenson's familiarity with computers, it is odd that when we start getting the explanatory version of Snow Crash, down around chapter fifty-six, he doesn't draw the obvious analogies to computer viral programs. The "linguistic infrastructure" of our brains could be likened to the processor: the "higher languages" are operating systems. Thus the Stoned virus can infect the hard disk of any Intel/BIOS machine regardless of whether it is running OS/2, UNIX or Windows NT. (The transmission of the virus, though, requires the "higher language" of MS-DOS.) Of course, if you do point this out, you have to defend against the criticism that the *real* underlying structure is digital electronics, that digital electronics do not respond to processing and that not all processors are the same. Still: a good read, interesting ideas, amusing bits. Some inconsistency in style, and some definite inconsistencies in slang and dialogue. Overall a worthwhile diversion.
Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
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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