I read this back in the 90's when I was about 18. Looking at it now from a present day prospective, this guy was on the money and way ahead of his time. We are actually rolling out a metaverse right now, Corporations, big tech and franchises have much more power than they should. Just such a good read, and a great review!
I read this when I was 12 back in 1993, so of course it's one of my favourite books! I really can't express how much I love it. When I first listened to the audiobook, I had the biggest grin on my face for the entire 10 hours.
The audio book on Audible is the way to go. I didn't know it was a parody of cyberpunk, but I can see it. The whole thing makes me laugh and it feels more like a 90s take on the genre, and really appeals to 15 year old me. When I listen to it I imagine it all in vaporwave aesthetic and that's pretty hilarious too. The idea that it is a TV preacher/inspirational speaker that is the villain is straight out of my teenage hell. Thanks for the review!!
Hiro is the binary internet hero! I liked the info dumps as well, Neal somehow predicted a wikipedia like source of knowledge in a story telling element (Now that is sci-fi).
I read this book in the 90s and enjoyed it greatly, but found the "infodump" (great word!) parts a bit tedious to get through. I mostly forgot about it until getting it on audiobook about five years ago, and it has since become one of my all-time favorite books. The performance of the narrator really brings it to life in a totally new way for me, and makes the parts I previously found tedious fascinating. It is my go-to re-listen when I'm out of audiobooks and between fresh monthly credits. As far as the book being a parody, this review is the first I had ever heard of that. Fanciful and over the top at times? Sure. But it's a scifi/cyberpunk novel; when is that *not* the case? Parody or not, I find the world Stephenson created to be rich, layered, and endlessly fascinating. It would be depressing as shit to live there, but I'm dying to see more stories told there. I especially love Stephenson's humor and the way he uses language. His descriptions and phrases like "clashy anal copulations" in reference to shopping carts never fail to amuse me. Part of me would love to see this book as a movie--the right kind of movie--but most of me knows that it would probably be impossible to translate to film without losing so much of what makes the book so entertaining and intriguing. Thank you for the review! Great job!
How often do you read a book non-seriously? Snowcrash is an amazing book. I asked Neil about making a movie. He said it would need to be more than one, time wise. This occurred well before netflix exists. I need to bug him again.
curlzncrush WWWOOWWW! I completely forgot that YT was in that... now I’m going to have to reread it as I felt that the worlds each book inhabited were starkly different...
Great review. You captured some great points. I was also a fan of the info-dump scenes as I am a Sumeria nerd and just loved the whole concept of creating linguistic virii. I thought the ancient "Binary System" with the king holding the ring and rod symbolizing 1 and 0 was pretty darn perceptive of the author.
Snow Crash was written 8 years after Neuromancer, so it's not surprising that Neal has a better grasp on computer/cyber tech today. Though I chuckled when he mentioned the programming languages like COBAL FORTRAN as if it was bleeding edge. YT's pockets that can hold calculators, compasses, gizmos, phones, cameras etc... when today a smartphone has all that in one. Can't blame Neal for not seeing the Smartphone boom coz no-one did except Steve Jobs. As for parody, I thought a name like Hiro Protagonist (Hero Protagonist) is quite a strange name if taken Sirius Lee. I felt like the likes of Neuromancer is like today's DC Comics brooding superhero movies, whereas Snow Crash is more akin to Marvel.
Well, there is Fortran 2008, there a certain things it can do better than most other languages. Cobol is still in use, Cobol 2014 the current version. Actually pays top dollar as hardly anybody still knows it. It will die out, eventually.
read this book for high school years ago and was not a big fan of the The Deliverator thing. Reread it recently and I think I've come around on that section.
the only parody I picked up on was the name of the main character, I love this book though. I found this video because I want to recommend it to someone else. I was blown away by how well Neal interwove several meaty sub plots, great world building and some very interesting characters and Ideas....the obvious thing you missed was probably Raven, he's a very good antagonist maybe worth mentioning
What I also enjoyed the most was the conversations with the librarian. It had some Dan Brown in it. I would trade all of those chase scenes for more time with the librarian.
About the parody thing, I didn't think this about it when I read it, but I heard a lecture on cyber punk, and the lecturer (a literature professor) certainly was tending this way. And then when I mentioned this to some other people I know who have read the book, they were like, 'Of Course.' About the info-dumping, I am so glad you enjoyed it! One of the things that people often tell me about Stephenson that they don't like (apart from the fact that he can't write endings, but clearly I don't care about this as much as the rest of the world, because it has never once bothered me.) is the info dumping, whereas this is actually one of the things I like about his books. I think he does this kind of exposition so well. The stuff and Enki and the babylonians etc, was exactly what made this book a standout, memorable, all time favourite for me. I'm so glad you liked it, Rachel.
yesmissjane I am going to go into all of Stephenson's books with a clear expectation of unsatisfying endings but a high bar for fascinating concepts and exposition! I'm really glad I'm not weird for liking the info dumps so much. Usually less subtle info dumps in speculative fiction makes people complain, but it was oh so fun in Snow Crash!
I don't think Snowcrash was a parody, perhaps just dated, It was written by a youngish man at a time when cyberpunk was new and cool. The occasional absurd humour is standard Stephenson. I agree with you about the info dumps, definitely the best part and the kind of thing that makes his books so interesting. Great ideas with abrupt endings :)
How interesting! That makes me rethink all the times I've read or been told it's a parody. Retroactive relabeling? Huh. But knowing parts of this, like the humor, are typical in his other books boosts my desire to read more by him! I've built him up as "too challenging" in my mind but am now ready to tackle my Stephenson TBR!
Kalanadi Well, that's just an opinion. The cynic in me always thought that the parody angle was taken by people who enjoyed the ideas of the book but were trying to apologise in some way for the over the top action parts. Maybe "serious" people would find it all a bit silly. There is a massive chance that I am overthinking it, and that parody was the original intention :)
Domo Kete I am not going to apologize for the over the top parts - I enjoyed them! :-) There was a lot of situational humor and great one-liners... right up my alley :-) I used the parody angle to get into the book when I thought I would really not like it, so it was helpful to think of it at the time. As I read more, I may come to agree with you that the parody aspect has been magnified over time. Your take on it is quite thought-provoking though.
I had to go back to chapters 66 and 68 and re-listen to them a few times. It took me a while to figure it out. So I guess Raven's bomb did everything exactly as it was supposed to until the scrolls were shown and the Snow Crash bitmap was replaced with the text that Hiro had put on them after he .... was sucked into the egg? That's the part that made me so confused maybe.
Well now that you say the plot out loud, I now realize how over the top it was. The book title did cause me a little grief while boarding a plane with it in my hand.
Interesting review. I liked the comments about Stephenson having a better grasp of the internet/VR. It seems to me that Matrix, Neuromancer, Tron, Ender's Game, Last Starfighter (may be a bit of a reach), and maybe even a lot more 80s and early 90s sci-fi could be accused of not understanding the internet and VR. I think the hope and the expectation and fantasy of creating alternative realities or interfacing in 'amazing' ways was there when people didn't know what the actual potential of the technology was but they were excited about its possibilities (and you could argue the same thing about space stories from the 40s and 50s). The fact that we now take for granted that those things are realistically impossible given the actual technology we have 3 decades later shouldn't be the only metric we judge those stories by. The internet didn't exist at all in 1992 so you have to forget what you think should be a good understanding of technology that was only a dream then.
Just finished. I liked the array of character pony of views. I also like liked the Dystopian setting of the world. The fall of countries and the rise of unrestrained capitalism really shifts power away from what we know now, but is plausible enough that we may see things like that in the future. Fido is the best character IMO.
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age were the two Stephenson novels I was going to bypass because of the cyberpunk setting. With the praise and interest in Snow Crash I may now have to read it. I think I understand where he's coming from as an author. Before I thought he was indecipherable but time has shown me otherwise. Have you read Anathem?
I personally wouldn't recommend The Diamond Age if you're not overly interested in the cyberpunk stuff. It only kinda worked for me. Snow Crash worked because of the over-the-top almost-parody thing... and the neurolinguistic hacking idea was a captivating idea if you like the power of language / linguistics. I haven't read Anathem yet, but it and Cryptonomicon are on my reading list. I am very much looking forward to Seveneves because I would like to know how Stephenson writes science fiction. Cyberpunk is fine but I enjoy my SF more.
I don't think the ending is that bad, though I admit I'd liked it better if it had at least a half page epilogue, even if it was centered on a secondary charachter, or an anex, maybe about Enki, or even better: A SEQUEL! Damn I want more Hiro, YT, Enzo and Raven in my life, but it's been 25 years... I guess my only hope is if the ever emerging movie project morphs into a Netflix series... One can only dream
My favorite novel on this planet. Thankyou for your review. Takes me back to 2002 when my friend introduced me to the book after lots of skateboarding. I just can’t wait for someone to make it into a film.
I really liked the extremist capitalism and the MC's name, i thought that was pretty funny. I didn't like the ending. Like what happened to Uncle Enzo and Raven and more importantly Raven's H-Bomb? like that bomb is set to go off if he dies, did he die? is the bomb in the middle of the city with YT and Hiro? Is Uncle Enzo dead with his Mafia falling apart? What happened to Juanita? Lagos wasnt exactly an angel so did she emulate him and abuse her newly acquired skills? What happened with the nam shub or L Bob Rife's churchgoers (especially the burnouts in the park)? What happened to Y.T.s Mom, did she know what happened to Y.T. after the scene in the Fed headquarters where she basically sold her out? We don't even know what happens to Hiro and he's the freaking hero protagonist. I feel like instead of having that 50 page infodump that barely made any sense in the middle NS shouldve taken that time to add an actual ending. to be fair i agree with you, the actual context of the infodump was interesting but then they just went on and on with making poorly drawn conclusions with that info. like juanita being innana and so hiro has to save her and all that. maybe that was the satire and im just not familiar enough with the genre. It was still an enjoyable and interesting book, but some of the execution was lacking IMO. I liked the ties between L Bob Rife and L Ron Hubbard and their respective churches.
Common Touch of Fantasy From what the Neal Stephenson fans have told me so far, "The Diamond Age" and "Snow Crash" are both good places to start with him.
The other book I would recommend as an entry-level Stephenson is 'Reamde', which is a contemporary adventure/thriller rather than sf, and much longer, but I think one of his most accessible. And I think by this time he has actually worked out how to write endings. But I am much less ending sensitive than other people, so take my opinion on that with a grain of salt.
Just recently found your channel when I was looking up stuff about Snow Crash to show my sister. I like your stuff a lot, very chill and honest. I used to read a lot as a kid but have had a hard time keeping up as an adult. Thankfully, I've recently started getting into audio books and it's rekindled my love of literature. Have you reviewed A Canticle for Leibowitz? I'm in the middle of that one right now, and so far it's pretty good.
I think the biggest parody of the genre is the general world depicted in SC. Nightmarish, tech savvy runaway capitalist societies where it's the rich versus the proletariat are a common tropes in the cyberpunk genre and SC takes that to an extreme; where companies like Walmart or Apple have their own countries and militaries, the guy who delivers your pizza is a highly trained professional with both driving and combat skills and couriers who will risk life and limb on lawless roads just to deliver a package. Cyberpunk protagonists also tend to be badass, gritty, pretty over the top underdogs Like in Akira or the original Blade Runner and I think Hero and YT serve as a parody of that tpe of character. It's a parody, because the book doesn't take itself very seriously.
Sooo I realize this is 5 years on, however you were vlogging about a book written 23 years prior, so I figure this review is fair game. Much like your friends warning you about inevitable disappointment, I feared the worst from the beginning of your review, but was not disappointed with the end of it. As such, I thought I would address your question of “What did I miss”. Snowcrash was not a parody of cyberpunk. Snowcrash was written at the time that “cyberpunk” was just entering the popular lexicon so it would’ve been difficult to satirize a genre that wasn’t fully formed yet. Snowcrash was, however, a BLATANT over the top satirization of America during the Reagan era. It was a thought experiment on what America could be like in the near-ish future if the economic and social constructs of the 80’s Reagenomics had continued to grow and dominate American culture... combined with another amazing thought experiment on the hacking (computer programming) and the hacker’s mind. This leads me to the next thing ... you might have gotten, but in not explaining it, I feel that you omitted the brilliant crux of the entire book. That is the idea that hackers (at the time) all knew how to read and write in binary. Because of the synaptic pathways built in the brain when we learn something, Stephenson explores the idea that one could then use those pathways to hack the brain of a hacker by showing them a bitmap of a “Snow-crashed” screen which back then, was a screen with black and white pixels fluttering about like a blizzard. Black and white, ons and offs... binary in a graphical format. Thus the name of the drug (both virtual and IRL) and the name of the book. This leads me to three other things that you seem to have missed likely because you are a fairly young person. 1) The Librarian program given to Hiro by D4vid included a giant satellite representation of earth that you could zoom in on and discover anything you wanted about what you were looking at. This was Google Earth NINE YEARS before Google Earth existed. This actually inspired the people who invented Google Earth to ... well invent it!. 2) The Librarian was Siri/Alexa/Cortana/Google Assistant almost 20 years before these virtual reference assistants existed. While I haven’t read anything where the creators of these assistants credit Stephenson, I’d bet money that they were also inspired by this book. 3) The “Snowcrash bitmaps” that were used to convey the hacks to the hacker’s brains were QR codes for the brain. They used black and white pixels to encode data (or nam shubs) into hacker’s brain. If you want to see the work that inspired (I’d even say predicted) eReaders, eNewspapers, and smart phones, read Stephenson’s book “The Diamond Age or a Young Ladies’ Illustrated Primer”. While it doesn’t feature any of the satire of Snowcrash or Zodiac, it does include plenty of “Data Dumps” as typified in Snowcrash and to an even larger extent in Cryptonomicon.
Nice review, though I haven't read it, I just found this video today, from a reference made in an interview (also today) by Bill Tai. Are you on Quora?
SnowCrash was required reading for a two-week science fiction novel writing course I attended in Kansas. I also enjoyed the book and came at it without any cyberpunk experience. Unlike you, I wasn't thrilled with long descriptions (dumps) that slowed the action and took me out of the story. I swallowed my tongue during some of the more graphic scenes. I enjoyed getting your perspective. Changing subjects, how firm is your policy of not reviewing self-published science fiction novels. Selfishly, I have a trilogy (they are ALL trilogies, aren't they, except for Zelazny and Adams?). The first book is already out, and the sequel releases next month. I'd be pleased if you'd look at either one. If you decide to proceed, I'll send you both books for your trouble, no additional expectations. And I'll send you book three next year when it's done. INVASIVE SPECIES gets good reviews on Amazon. [You said you preferred public communication at first, so that's why I'm just laying this all out there as a comment.] Give a Ray Bradbury Creative Writing award winner a shot, please. Thanks, Michael Pickard
Hey, do you recall the info-dump chapters? If so, could you give a short list? (I'm reading about information theory and this book interests me; I'm too busy to read the whole thing though) Thanks,
The conflict presented in the book is slow to develop and then drags with flat characters. YT is the books saving grace but even that gets weird since she is 15 and there is a sex scene with the main bad guy...a little strange. Your summery of the conflict is on point but the book takes way too long to get there, I'm not sure Hero finds out about David until 20 chapters in? Yes the idea is cool but way too many info dumps to get us there. Must I read all of wiki to understand his idea?? the answer is yes, and that's not good enough. Also, not enough "showing" us Hero's skills...just by the way he is awesome hacker and greatest swordsman...which of course is needed for the ending, but shouldn't a writer give us some minor conflicts to highlight these skills, or fail using them to overcome later? Great idea, just missed the execution on this one.
I read this book because I wanted to see what inspired the "metaverse" trajectory of Facebook. I didn't realize it was supposed to be a parody, I thought it was just having fun with some worldbuilding. In retrospect, the line about how america does a couple things really well, and one of them is pizza delivery should have been my biggest heads up. A mafia pizza delivery group running more of the country than the government is such a funny setup. I also really enjoyed the info dump sections. I kept thinking "there's no way this is true, this is such a fun research expedition to be brought on" and I think the book had really interesting things to say about ownership of intellectual property, hacking/american cultures. The weakest part of it for me was Y.T.'s character. I was uncomfortable with how many men conistently check her out, (A 15 YEAR OLD) and for all the cool subversive ideas about language and power in the book it felt like YT's character never really went anywhere. I liked the Courier role and her relationship with her mom was interesting but I agree the lack of closure with her story makes me question how seriously I should have been trying to take her character. SPOILERS!! -------- The sex scene with her and Raven literally made me so uncomfortable that after I fnished the chapter on my kindle I immediately went to the kindle store and bought the next book on my list, 3 Body Problem (which was incredible, I am not a fast reader and I read it in 4 days.) and only went back to SnowCrash after I finished that book. Overall I really enjoyed the book and loved the parts about language and history and speculative technology and corporate/libertarian dystopia. Despite how cool and fun her character seemed in theory, several scenes with YT gave me such profound cringe/Ick that I had to bleach my mind with a different sci fi before I could return to finish it. Anyway. Good content, thanks for your labor.
I got through the entire book but it was rough. I found the environment bizarre, the characters disjointed, and the writing crude. I agree that the best part of the book are the ideas. I have some interest in how ideas spread and Dawkins’ idea of a cultural meme.
I agree with most people here. Snow Crash didn't really feel like a deliberate cyberpunk parody to me (that is, a skewering of original cyberpunk) but more like Stephenson taking all the cyberpunk toys and tropes and deciding to have as much fun with them as possible. I think if Stephenson had any underlying agenda, it was to update cyberpunk to bring it more in line with real-world computer systems, like you picked up on. (And which is almost the opposite of parody) Good luck with your Stephenson TBR, his books are some of my favourite geeky comfort reading, strangely enough :)
Mark Gerrits I am beginning to agree with you and Domo Kete more, that the parody was not very deliberate, and the more over the top parts were Stephenson's humor. I hope to discover more of this for myself as I read through his book, see what my final opinion is... This is a very interesting genre for me to read, because it's about computers, the Web, and the cultural effects of those things that were "coming into their own" at the same time I was born. I have always taken pride in the fact that the first website went live in the year of my birth :-) And cyber punk is the subgenre of science fiction that seems to celebrate the often crazy weird culture of the Internet, hacking, and programming. I'm not interested in joining in many online communities, by cyberpunk lets me read about them in a roundabout way!
I think the whole book has a parodical tone, from the exposition about pizza deliveries with the binders of instructions to YT's teen-parent dynamic amid impending nuclear holocaust. I think it's all of the tongue-in-cheek that jumped out at me, like how the virtual world is essentially like a high school, with different cliques in the cafeteria, plus crappy avatars for the uncool kids (except for the badass villain).
Hmm. Actually it is more a parody of the USA and capitalism. Not so much cyberpunk. In a way it is post-cyberpunk or cyberpunk 2.0 as the characters actually survive and are better off after than before. 1984 Neuromancer is a book by a non-technology interested person, it is more psychological, sociological writtten at a time when mutual assured destruction between East and West could happen every day. 1992 Snow Crash is from someone who is tech savvy and who talks to techies. It extrapolates developments in the US to an extreme. Like the 3 things the US is the world leader in. Movies, Coding and Fast-Pizza-Delivery. Everything else is done somewhere else better or as good for a lower price. Society fragments and gated communities are much more widespread. Many of them are franchises where one global entity offers a template that people can opt-in for their lives. Franchises like Little Italy where, obviously, the Mafia is in control and beneficial in that area for their members and their community members. Or Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. A gated community police state (General Lee dictator of Singapore) which relies on high-tech for protection using dog-cyborgs that are capable of reaching supersonic running speeds when the regulator for inhabited areas is turned off. Thank god for radioative decay batteries.YAY! And "Anybody will listen to R.E.A.S.O.N." A book rife with precious one-liners and klischees, the opening 5 or 10 pages alone are worth the entire book. It slows down in the last chapter some, kind of like a pen and paper roleplaying session where the suspense is gone as the plan of the arch enemy is crossed. Getting that one is just a bonus scene, not a must.
My disappointment with the ending was pretty much because of the abruptness of the ending. Like, okay... you wanna tie up ANY loose ends here? The story itself was intriguing and interesting and I also really enjoyed the info more than the action. I think it's difficult (and a bit unfair) to compare Neuromancer and Snow Crash, honestly, because the former was written near the beginning of the Internet as we know it and I doubt there was very much knowledge easily available. Neuromancer was more of a 'what if'. By 1992, there would have been a lot more knowledge for Stephenson to work with. I think this difference is also why cyberpunk came to an end in the early 90's. Cyberpunk's "what if" just wasn't meshing with what was actually happening with technology. Sorry... you totally just spawned a really interesting thought process for me. XD Thanks! As for the parody, I mean... come on with names like Hiro Protagonist and Yours Truly, how could it be anything but? XD And that's before the pizza delivery guy/master swordsman self-insert fantasy even comes into play. Hehe. Truthfully I read it so long ago that I couldn't give you specifics if I wanted, though. Glad you enjoyed it!
tarabyt3 That is really true about comparing Neuromancer and Snow Crash. It is unfair because of the time difference, and Stephenson was working with a lot more knowledge and advancement in the field (for one, the Web was alive! Also, I truly think Stephenson is more knowledgeable about computer programming and the guts of how the technology works). I'm comparing them more because they are the only two in the genre I've read so far. I should read more Gibson I suppose... And yes, the ending was so abrupt. It's not a good sign when the reader truly thinks their copy of the book is missing a page! I checked page counts and everything! Stephenson's afterward made it sound like the book was really hard to write, very time-consuming, and actually came out of a game idea, so I wonder if the abruptness was him losing steam. But we can only guess :-) I have an imagination, so I can fill in the blanks. It would just be nice if it was written down by the author! Haha!
Kalanadi Mmm... If you didn't like Neuromancer, you probably won't like his other stuff. Though you could try his short stories collection "Burning Chrome." Also... maybe Pattern Recognition? It's not cyberpunk, but near-future SF. It's a bit strange but I did enjoy it (though I wouldn't recommend reading past the first book, personally.) And yeah. It's like, I CAN fill in the blanks, but I dun wanna! XD
tarabyt3 I was wondering if Gibson ever wrote more straight SF, so I think you sort of answered that question for me! his latest book, "The Peripheral", got a lot of buzz, but I wasn't sure if it was SF or cyberpunk-y. I feel I want to pick that one up at some point. I hate abandoning authors after a single book, especially when it was a debut or very early in their career!
No, from Pattern Recognition all his stuff has been... not cyberpunk. He's given up the genre, I think, because it's no longer relevant, perhaps. I am dying to read The Peripheral but can't bring myself to because I actually disliked his last fiction novel QUITE a lot. I loved reading Gibson so it was a super blow when I found that I didn't enjoy his last two books so I'm sort of afraid to read his next. What if I don't like it?!? But... I will definitely read it sometime this year I think. :D
tarabyt3 Cyber punk isn't relevant anymore? Hm. Since I just finished the Jean le Flambeur series by Hannu Rajaniemi, I can see where other technologies like quantum physics have taken over the old desktop computer / hacking time period. But I found the virtual reality world in Snow Crash (from 1992! When I was a toddler, lol!) to be surprisingly relevant to virtual games and online avatars today. I am having a similar reaction to Tamora Pierce in terms of how much I've enjoyed her latest books. I thought the Beka Cooper series was OK, and then was really disappointed with Battle Magic. In my case, I might be getting too old for the demographic Pierce is writing for. But I find myself slightly dreading the release of her next book. What if I hate the Numair book I've been waiting *eight years* for? Augh, nooo...
Bob Rife really gives me perspective on Mark Zuckerberg's Meta project. While he is marketing Meta as a one-stop solution for the Verse framework, it almost seems like he has too much control. The data privacy issues have been bad on a messaging app, imagine when this gets into 3d & VR. Scary stuff.
The parody was the tone of it all. Cyberpunk first envisioned itself as a new breed of scifi that transcended the contempt afforded to the 'Thud and Blunder' of rockets and spacemen that had come to define the genre. Cyberpunk was to be about edge, drugs, violence, flawed heroes and social commentary. Dark, adult, real. In time, the staying power of the cyberpunk aesthetic made it into an easily reducible cartoon of itself. Cyberpunk became a meme, and that meme gave us things like "The Matrix", itself a term first coined by Gibson in his short story, "Burning Chrome". In this sense, Cyberpunk has fallen prey to the exact same fate that befell the raygun gothic futurism of the years before it, the fate that spawned the '-punk' ethos of the 1980's as a reaction to the staid tropes that defined the scifi of the time. So the parody is the very way that snowcrash is written, it's in the narrative tone itself. Snow Crash mocks the tone of the formative Cyberpunk works by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling.
For me, the parody really hit hard at the end. Almost everything came to 11 within the final 10 chapters. I started to take note of all the comedic conclusions, but there were too many. Personally, I didn't like the linguistic and theological info-dumps. He kept repeating the same information over and over, which was a pain when I got it the first time. It's also partly factual, partly ridiculous... which made it feel like useless information. But I suppose that could be the parody bleeding through. It just felt like a chore reading through all that info, like a textbook that won't apply to anything other than an abrupt conclusion. The high tech was great, and well described throughout. The entire world was developed with very creative thought, which is appreciated. Overall I thought the piece as a whole was average, but there were many great parts to it. If you love cyberpunk and cultural history, you will likely find this to be a great read.
THIS COMMENT CONTAINS BIG FAT SPOILERS: I don't think the representations of hacking in both Neuromancer and Snow Crash are so far off in terms of how many fantasy elements there are, I just think that Stephenson tends to get a free pass because he talks about things like "the numbers that a computer can understand" and thus how everything in the Metaverse is base two... both include a romantic element that is far removed from what programming is like. You know Hiro writes code, but the portrayal of what he does in the Metaverse is more like he's using godmode. It's also somewhat confusing how the interface of the computers he uses would work, as the book sometimes implies that the computer has a lens that projects the image of the metaverse onto Hiro's goggles, but then again we don't know if he needs to move his body to have his avatar replicate his movements (which is implied in that one event with him doing that swordsmanship performance in front of his neighbours in the U-Stor-It). He also admits not having known the real meaning f the acronym BIOS when writing it. But I think what he really got right was the societal impact of such a thing like cyberspace, not just as a tool for military corporations but for everyday civilian users. I also loved the infodumps of the book at first, but thought they lost a lot of steam and stopped making sense near the end. I had imagined something different. Didn't really know if Rife was just trying to revive the cult of Asherah or use a similar way of indoctrinating people for other ends. Didn't really know what the book's real point about religion ultimately was. I also thought I found inconsistencies regarding the "physical version" of Snow Crash and its ellaboration. I was also a fan of the loser facet of Hiro, so much so that I wish there had been a lot more of that and a lot less of him shooting his way into an aircraft carrier. The book has a couple of really great quotes on immaturity that... just speak to me XD. But my favourite character has to be Ng. I was also not a big fan of the chase scenes or action scenes except for the showdowns with Raven, the part where Ng and YT work together, Hiro vs the racists and the final part with all the thrashers pooning the helicopter. Those were excellent. I don't know, the attitude of the book was pretty cool and infectious. It has some big problems for me and I was disappointed by the ending but it was one hell of a fun read at the same time.
It's funny how the virtual world in this book is called the 'Metaverse', and Mark Zuckerberg decides to change the name of Facebook to the 'Metaverse'.
Good authors often leave those "wrapping up the loose ends" chapters out so that you fill in that stuff with your own imagination ;) Contrast that with the Harry Potter style garbage that fills in every single last little detail for you so you don't have to even use your imagination at all! LOL
I'd much rather live in a world run by franchises and city-states than any government because franchises have to worry about customer service which the government has absolutely no obligation to (just think DMV, IRS, FDA, etc) and city-states would have a much harder time getting away with corruption because of the working class to bureaucrat ratio and just the population size in general. I'm an anarchist because of the points I've made here. Competition and a mindset to reject authority are the best combinations to obtain individual autonomy while also retaining accountability for all parties.
I JUST FINISHED IT & THOUGHT IT WAS GREAT,GEORGE MILLER SHOULD DIRECT AN EXCLUSIVE NETFLIX SERIES 4 IT,HIS VISUAL STYLE WOULD BE A PERFECT MATCH 4 STEPHENSON'S WORLD/METAVERSE.GREAT REVIEW.#IAMNOTYELLINGIAMALLCAPSATALLTIMESLOL
Damn, I wish more women in my life were like you. Inquisitive, smart, and interested in really cool fiction like Snow Crash. The fact that you really liked the infodumps shows that you have a great appreciation for history, culture, and plot structure. Whoever lands you is quite a lucky individual 😉 Sorry I had to go down that road, but I just thought you'd think it was nice.
It is a 4 Color version of a novel, sure. But, at the time 1993, tremendously fun to read. It feels young, yes, so juvenile is a good description. Not bad to attract young readers. And some of the pen strokes are a little thick, overemphasizing US and global culture by one or two orders of magnitude. Not an attempt at precise micro-surgery capable language, agreed. You have to like tongue in cheek descriptions. But underneath the obvious description is a more fine tuned critique which precisely shows where the world of the early 1990-ies was heading. Not the distance it would go, but where.
I read this back in the 90's when I was about 18. Looking at it now from a present day prospective, this guy was on the money and way ahead of his time. We are actually rolling out a metaverse right now, Corporations, big tech and franchises have much more power than they should. Just such a good read, and a great review!
Remember, Neuromancer was published in 1982, and written on a manual typewriter!
Neal Stephenson writes his books with a fountain pen....
@@jerzykowalskiShosa and a decade later
@@jerzykowalskiShosa Heinlein wrote his on stone tablets.
@@locutusdborg126 Was it not skulls of Lazarus Long enemies?
Or on the fabric of the pointy hatted masters?
@@jerzykowalskiShosa Ah, a fellow science fiction nerd. Greetings.
I read this when I was 12 back in 1993, so of course it's one of my favourite books! I really can't express how much I love it. When I first listened to the audiobook, I had the biggest grin on my face for the entire 10 hours.
The audio book on Audible is the way to go. I didn't know it was a parody of cyberpunk, but I can see it. The whole thing makes me laugh and it feels more like a 90s take on the genre, and really appeals to 15 year old me. When I listen to it I imagine it all in vaporwave aesthetic and that's pretty hilarious too. The idea that it is a TV preacher/inspirational speaker that is the villain is straight out of my teenage hell. Thanks for the review!!
I totally agree about the need for extra chapters at the end.
Hiro is the binary internet hero! I liked the info dumps as well, Neal somehow predicted a wikipedia like source of knowledge in a story telling element (Now that is sci-fi).
I read this book in the 90s and enjoyed it greatly, but found the "infodump" (great word!) parts a bit tedious to get through. I mostly forgot about it until getting it on audiobook about five years ago, and it has since become one of my all-time favorite books. The performance of the narrator really brings it to life in a totally new way for me, and makes the parts I previously found tedious fascinating. It is my go-to re-listen when I'm out of audiobooks and between fresh monthly credits.
As far as the book being a parody, this review is the first I had ever heard of that. Fanciful and over the top at times? Sure. But it's a scifi/cyberpunk novel; when is that *not* the case? Parody or not, I find the world Stephenson created to be rich, layered, and endlessly fascinating. It would be depressing as shit to live there, but I'm dying to see more stories told there.
I especially love Stephenson's humor and the way he uses language. His descriptions and phrases like "clashy anal copulations" in reference to shopping carts never fail to amuse me. Part of me would love to see this book as a movie--the right kind of movie--but most of me knows that it would probably be impossible to translate to film without losing so much of what makes the book so entertaining and intriguing.
Thank you for the review! Great job!
It's a shame that Niel Stephenson is so much better at world-building than he is at actual storytelling.
I hope you've continued your adventure into classic cyberpunk.
The first wave was alot like the Cthulu Mythos of the 1920s-40s.
How often do you read a book non-seriously? Snowcrash is an amazing book. I asked Neil about making a movie. He said it would need to be more than one, time wise. This occurred well before netflix exists. I need to bug him again.
Thanks for another good review; I haven't read this one, but I really enjoyed Stephenson's "The Diamond Age".
ixtl guul Thanks :-) I couldn't make it through "The Diamond Age" but I'm going to take another crack at it since I liked Snow Crash so much!
Diamond Age is a sequal to Snow Crash with YT making an appearance as a minor character in Diamond Age
curlzncrush WWWOOWWW! I completely forgot that YT was in that... now I’m going to have to reread it as I felt that the worlds each book inhabited were starkly different...
Great review. You captured some great points. I was also a fan of the info-dump scenes as I am a Sumeria nerd and just loved the whole concept of creating linguistic virii. I thought the ancient "Binary System" with the king holding the ring and rod symbolizing 1 and 0 was pretty darn perceptive of the author.
Anyone else here after the release of the meta verse
Snow Crash was written 8 years after Neuromancer, so it's not surprising that Neal has a better grasp on computer/cyber tech today. Though I chuckled when he mentioned the programming languages like COBAL FORTRAN as if it was bleeding edge. YT's pockets that can hold calculators, compasses, gizmos, phones, cameras etc... when today a smartphone has all that in one. Can't blame Neal for not seeing the Smartphone boom coz no-one did except Steve Jobs.
As for parody, I thought a name like Hiro Protagonist (Hero Protagonist) is quite a strange name if taken Sirius Lee. I felt like the likes of Neuromancer is like today's DC Comics brooding superhero movies, whereas Snow Crash is more akin to Marvel.
Well, there is Fortran 2008, there a certain things it can do better than most other languages. Cobol is still in use, Cobol 2014 the current version. Actually pays top dollar as hardly anybody still knows it. It will die out, eventually.
read this book for high school years ago and was not a big fan of the The Deliverator thing. Reread it recently and I think I've come around on that section.
Who else thinks that the surname "Protagonist" is both cheesy and badass at the same time? 😁
the only parody I picked up on was the name of the main character, I love this book though. I found this video because I want to recommend it to someone else. I was blown away by how well Neal interwove several meaty sub plots, great world building and some very interesting characters and Ideas....the obvious thing you missed was probably Raven, he's a very good antagonist maybe worth mentioning
I love raven.
Bad guys: look fellas, he brought a knife to gunfight.
Raven with nuke strapped to his chest: am I a joke to you?
What I also enjoyed the most was the conversations with the librarian. It had some Dan Brown in it. I would trade all of those chase scenes for more time with the librarian.
About the parody thing, I didn't think this about it when I read it, but I heard a lecture on cyber punk, and the lecturer (a literature professor) certainly was tending this way. And then when I mentioned this to some other people I know who have read the book, they were like, 'Of Course.'
About the info-dumping, I am so glad you enjoyed it! One of the things that people often tell me about Stephenson that they don't like (apart from the fact that he can't write endings, but clearly I don't care about this as much as the rest of the world, because it has never once bothered me.) is the info dumping, whereas this is actually one of the things I like about his books. I think he does this kind of exposition so well. The stuff and Enki and the babylonians etc, was exactly what made this book a standout, memorable, all time favourite for me.
I'm so glad you liked it, Rachel.
yesmissjane I am going to go into all of Stephenson's books with a clear expectation of unsatisfying endings but a high bar for fascinating concepts and exposition! I'm really glad I'm not weird for liking the info dumps so much. Usually less subtle info dumps in speculative fiction makes people complain, but it was oh so fun in Snow Crash!
it is very surprising how many people don't interpret a book that has a main character literally named Hiro Protagonist, as a parody.
Not sure how the YT algorithm put you in my stream, but I'm glad it did. Subscribed
i couldnt really get into it but now have a bit more understanding. ty. i dont read often so hard to keep track
After covid 19 and the invention of an actual metaverse...i feel we are going to live this book in real life. OH MY GOD!!!!! WHAT ON EARTH!!
I don't think Snowcrash was a parody, perhaps just dated, It was written by a youngish man at a time when cyberpunk was new and cool. The occasional absurd humour is standard Stephenson.
I agree with you about the info dumps, definitely the best part and the kind of thing that makes his books so interesting. Great ideas with abrupt endings :)
How interesting! That makes me rethink all the times I've read or been told it's a parody. Retroactive relabeling? Huh.
But knowing parts of this, like the humor, are typical in his other books boosts my desire to read more by him! I've built him up as "too challenging" in my mind but am now ready to tackle my Stephenson TBR!
Kalanadi Well, that's just an opinion. The cynic in me always thought that the parody angle was taken by people who enjoyed the ideas of the book but were trying to apologise in some way for the over the top action parts. Maybe "serious" people would find it all a bit silly.
There is a massive chance that I am overthinking it, and that parody was the original intention :)
Domo Kete I am not going to apologize for the over the top parts - I enjoyed them! :-) There was a lot of situational humor and great one-liners... right up my alley :-)
I used the parody angle to get into the book when I thought I would really not like it, so it was helpful to think of it at the time. As I read more, I may come to agree with you that the parody aspect has been magnified over time. Your take on it is quite thought-provoking though.
Plz read Diamond Age, its Stephenson's best work
Yup, that was my reaction to reading that ending and again when I listened to the audio book 😂😂
I had to go back to chapters 66 and 68 and re-listen to them a few times. It took me a while to figure it out. So I guess Raven's bomb did everything exactly as it was supposed to until the scrolls were shown and the Snow Crash bitmap was replaced with the text that Hiro had put on them after he .... was sucked into the egg? That's the part that made me so confused maybe.
Well now that you say the plot out loud, I now realize how over the top it was. The book title did cause me a little grief while boarding a plane with it in my hand.
My fav character was the guy having 'Poor Impulse Control' tatoo'd on his forehead.
Interesting review. I liked the comments about Stephenson having a better grasp of the internet/VR. It seems to me that Matrix, Neuromancer, Tron, Ender's Game, Last Starfighter (may be a bit of a reach), and maybe even a lot more 80s and early 90s sci-fi could be accused of not understanding the internet and VR.
I think the hope and the expectation and fantasy of creating alternative realities or interfacing in 'amazing' ways was there when people didn't know what the actual potential of the technology was but they were excited about its possibilities (and you could argue the same thing about space stories from the 40s and 50s). The fact that we now take for granted that those things are realistically impossible given the actual technology we have 3 decades later shouldn't be the only metric we judge those stories by. The internet didn't exist at all in 1992 so you have to forget what you think should be a good understanding of technology that was only a dream then.
Just finished. I liked the array of character pony of views. I also like liked the Dystopian setting of the world. The fall of countries and the rise of unrestrained capitalism really shifts power away from what we know now, but is plausible enough that we may see things like that in the future. Fido is the best character IMO.
I know it's been a couple years since you left this comment, but I highly recommend Diamond Age if you haven't already read it.
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age were the two Stephenson novels I was going to bypass because of the cyberpunk setting.
With the praise and interest in Snow Crash I may now have to read it. I think I understand where he's coming from as an author. Before I thought he was indecipherable but time has shown me otherwise.
Have you read Anathem?
I personally wouldn't recommend The Diamond Age if you're not overly interested in the cyberpunk stuff. It only kinda worked for me. Snow Crash worked because of the over-the-top almost-parody thing... and the neurolinguistic hacking idea was a captivating idea if you like the power of language / linguistics.
I haven't read Anathem yet, but it and Cryptonomicon are on my reading list. I am very much looking forward to Seveneves because I would like to know how Stephenson writes science fiction. Cyberpunk is fine but I enjoy my SF more.
He's amazing at SF. Anathem is too too good.
I don't think the ending is that bad, though I admit I'd liked it better if it had at least a half page epilogue, even if it was centered on a secondary charachter, or an anex, maybe about Enki, or even better: A SEQUEL! Damn I want more Hiro, YT, Enzo and Raven in my life, but it's been 25 years... I guess my only hope is if the ever emerging movie project morphs into a Netflix series... One can only dream
My favorite novel on this planet. Thankyou for your review. Takes me back to 2002 when my friend introduced me to the book after lots of skateboarding.
I just can’t wait for someone to make it into a film.
ummm its 2021 and its happening
I really liked the extremist capitalism and the MC's name, i thought that was pretty funny. I didn't like the ending. Like what happened to Uncle Enzo and Raven and more importantly Raven's H-Bomb? like that bomb is set to go off if he dies, did he die? is the bomb in the middle of the city with YT and Hiro? Is Uncle Enzo dead with his Mafia falling apart? What happened to Juanita? Lagos wasnt exactly an angel so did she emulate him and abuse her newly acquired skills? What happened with the nam shub or L Bob Rife's churchgoers (especially the burnouts in the park)? What happened to Y.T.s Mom, did she know what happened to Y.T. after the scene in the Fed headquarters where she basically sold her out? We don't even know what happens to Hiro and he's the freaking hero protagonist.
I feel like instead of having that 50 page infodump that barely made any sense in the middle NS shouldve taken that time to add an actual ending. to be fair i agree with you, the actual context of the infodump was interesting but then they just went on and on with making poorly drawn conclusions with that info. like juanita being innana and so hiro has to save her and all that. maybe that was the satire and im just not familiar enough with the genre.
It was still an enjoyable and interesting book, but some of the execution was lacking IMO. I liked the ties between L Bob Rife and L Ron Hubbard and their respective churches.
That's Niel Stephenson's style: he does great world-building, sets up an awesome story and then gets bored and ends the book in like 20 pages.
I've never read a Stephenson novel. What does everyone think the best "first-novel" for a Stephenson newbie should be? Is it Snow Crash?
Common Touch of Fantasy From what the Neal Stephenson fans have told me so far, "The Diamond Age" and "Snow Crash" are both good places to start with him.
k, thanks. I'll probably look for a copy of Snow Crash used somewhere or borrow it from the library at some point.
The other book I would recommend as an entry-level Stephenson is 'Reamde', which is a contemporary adventure/thriller rather than sf, and much longer, but I think one of his most accessible. And I think by this time he has actually worked out how to write endings. But I am much less ending sensitive than other people, so take my opinion on that with a grain of salt.
Thanks for the recommendation. Every time I see Reamde, I think someone misspelled Remade.
Common Touch of Fantasy I think the intention was a typo in Readme :)
Just recently found your channel when I was looking up stuff about Snow Crash to show my sister. I like your stuff a lot, very chill and honest. I used to read a lot as a kid but have had a hard time keeping up as an adult. Thankfully, I've recently started getting into audio books and it's rekindled my love of literature. Have you reviewed A Canticle for Leibowitz? I'm in the middle of that one right now, and so far it's pretty good.
I think the biggest parody of the genre is the general world depicted in SC. Nightmarish, tech savvy runaway capitalist societies where it's the rich versus the proletariat are a common tropes in the cyberpunk genre and SC takes that to an extreme; where companies like Walmart or Apple have their own countries and militaries, the guy who delivers your pizza is a highly trained professional with both driving and combat skills and couriers who will risk life and limb on lawless roads just to deliver a package. Cyberpunk protagonists also tend to be badass, gritty, pretty over the top underdogs Like in Akira or the original Blade Runner and I think Hero and YT serve as a parody of that tpe of character. It's a parody, because the book doesn't take itself very seriously.
Sooo I realize this is 5 years on, however you were vlogging about a book written 23 years prior, so I figure this review is fair game.
Much like your friends warning you about inevitable disappointment, I feared the worst from the beginning of your review, but was not disappointed with the end of it. As such, I thought I would address your question of “What did I miss”.
Snowcrash was not a parody of cyberpunk. Snowcrash was written at the time that “cyberpunk” was just entering the popular lexicon so it would’ve been difficult to satirize a genre that wasn’t fully formed yet. Snowcrash was, however, a BLATANT over the top satirization of America during the Reagan era.
It was a thought experiment on what America could be like in the near-ish future if the economic and social constructs of the 80’s Reagenomics had continued to grow and dominate American culture... combined with another amazing thought experiment on the hacking (computer programming) and the hacker’s mind.
This leads me to the next thing ... you might have gotten, but in not explaining it, I feel that you omitted the brilliant crux of the entire book. That is the idea that hackers (at the time) all knew how to read and write in binary. Because of the synaptic pathways built in the brain when we learn something, Stephenson explores the idea that one could then use those pathways to hack the brain of a hacker by showing them a bitmap of a “Snow-crashed” screen which back then, was a screen with black and white pixels fluttering about like a blizzard. Black and white, ons and offs... binary in a graphical format. Thus the name of the drug (both virtual and IRL) and the name of the book.
This leads me to three other things that you seem to have missed likely because you are a fairly young person.
1) The Librarian program given to Hiro by D4vid included a giant satellite representation of earth that you could zoom in on and discover anything you wanted about what you were looking at. This was Google Earth NINE YEARS before Google Earth existed. This actually inspired the people who invented Google Earth to ... well invent it!.
2) The Librarian was Siri/Alexa/Cortana/Google Assistant almost 20 years before these virtual reference assistants existed. While I haven’t read anything where the creators of these assistants credit Stephenson, I’d bet money that they were also inspired by this book.
3) The “Snowcrash bitmaps” that were used to convey the hacks to the hacker’s brains were QR codes for the brain. They used black and white pixels to encode data (or nam shubs) into hacker’s brain.
If you want to see the work that inspired (I’d even say predicted) eReaders, eNewspapers, and smart phones, read Stephenson’s book “The Diamond Age or a Young Ladies’ Illustrated Primer”. While it doesn’t feature any of the satire of Snowcrash or Zodiac, it does include plenty of “Data Dumps” as typified in Snowcrash and to an even larger extent in Cryptonomicon.
This book is on my TBR and this review was very helpful - thanks!
Sophia Jackson You are most welcome! ^_^ I hope you enjoy it when you get around to it! I was definitely glued to my seat through large parts of it.
Nice review, though I haven't read it, I just found this video today, from a reference made in an interview (also today) by Bill Tai. Are you on Quora?
The author clearly delivered for Domino's in the 1980's
Seems like Snow Crash became really relevant lately! :D
SnowCrash was required reading for a two-week science fiction novel writing course I attended in Kansas. I also enjoyed the book and came at it without any cyberpunk experience. Unlike you, I wasn't thrilled with long descriptions (dumps) that slowed the action and took me out of the story. I swallowed my tongue during some of the more graphic scenes. I enjoyed getting your perspective. Changing subjects, how firm is your policy of not reviewing self-published science fiction novels. Selfishly, I have a trilogy (they are ALL trilogies, aren't they, except for Zelazny and Adams?). The first book is already out, and the sequel releases next month. I'd be pleased if you'd look at either one. If you decide to proceed, I'll send you both books for your trouble, no additional expectations. And I'll send you book three next year when it's done. INVASIVE SPECIES gets good reviews on Amazon. [You said you preferred public communication at first, so that's why I'm just laying this all out there as a comment.] Give a Ray Bradbury Creative Writing award winner a shot, please. Thanks, Michael Pickard
Mike Pickard I'm commenting to locate your info later
"Trilogy=commitment..."
but I'll gladly grab & glance
Thanks
This books awesome I can’t wait to finish listening to it I love cyberpunk lore, videogames etc
Hey, do you recall the info-dump chapters? If so, could you give a short list?
(I'm reading about information theory and this book interests me; I'm too busy to read the whole thing though)
Thanks,
+Andrew Fuller read the whole thing, you monster.
Must have a book report he wants others to write.
The conflict presented in the book is slow to develop and then drags with flat characters. YT is the books saving grace but even that gets weird since she is 15 and there is a sex scene with the main bad guy...a little strange. Your summery of the conflict is on point but the book takes way too long to get there, I'm not sure Hero finds out about David until 20 chapters in? Yes the idea is cool but way too many info dumps to get us there. Must I read all of wiki to understand his idea?? the answer is yes, and that's not good enough. Also, not enough "showing" us Hero's skills...just by the way he is awesome hacker and greatest swordsman...which of course is needed for the ending, but shouldn't a writer give us some minor conflicts to highlight these skills, or fail using them to overcome later? Great idea, just missed the execution on this one.
I read this book because I wanted to see what inspired the "metaverse" trajectory of Facebook. I didn't realize it was supposed to be a parody, I thought it was just having fun with some worldbuilding. In retrospect, the line about how america does a couple things really well, and one of them is pizza delivery should have been my biggest heads up. A mafia pizza delivery group running more of the country than the government is such a funny setup.
I also really enjoyed the info dump sections. I kept thinking "there's no way this is true, this is such a fun research expedition to be brought on" and I think the book had really interesting things to say about ownership of intellectual property, hacking/american cultures. The weakest part of it for me was Y.T.'s character. I was uncomfortable with how many men conistently check her out, (A 15 YEAR OLD) and for all the cool subversive ideas about language and power in the book it felt like YT's character never really went anywhere. I liked the Courier role and her relationship with her mom was interesting but I agree the lack of closure with her story makes me question how seriously I should have been trying to take her character. SPOILERS!! -------- The sex scene with her and Raven literally made me so uncomfortable that after I fnished the chapter on my kindle I immediately went to the kindle store and bought the next book on my list, 3 Body Problem (which was incredible, I am not a fast reader and I read it in 4 days.) and only went back to SnowCrash after I finished that book.
Overall I really enjoyed the book and loved the parts about language and history and speculative technology and corporate/libertarian dystopia. Despite how cool and fun her character seemed in theory, several scenes with YT gave me such profound cringe/Ick that I had to bleach my mind with a different sci fi before I could return to finish it.
Anyway. Good content, thanks for your labor.
I got through the entire book but it was rough. I found the environment bizarre, the characters disjointed, and the writing crude. I agree that the best part of the book are the ideas. I have some interest in how ideas spread and Dawkins’ idea of a cultural meme.
I agree with most people here. Snow Crash didn't really feel like a deliberate cyberpunk parody to me (that is, a skewering of original cyberpunk) but more like Stephenson taking all the cyberpunk toys and tropes and deciding to have as much fun with them as possible.
I think if Stephenson had any underlying agenda, it was to update cyberpunk to bring it more in line with real-world computer systems, like you picked up on. (And which is almost the opposite of parody)
Good luck with your Stephenson TBR, his books are some of my favourite geeky comfort reading, strangely enough :)
Mark Gerrits I am beginning to agree with you and Domo Kete more, that the parody was not very deliberate, and the more over the top parts were Stephenson's humor. I hope to discover more of this for myself as I read through his book, see what my final opinion is...
This is a very interesting genre for me to read, because it's about computers, the Web, and the cultural effects of those things that were "coming into their own" at the same time I was born. I have always taken pride in the fact that the first website went live in the year of my birth :-) And cyber punk is the subgenre of science fiction that seems to celebrate the often crazy weird culture of the Internet, hacking, and programming. I'm not interested in joining in many online communities, by cyberpunk lets me read about them in a roundabout way!
I agree about the infodumps. Makes me think a (likely) film adaptation wouldn't work well.
Superb review!
I think the whole book has a parodical tone, from the exposition about pizza deliveries with the binders of instructions to YT's teen-parent dynamic amid impending nuclear holocaust.
I think it's all of the tongue-in-cheek that jumped out at me, like how the virtual world is essentially like a high school, with different cliques in the cafeteria, plus crappy avatars for the uncool kids (except for the badass villain).
Hmm. Actually it is more a parody of the USA and capitalism. Not so much cyberpunk. In a way it is post-cyberpunk or cyberpunk 2.0 as the characters actually survive and are better off after than before.
1984 Neuromancer is a book by a non-technology interested person, it is more psychological, sociological writtten at a time when mutual assured destruction between East and West could happen every day.
1992 Snow Crash is from someone who is tech savvy and who talks to techies. It extrapolates developments in the US to an extreme. Like the 3 things the US is the world leader in. Movies, Coding and Fast-Pizza-Delivery. Everything else is done somewhere else better or as good for a lower price.
Society fragments and gated communities are much more widespread. Many of them are franchises where one global entity offers a template that people can opt-in for their lives. Franchises like Little Italy where, obviously, the Mafia is in control and beneficial in that area for their members and their community members.
Or Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. A gated community police state (General Lee dictator of Singapore) which relies on high-tech for protection using dog-cyborgs that are capable of reaching supersonic running speeds when the regulator for inhabited areas is turned off. Thank god for radioative decay batteries.YAY!
And "Anybody will listen to R.E.A.S.O.N."
A book rife with precious one-liners and klischees, the opening 5 or 10 pages alone are worth the entire book.
It slows down in the last chapter some, kind of like a pen and paper roleplaying session where the suspense is gone as the plan of the arch enemy is crossed. Getting that one is just a bonus scene, not a must.
his name is "Hero Protagonist"? are you kidding?
Actually Hiro Protagonist, indeed pretty satirical.
My disappointment with the ending was pretty much because of the abruptness of the ending. Like, okay... you wanna tie up ANY loose ends here? The story itself was intriguing and interesting and I also really enjoyed the info more than the action.
I think it's difficult (and a bit unfair) to compare Neuromancer and Snow Crash, honestly, because the former was written near the beginning of the Internet as we know it and I doubt there was very much knowledge easily available. Neuromancer was more of a 'what if'. By 1992, there would have been a lot more knowledge for Stephenson to work with. I think this difference is also why cyberpunk came to an end in the early 90's. Cyberpunk's "what if" just wasn't meshing with what was actually happening with technology. Sorry... you totally just spawned a really interesting thought process for me. XD Thanks!
As for the parody, I mean... come on with names like Hiro Protagonist and Yours Truly, how could it be anything but? XD And that's before the pizza delivery guy/master swordsman self-insert fantasy even comes into play. Hehe. Truthfully I read it so long ago that I couldn't give you specifics if I wanted, though.
Glad you enjoyed it!
tarabyt3 That is really true about comparing Neuromancer and Snow Crash. It is unfair because of the time difference, and Stephenson was working with a lot more knowledge and advancement in the field (for one, the Web was alive! Also, I truly think Stephenson is more knowledgeable about computer programming and the guts of how the technology works). I'm comparing them more because they are the only two in the genre I've read so far. I should read more Gibson I suppose...
And yes, the ending was so abrupt. It's not a good sign when the reader truly thinks their copy of the book is missing a page! I checked page counts and everything! Stephenson's afterward made it sound like the book was really hard to write, very time-consuming, and actually came out of a game idea, so I wonder if the abruptness was him losing steam. But we can only guess :-) I have an imagination, so I can fill in the blanks. It would just be nice if it was written down by the author! Haha!
Kalanadi Mmm... If you didn't like Neuromancer, you probably won't like his other stuff. Though you could try his short stories collection "Burning Chrome." Also... maybe Pattern Recognition? It's not cyberpunk, but near-future SF. It's a bit strange but I did enjoy it (though I wouldn't recommend reading past the first book, personally.)
And yeah. It's like, I CAN fill in the blanks, but I dun wanna! XD
tarabyt3 I was wondering if Gibson ever wrote more straight SF, so I think you sort of answered that question for me! his latest book, "The Peripheral", got a lot of buzz, but I wasn't sure if it was SF or cyberpunk-y. I feel I want to pick that one up at some point. I hate abandoning authors after a single book, especially when it was a debut or very early in their career!
No, from Pattern Recognition all his stuff has been... not cyberpunk. He's given up the genre, I think, because it's no longer relevant, perhaps. I am dying to read The Peripheral but can't bring myself to because I actually disliked his last fiction novel QUITE a lot. I loved reading Gibson so it was a super blow when I found that I didn't enjoy his last two books so I'm sort of afraid to read his next. What if I don't like it?!? But... I will definitely read it sometime this year I think. :D
tarabyt3 Cyber punk isn't relevant anymore? Hm. Since I just finished the Jean le Flambeur series by Hannu Rajaniemi, I can see where other technologies like quantum physics have taken over the old desktop computer / hacking time period. But I found the virtual reality world in Snow Crash (from 1992! When I was a toddler, lol!) to be surprisingly relevant to virtual games and online avatars today.
I am having a similar reaction to Tamora Pierce in terms of how much I've enjoyed her latest books. I thought the Beka Cooper series was OK, and then was really disappointed with Battle Magic. In my case, I might be getting too old for the demographic Pierce is writing for. But I find myself slightly dreading the release of her next book. What if I hate the Numair book I've been waiting *eight years* for? Augh, nooo...
Can't wait for the movie
Finding this one hard to read. Enjoying the concepts, but the plot is slightly all over the place.
I totally agree with you. Had I read it back in the 90's, I think I would enjoy it more.
Bob Rife really gives me perspective on Mark Zuckerberg's Meta project. While he is marketing Meta as a one-stop solution for the Verse framework, it almost seems like he has too much control. The data privacy issues have been bad on a messaging app, imagine when this gets into 3d & VR. Scary stuff.
The parody was the tone of it all. Cyberpunk first envisioned itself as a new breed of scifi that transcended the contempt afforded to the 'Thud and Blunder' of rockets and spacemen that had come to define the genre. Cyberpunk was to be about edge, drugs, violence, flawed heroes and social commentary. Dark, adult, real. In time, the staying power of the cyberpunk aesthetic made it into an easily reducible cartoon of itself. Cyberpunk became a meme, and that meme gave us things like "The Matrix", itself a term first coined by Gibson in his short story, "Burning Chrome". In this sense, Cyberpunk has fallen prey to the exact same fate that befell the raygun gothic futurism of the years before it, the fate that spawned the '-punk' ethos of the 1980's as a reaction to the staid tropes that defined the scifi of the time.
So the parody is the very way that snowcrash is written, it's in the narrative tone itself. Snow Crash mocks the tone of the formative Cyberpunk works by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling.
For me, the parody really hit hard at the end. Almost everything came to 11 within the final 10 chapters. I started to take note of all the comedic conclusions, but there were too many.
Personally, I didn't like the linguistic and theological info-dumps. He kept repeating the same information over and over, which was a pain when I got it the first time. It's also partly factual, partly ridiculous... which made it feel like useless information. But I suppose that could be the parody bleeding through. It just felt like a chore reading through all that info, like a textbook that won't apply to anything other than an abrupt conclusion.
The high tech was great, and well described throughout. The entire world was developed with very creative thought, which is appreciated. Overall I thought the piece as a whole was average, but there were many great parts to it.
If you love cyberpunk and cultural history, you will likely find this to be a great read.
sorry to get off subject... Rachel i want to take you out on a date!!! promise to read the book.
One of the very best scifi books. Nice review.
i love your review! have the same thoughts as well!
THIS COMMENT CONTAINS BIG FAT SPOILERS: I don't think the representations of hacking in both Neuromancer and Snow Crash are so far off in terms of how many fantasy elements there are, I just think that Stephenson tends to get a free pass because he talks about things like "the numbers that a computer can understand" and thus how everything in the Metaverse is base two... both include a romantic element that is far removed from what programming is like. You know Hiro writes code, but the portrayal of what he does in the Metaverse is more like he's using godmode. It's also somewhat confusing how the interface of the computers he uses would work, as the book sometimes implies that the computer has a lens that projects the image of the metaverse onto Hiro's goggles, but then again we don't know if he needs to move his body to have his avatar replicate his movements (which is implied in that one event with him doing that swordsmanship performance in front of his neighbours in the U-Stor-It). He also admits not having known the real meaning f the acronym BIOS when writing it. But I think what he really got right was the societal impact of such a thing like cyberspace, not just as a tool for military corporations but for everyday civilian users.
I also loved the infodumps of the book at first, but thought they lost a lot of steam and stopped making sense near the end. I had imagined something different. Didn't really know if Rife was just trying to revive the cult of Asherah or use a similar way of indoctrinating people for other ends. Didn't really know what the book's real point about religion ultimately was. I also thought I found inconsistencies regarding the "physical version" of Snow Crash and its ellaboration.
I was also a fan of the loser facet of Hiro, so much so that I wish there had been a lot more of that and a lot less of him shooting his way into an aircraft carrier. The book has a couple of really great quotes on immaturity that... just speak to me XD. But my favourite character has to be Ng. I was also not a big fan of the chase scenes or action scenes except for the showdowns with Raven, the part where Ng and YT work together, Hiro vs the racists and the final part with all the thrashers pooning the helicopter. Those were excellent.
I don't know, the attitude of the book was pretty cool and infectious. It has some big problems for me and I was disappointed by the ending but it was one hell of a fun read at the same time.
It's funny how the virtual world in this book is called the 'Metaverse', and Mark Zuckerberg decides to change the name of Facebook to the 'Metaverse'.
Good authors often leave those "wrapping up the loose ends" chapters out so that you fill in that stuff with your own imagination ;) Contrast that with the Harry Potter style garbage that fills in every single last little detail for you so you don't have to even use your imagination at all! LOL
Enjoyed it too !!
I'd much rather live in a world run by franchises and city-states than any government because franchises have to worry about customer service which the government has absolutely no obligation to (just think DMV, IRS, FDA, etc) and city-states would have a much harder time getting away with corruption because of the working class to bureaucrat ratio and just the population size in general.
I'm an anarchist because of the points I've made here. Competition and a mindset to reject authority are the best combinations to obtain individual autonomy while also retaining accountability for all parties.
Chase and fight scenes were the commercials.
Lol wtf, Snow Crash is not a parody of anything. It just goes that hard!
R.E.A.S.O.N.
Thanks, good review and the book is not for me.
eh, this book is more of a worldbuilding exercise than an actual story
I JUST FINISHED IT & THOUGHT IT WAS GREAT,GEORGE MILLER SHOULD DIRECT AN EXCLUSIVE NETFLIX SERIES 4 IT,HIS VISUAL STYLE WOULD BE A PERFECT MATCH 4 STEPHENSON'S WORLD/METAVERSE.GREAT REVIEW.#IAMNOTYELLINGIAMALLCAPSATALLTIMESLOL
Looks like this was some inspiration for Mark Zuckerberg. I gotta read this!
Here after Facebook's meta plan
To much info for a book review. I had to stop myself from watching all of it.
I though it was to complicated and sort of dry
Damn, I wish more women in my life were like you. Inquisitive, smart, and interested in really cool fiction like Snow Crash. The fact that you really liked the infodumps shows that you have a great appreciation for history, culture, and plot structure.
Whoever lands you is quite a lucky individual 😉
Sorry I had to go down that road, but I just thought you'd think it was nice.
Snowcrash is a terrible novel. Juvenile; clumsily written.
Ping & Yari you're mad...
It is a 4 Color version of a novel, sure.
But, at the time 1993, tremendously fun to read.
It feels young, yes, so juvenile is a good description. Not bad to attract young readers.
And some of the pen strokes are a little thick, overemphasizing US and global culture by one or two orders of magnitude.
Not an attempt at precise micro-surgery capable language, agreed.
You have to like tongue in cheek descriptions. But underneath the obvious description is a more fine tuned critique which precisely shows where the world of the early 1990-ies was heading. Not the distance it would go, but where.
I love this booooooooook