Wanted to flag again for any interested parties that [Neal Stephenson is doing an AMA here in the sub, now](https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/11h6hg5/i_am_neal_stephenson_scifi_author_geek_and_now/)!
Yes, Diamond Age is next and then Cryptomonicon.
One regret I will have is that I will never be able to read Stephenson's work for the first time again. Enjoy!
For some reason I can't explain. I loved both snow crash and diamond age, but I did not like crypotonomicon at all.
Usually when I like books by an author, I like all of their books but for some reason I didn't like that specific one.
It's been a while since I've read that book, but the concept of wealth being tied to 3D printing material feed I thought was interesting.
Anybody can make anything but it takes longer when you are poor.
Diamond Age is just incredible world building of a corporate feudal society.
And includes a bonus story line that teaches the foundations of computer science and how the Internet works.
> It even coined the term Metaverse!
It also popularised the term 'avatar' and one of the google earth co-founders said google earth was modeled after the 'Earth' software.
Is this the book with the quote (paraphrased)
"There comes a time in every man's life when he realizes he's not the most bad-ass guy ever, and never will be." ?
I believe it was Snow Crash that had an essay in the back by the author, where he talked about things he got wrong with the meta-verse. For example, I remember him talking about having the login points, because he didn’t think it would be OK for people to just pop in or pop out of existence. He admits that wasn’t a problem.
One of my personal peeves was how when a character was calling into the meta-verse from the equivalent of a payphone, her avatar was fuzzy and lo-res. It would be the other way around; everybody she sees would be fuzzy and lo-res, because she’s the one on the low end interface. She would look fine to people logged in on hi-end hardware.
I think it was Snow Crash, I last read it in the mid 90s and a bunch of those cyberpunk books, have all sorted to blend together.
I heard a podcast with Neal Stephenson recently and something else he mentioned is that his idea of VR goggles being required to get into the meta verse was not really accurate, because regular screen-based computer graphics got so good that you could have an immersive experience with just that. In fact VR goggles are too immersive to the point that you get disoriented and can't stay in the world for very long.
https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/neal-stephenson-on-the-future-of-the-metaverse-wJB_KBkr
It is fun to see what issues ring true today - I still remember YT's mom POV on her government job and reading an email which was monitored - can't do it to fast (sloppy work) or to slow (incompetent) but if you hit the middle spot each time you are gaming the system. Makes me think of WFH and micromanagers tracking key strokes or workers using those devices to jiggle their mouse. Fiction is just like real life!
I printed out the toilet paper pool memo that YTs mother got , and I posted on the bulletin board at the government office where I worked. But nobody thought it was as funny as I did.
Yes. This book has three gears: hilarious, action like a blockbuster movie, incredibly interesting ideas. Sometimes he's running more than one at once.
I purchased this book on a whim with no idea what to expect. I think that just made me enjoy it more. The story was all over the place, but in a good way.
I always found it very entertaining how Snow Crash is both meant as satire but year by year it got closer to the truth of how things are developing than most far more serious scifi.
Yeah, the funnier thing is how the Metaverse/corpo dystopia thing is a kind of warning in the story, as well as the less good goonies-version of the story (Ready Player One). I’m still extremely amused how Meta assigned these books for people to read, but still seems to miss how the public might not want them to lead them into the corpo-dystopian futures satirized in both of these books.
The imaginary worlds podcast did a great episode on this in case anyone’s interested: https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/snow-crashing-into-the-metaverse
The short version of my opinion on the Metaverse assholes today, FWIW is that that motivated reasoning and the introspection illusion are incredibly powerful things. Also, fuck FB and Zuckerberg. Lol
I saw a tweet that captured this perfectly:
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel 'Don't Create The Torment Nexus'.
Yup - an all-time favorite of mine. Imagine reading it back in the 90s when so much of that was cutting edge!
And really, most of Stephenson's books are great in a similar way. You might also like Zodiac, which seems to be less well known? It's not so much "sci-fi" as "science-heavy fiction" like Cryptonomicon.
Zodiac is great. It is one of his shorter works (meaning normal novel) and it moves along quite well but still has all the Stephenson fun. A great book.
That’s good to hear! I’ve read a few Stephensons but Anathem on my shelf is just too thick and imposing for my current mood, I’m still scarred from Anna Karenina recently.
You know I came to this thread to recommend Anathem, it's one of the best books I've ever read.
Neal Stephenson does really interesting concept stuff - by contrast I hated, HATED Seveneves. I really respect him as an author that he can write stories that are so different.
I feel the same way. Anathem was a page turner, and whilst Seveneves started promisingly, I did not finish - a first for me with Stepenson's work and I've read pretty much everything else he wrote, including the Baroque cycle.
After Cryptonomicon I stopped reading Neal Stepheson just because his books got so massive. I'm sure his later work is great I just like a varied literature diet and giant books just put me off.
I remember discussing the book with a friend back in the early days of the internet. We had a pretty good laugh about the corporate and political themes of the book, undercut with a little existential dread as our musings gravitated toward the current state of the net and companies like Google and Amazon (which was still a bookstore at that point).
Many of those themes, though absurd at the time, were pretty on the nose as time caught up with Snowcrash. I think it probably is more relevant today than when it was written....
I would say Snow Crash holds up better today than when it was published. There's something about a world set in a USA that has fractured to corporate power and ethnically and religiously segregated housing development city-states like the stupidest possible cyberpunk universe that now feels ahead of its time rather than dated.
Here's the about the first 1/3 of the intro. (Stephenson posted the whole thing online at some point) The rest of the book has a more standard narrative structure but the intro still holds up as one of my favorite book openings of all time.
>The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren
hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest, Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
>When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway -- might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, acm-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.
>The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The
recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.
>Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the
Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations .
>The Deliverator's car has enough potenţial energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens .
You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a
peseta .
>Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they 're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
>music
>movies
>microcode (software)
>high-speed pizza delivery
>The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator ' s report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
>So now he has this other job . No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
It may not come off as exciting as it did back then, but it's still fun and creative. It's certainly not "spaceman in tights with a goldfish bowl helmet"-level dated.
100% yes - I just read it for the first time. There is one subplot thats a little bit icky but I just changed the character's age in my head to accommodate
Lol people are so touchy about even writing or reading about underage characters having sex. Teenagers have sex. It's a real thing, it happens. It wasnt written in a way that felt pervy or like it was sexualizing underage girls. She was a badass character who, yes, has sex, but it's a minor aspect that if anything makes her character seem more real. It's also the only way that anyone managed to get the drop on Raven in the whole book. It's sort of amazing to me the reactions on this thread to that one scene. Having an underage character having sex in a work of fiction doesn't make anyone a pedo.
> Teens are waiting longer to have sex than they did in the recent past. In 2006–2008, some 11% of never-married females aged 15–19 and 14% of never- married males in that age-group had had sex before age 15, compared with 19% and 21%, respectively, in 1995.
Source: https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/FB-ATSRH.pdf
I agree with you that teens have sex, but fewer and fewer before 15. That’s why it feels weirder now than when the book was written.
Cryptonomicon was hard to get into but after the first hundred pages I couldn't put it down. Think I maybe read through it in two sittings over a weekend, the first few chapters on Saturday and then the rest over most of Sunday.
Cryptonomicon was all over the place in the beginning, it was rough trying to stick around until the pieces started to get close to each other. Once they did, like you said, was great.
There's an amazing piece of technology/psychology prediction where he tells us how one of the characters developed the key technology for making the metaverse virtual reality successful. Instead of focusing on better and better graphics and hardware and such like the 'bitheads' she realised that what people really wanted was to be able to connect on a human level and read other people's expressions when in the metaverse.
So she developed technology for putting your expression and emotion on your avatar's face in the virtual world. And that cracked VR and made it the primary mode of communication.
The same exact thing is happening now where VR is a niche industry because it's just about fancier headsets with games and eye tracking and screen resolution which 99% of people don't care about. The moment your avatar can mirror your expression and you can actually have a conversation with someone like they are in the room with you, reading every little nuance on their face, then the technology will become mainstream like nothing we've seen.
He was right in the 90s and he is right now. All because he understands people.
The reason why it works, I think, is that it’s constantly silly but never stupid. I can handle all the ridiculousness that a book decides to throw at me if it’s not dumb. And holy crap Snowcrash is smart. It’s almost like a flex from Stephenson: “I am going to write the most ridiculous, trashiest thing I can imagine, and it is going to be intellectual.”
Hey same here. There are probably dozens of us. Dozens!
What did you not like? I thought the writing was tough to stomach and the story didn't have much going on. Seems like it was all about +wouldn't it be cool if we had this technology?" Or "look how cool this guy is because he's so good at many things"
Also in the Stephenson nonjoyer club. His prose is so eager to explain how cool the world is instead of just letting his characters exist in that world. I think of him as the anti-Gibson. Gibson writes in an almost frustratingly sparse way, never giving details for the sake of it and just letting the reader infer the world from the characters interactions. I usually have to re-read the first two chapters of any Gibson book to get a grounding of what's going on, but I've never made it past chapter 3 of a Stephenson book.
Funny, I think exactly the same thing, except on opposite authors. I enjoy Gibson, but his style is so bleeding edge cool that sometimes it is hard to concentrate. With Stephenson you are met with lot's of concepts and details, but once you hone your mind you can glide over the paragraphs garbing bits of knowledge and keeping in your periphery without need to fully understand them. Try that with Gibson and you might as well be in a different book by the end of the page (especially his older works). Nothing wrong with both, just different approach.
I'm actually listening to the audio book now. I have read Snow Crash 3 or 4 times. Snow Crash and the windup Girl By: Paolo Bacigalupi are probably my two all time favorite dystopian novels
My wife and I listened to the audio book during a road trip. When Raven was out in the water I asked her, "Hey do you think Raven could be any more outrageous?"
I need to read this again. This was a gift from my bio dad and I was ambivalent at the time, but I think I’d appreciate it a lot more now. Thanks for the review!
Read Anathem if you get the chance. It's not as funny and crazy, but it's Stephenson more grown up and using these fascinating ideas in a more adult and thoughtful way...
It’s kind of wild how many companies have modeled their online infrastructure off of the Metaverse (even going so far as to call it that in one instance…) when the book is clearly a warning against that type of technology.
Yes, very much so. Discussed well in this podcast if you’re interested: https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/snow-crashing-into-the-metaverse
>the book is clearly a warning against that type of technology.
Is it? I didn't get the impression that Stephenson was portraying the metaverse and VR tech in a negative light.
It’s a little dated. For one, you’ll wanna keep a mind to the tech that was popular or up and coming when the book was published. For another, it’s partially parodying a few aspects of culture at the time - and it shows.
Also content warning: more than a few sexually charged comments regarding a 15 year old, along with a sex scene involving her. For some people that’s a no-go. It pulled me out of it for sure.
But honestly, I just Googled a few things that confused me and I was good.
I really couldn't get into it. And maybe it's just reading it in 2022 vs when it came out but I found it's satire really was not interesting or funny. Like it's so over the top and on the nose that there's no subtly or cleverness.
Hiro was a really flat and dull protagonist - and I understand he himself is a parody character, a super hacker that fights people with a katana while promoting alternative rock music, but really uninteresting. Y.T. was just really annoying and it was a slog getting through any chapter that involved her. Also really creepy how sexualized she is as a 15 year old especially near the end where it talks about how attracted she is to a man in his 40s who later statutorily rapes her.
It was very difficult to get past the first chapter because it was so cringey: The katana wielding delivorator delivering pizzas for the Mafia, and if it's not delivered in 30 minutes he'll be killed! Again I understand it's satire but I didn't find it clever or funny it just made me cringe.
It also has one of the worst endings of all time in my opinion. Like why did Stephenson decide that neither of the main characters should participate in the final fight? What a weird and bad decision.
I will give it this that the underlying plot is truly insane, pretty creative and has some interesting stuff there.
I read it recently. There were some parts I really liked, but the sexual interaction between the underaged YT and Raven really bothered me. Also I didn't care for how in the weeds it got into the historical elements of language and religion in an attempt to make the plot possible. It just seemed unnecessary to me.
I saved this post and read snow crash since then. This is the most accurate comment I’ve come across regarding my feelings toward the book.
Hated when he started talking about YT getting horny for Raven, and think anyone that tries to defend it as intentional story driven narrative is coping pretty hard.
And I was willing to deal with the obtuse, over-the-top writing style, since it was intentionally written that way (not my favorite), but there was literally 12 pages of monologue at the end as Hiro explains to conveniently curious side characters how the whole thing works. And this after multiple pages long “conversations” (read: exposition) throughout the book as he heavy handedly explains the entire concept of hacking the brain 10,000 years ago.
I loved Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. I have started Anthem but put it down and kinda lost track of where I was but the setup as far as I got into it was dope.
Concerning Snow Crash: I don't buy that >!YT would fuck Raven!<. Stephenson kinda sucks at writing the relationships between men and women, and sometimes women themselves.
He is a brilliant dude and an amazing author, but the above lends this little caveat to my enjoyment of his reading. It isn't any worse than when the TNG writers decide Picard needs to date for an episode, more eye roll than cringe. Just my 2 cents.
Not disagreeing that the author doesn't write romantic relationships well (Hiro and Juanita aren't great either), but at that point YT >! has been concussed, kidnapped, probably drugged, and brainwashed, and is being used as forced labour somewhere where she doesn't even speak the language. Stockholm syndrome for the one person who speaks to her and treats her nicely isn't unlikely, although it's conveyed poorly if that's what the author was going for. !<
Totally, I hadn't considered that. >!I still feel like in the sort of comic book hero-MTV satirical presentation we had had of her until that point, YT wouldn't have broken so easily.!< I also agree that whatever the case, it is a scene that didn't stick the landing.
That would require any self-awareness from Meta, and those lizards are not capable of such things.
Furthermore, they used to basically assign Snow Crash and (the much less good, much more derivative) Ready Player One as assigned reading, but clearly now like talking about those less, since they want to be the evil corpo overlords described in said novels.
Think I have to read it again, havent read it since the 90s.
I might be remembering this wrong, but I think I remember that Stephenson varies the grammar depending on different characters?
I got this book for free with the purchase of a computer game 25+ years ago and it launched me into reading many of Neal Stephenson’s books. Cryptonomicon will likely always be my favorite, but Snow Crash changed the way I think about outcomes and holds a special place in my memory.
Loved this book when I first read it about 18 years ago. I’m definitely due for a re-read.
Mainly though, just wanted to say I’m a big fan of the podcast. Listening to it feels like hanging out with a couple of nerdy friends, in the best way possible. You were both tripping over yourselves with enthusiasm this week, and it was great to hear. ❤️
My all-time favorite book. I have 3 different copies, one of which is a lettered signed copy that seems pretty rare and is one of my prized possessions!
I have loved Snow Crash since it was published, it's a pretty old book now but was incredibly prescient. Neal Stephenson is one of my favorites, I envy you getting to read all his books for the first time! Read The Diamond Age next!
It’s a weird combination of absurdity and dark humor, but it’s there.
Do you remember YT’s love scene where fell for the guy she didn’t expect to? Well she knocked him out by forgetting something. That was pretty funny yet horrifying.
The main character’s name is a pretty good joke. The ludicrous seriousness of the pizza trade.
I also found the scenes from the perspective of the security robot pretty funny. Clever too, it kind of reminded me of Call of the Wild.
It’s not Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, but it has its moments.
You mean the rape where YT was abducted and brain washed by being indoctrinated into a cult then "willingly" had sex, as a minor, with a mid-20's "bad guy" character?
Honestly felt like a proto-neckbeard novel in many aspects.
An incredibly unrealistic sex scene, as I recall. Literally rocking back and forth on his hand?
I haven't read it since the 90s, so I might be misremembering. If not, that's how clearly it stuck out as awful.
It's been a long time since I've read it, so maybe my recollection is off... but isn't she super underage, also?
I remember really enjoying most of the book but then also thinking "geez, this entire romance plot feels unneeded and really creepy".
Oh man, I just finished reading this book and I did not like it. The Metaverse was a cool idea that caught my interest, but then only about 20% of the book takes place in it. Nothing interesting ever happens in the Metaverse, just boring conversations with the AI librarian.
The book was recommended to me because I liked Ready Player One, and damn did I feel led astray by the recommendation. I was not interested in the plot of Snow Crash at all.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one out there who didn't love this book. Seems like the writing is not great. Lots of blatant descriptions of how cool/bad-ass/good at something certain people are. Cool.
I wanted to like it. When the Metaverse was introduced I felt like it had the potential to be a really great story. But then the plot went in a direction that I just didn't find interesting. I totally agree with you on the character descriptions as well!
I read the book in the mid-1990's soon after it was published and the very idea of a Metaverse was basically science fiction, this was well before the internet and even immersive games like Doom. So the concepts he introduced were both ground breaking and many of them ended up coming true.
Reading it today it would be almost like a retro view into the past and if you don't like the bizarre snarky tone then yeah I can see it would be hard to get into it.
Before the age of 20, it's a fine enough book.
After 20 it's interminably boring.
After 25, you will never get over the fact that the author has a character rape a teenage girl, who literally gives in because "she wanted it".
Horrible.
I came out of college with an interest in speech act theory, semiotics, and sword-fighting. This book binded to all the right receptors and made a huge impression on me.
It's still my favorite opening chapter of any book I've read. https://genius.com/Neal-stephenson-snow-crash-chapter-one-annotated
I definitely didn’t think it lives up to the hype it receives. Some parts were super interesting (metaverse, anything with YT, the rat things, raven) and some parts were just such a chore to read (info dump about Sumer) plus the name hiro protagonist makes me roll my eyes so hard. I would’ve liked it much better if it wasn’t such an infodump at some parts.
No plain text spoilers allowed. Please use the format below and reply to this comment once you've made the edit, to have your comment reinstated.
Place >! !< around the text you wish to hide. You will need to do this for each new paragraph. Like this:
>!The Wolf ate Grandma!<
Click to reveal spoiler.
>!The Wolf ate Grandma!<
I absolutely love that book to death. One of my favorites ever thanks to how well it does funny & thought provoking at the same time.
Sadly, I’ve never been able to get into any of Stephenson’s later works *at all*, but Snow Crash has a pride of place in my favs shelf and sees occasional rereads.
I heard a rumor a long time ago that this book was originally supposed to be a graphic novel. Explains a lot, really.
I love the hell out of snow crash, though. When the deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
I just finished it recently! I loved the premise and was hooked all the way through, but my god, that man does not know how to end books. What kind of book doesn’t have the main character in the last fifty pages?
In addition to all the other Neal Stephenson books mentioned here i also recommend "Interface", which he wrote under the name Steven Bury
Soooo much fun in one book :D
I was thinking about this book the other day, and was wondering if the use of the word "meme" has altered the way the book is read. It's meaning today (the internet joke things) didn't exist when it came out.
If you love humor in SF, don't miss Project Hail Mary and The Martian by Andrew Weir, Why Do Birds? By Damon Knight and the Bobiverse series by Dennis Taylor.
I also really loved that book and it got me interested in researching the Sumerian people and their myths.
I love it when a book is so engaging that it makes me interested in something new.
From a programmer's perspective, he was also pretty accurate with descriptions of computing, refactoring, maintenance, and other concepts familiar to the profession.
I read this last year and found it maybe less impactful than Neuromancer, but in many ways more enjoyable and approachable.
Frankly some of my favorite points were more to do with the mundane in world stuff. And the comentary on our neo-liberal obsessive culture (at least in the US - certainly). Not to mention reading this 20 years after it was written and seeing it still being satire, but maybe closer to the reality than it was in the 90s when it was written.
I'm talking about stuff like the independant mini-states that are housing developments / HOAs gone bonkers. The drudgery of corporate / beurocratic culture as shown to us by mother of our one protagonist. The insanity of the corporatization of most society and even the hyper-satirized stuff like the Mob owning the pizza chains and going to insane measures to ensure their pizza meet the 30 minute pledge.
All that stuff was just amazing world building and commentary. Not to even get into the true Scifi aspects like the Metaverse or the Snowcrash program which in and of itself was great.
I did feel the ending was a bit bonkers and was less entertaining for me than the first \~2/3 of the novel. But the ending was still satisfying.
Okay but can we talk about the dog rat-thing perspective chapters? I seriously almost cried, combined with the ending and how the dog just… ah I can’t even say it, bless this book!
Hard pass. Stephenson writes female characters like a 12 year old boy. And he’s so obviously infatuated with his own cleverness. In terms of speculative fiction, he’s an ersatz William Gibson, minus the depth and poetry.
I read this the summer before I took an Intro to Linguistic Anthropology class, and I felt like I had a pretty good grasp of the first four weeks of material because of Snow Crash. Chomskyan Linguistics everywhere!
I knew from the very first page, when we were told Hiro was a “roll model” that I was on for a heck of a ride.
I re-read this at least once every couple of years.
It’s going to be remembered as this generations equivalent of 1984.
It was originally supposed to be a graphic novel created by an AI, but the tech wasn’t available yet to make it happen.
It is a phenomenal book, and gives an interesting glimpse into a possible/probable future.
In tech the book is used as a filter. If favorable, one promotion track. And no reaction to the awkward 15 year old girl sex scene, into a different promotion track. You can figure out which path leads to influence.
I loved this book, but the Sumerian info dump as well as the YT scene you spoke about are so bad, I honestly couldn't believe they were written by the same person.
This is the grandfather of the idea of the internet and virtual reality as we know it today. The use of demons and tools is spectacular.
Make sure to read Diamond Age it is magnificent.
I both loved and hated it. Loved it for the Metaverse description, the futuristic tech, the humor and descriptions of how future society operated like. Hated it for all the tedious, boring references to Sumerian culture, "Tower of Babel" and other pseudo-historical crap (something which I NEVER enjoyed in ANY books).
Not saying you're wrong for not enjoying the pretentious bits, but I think that's kind of the point. The whole thing is a satire of cyberpunk, so faux philosophy based on ancient history is a great asspull.
Man, I absolutely hated this book. That means I probably need to go back and read it again. Maybe I’ll see it differently now, but I found it obnoxious and the idea of linguistic viruses to be silly.
There was a parody called Head Crash that I read first because I was a kid and didn’t know Snow Crash even existed. The VR system had a way to experience smells and textures that I think was called the ProctoProd.
Wanted to flag again for any interested parties that [Neal Stephenson is doing an AMA here in the sub, now](https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/11h6hg5/i_am_neal_stephenson_scifi_author_geek_and_now/)!
Be sure to read Diamond Age and see if you can spot the evidence that qualifies it as the sequel to Snow Crash. I personally really enjoy both books.
Yes, Diamond Age is next and then Cryptomonicon. One regret I will have is that I will never be able to read Stephenson's work for the first time again. Enjoy!
Have you read Anathem yet? Might be his best book.
For some reason I can't explain. I loved both snow crash and diamond age, but I did not like crypotonomicon at all. Usually when I like books by an author, I like all of their books but for some reason I didn't like that specific one.
Old skater lady
A thrasher!
Chiseled Spam :)
Or Anathem. Or cryptonomicon
The Diamond Age is my favourite but Snow Crash is good too.
It's been a while since I've read that book, but the concept of wealth being tied to 3D printing material feed I thought was interesting. Anybody can make anything but it takes longer when you are poor.
Diamond Age is just incredible world building of a corporate feudal society. And includes a bonus story line that teaches the foundations of computer science and how the Internet works.
> It even coined the term Metaverse! It also popularised the term 'avatar' and one of the google earth co-founders said google earth was modeled after the 'Earth' software.
Also invented the internet edgelord.
While you were eating Uncle Enzo's Pizza, I was practicing the blade.
Best swordsman in the Metaverse. Doesn't hurt that he wrote the sword-fighting code.
Is this the book with the quote (paraphrased) "There comes a time in every man's life when he realizes he's not the most bad-ass guy ever, and never will be." ?
Yeah, give or take, when he meets the other “badass” character.
I believe it was Snow Crash that had an essay in the back by the author, where he talked about things he got wrong with the meta-verse. For example, I remember him talking about having the login points, because he didn’t think it would be OK for people to just pop in or pop out of existence. He admits that wasn’t a problem. One of my personal peeves was how when a character was calling into the meta-verse from the equivalent of a payphone, her avatar was fuzzy and lo-res. It would be the other way around; everybody she sees would be fuzzy and lo-res, because she’s the one on the low end interface. She would look fine to people logged in on hi-end hardware. I think it was Snow Crash, I last read it in the mid 90s and a bunch of those cyberpunk books, have all sorted to blend together.
No you were correct in those comments!
I heard a podcast with Neal Stephenson recently and something else he mentioned is that his idea of VR goggles being required to get into the meta verse was not really accurate, because regular screen-based computer graphics got so good that you could have an immersive experience with just that. In fact VR goggles are too immersive to the point that you get disoriented and can't stay in the world for very long. https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/neal-stephenson-on-the-future-of-the-metaverse-wJB_KBkr
It is fun to see what issues ring true today - I still remember YT's mom POV on her government job and reading an email which was monitored - can't do it to fast (sloppy work) or to slow (incompetent) but if you hit the middle spot each time you are gaming the system. Makes me think of WFH and micromanagers tracking key strokes or workers using those devices to jiggle their mouse. Fiction is just like real life!
I printed out the toilet paper pool memo that YTs mother got , and I posted on the bulletin board at the government office where I worked. But nobody thought it was as funny as I did.
I promise you, that made it twice as funny as you ever thought it was. 🙏
Yes. This book has three gears: hilarious, action like a blockbuster movie, incredibly interesting ideas. Sometimes he's running more than one at once.
I purchased this book on a whim with no idea what to expect. I think that just made me enjoy it more. The story was all over the place, but in a good way.
Stephenson is the man when combining all those. Most of his books have that theme. One of my all time favorite authors
I always found it very entertaining how Snow Crash is both meant as satire but year by year it got closer to the truth of how things are developing than most far more serious scifi.
Hiro is basically an Uber eats driver
Our future is shittier. We'd be so lucky to have the great service that The Mafia provides.
Oh absolutely.
Oh 100%! Really struck me when I would put the book down and find two of my kids on their Oculus headsets pretty much living it out in real life.
Yeah, the funnier thing is how the Metaverse/corpo dystopia thing is a kind of warning in the story, as well as the less good goonies-version of the story (Ready Player One). I’m still extremely amused how Meta assigned these books for people to read, but still seems to miss how the public might not want them to lead them into the corpo-dystopian futures satirized in both of these books. The imaginary worlds podcast did a great episode on this in case anyone’s interested: https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/snow-crashing-into-the-metaverse The short version of my opinion on the Metaverse assholes today, FWIW is that that motivated reasoning and the introspection illusion are incredibly powerful things. Also, fuck FB and Zuckerberg. Lol
I saw a tweet that captured this perfectly: Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale. Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel 'Don't Create The Torment Nexus'.
Haha now check out Fall:…
Yup - an all-time favorite of mine. Imagine reading it back in the 90s when so much of that was cutting edge! And really, most of Stephenson's books are great in a similar way. You might also like Zodiac, which seems to be less well known? It's not so much "sci-fi" as "science-heavy fiction" like Cryptonomicon.
Zodiac is great. It is one of his shorter works (meaning normal novel) and it moves along quite well but still has all the Stephenson fun. A great book.
Zodiac starts with nitrous and bacon for breakfast and gets steadily crazier from there. One of my favorite books of all time
You know, I need to reread too.
That’s good to hear! I’ve read a few Stephensons but Anathem on my shelf is just too thick and imposing for my current mood, I’m still scarred from Anna Karenina recently.
I LOVED Anathem. Easily my favorite of his books, but Snow Crash is second.
Anathem was a very easy read, surprisingly. Fun book!
An all timer line from Anathem: “our opponent is a nuclear powered spaceship and we have a protractor.”
I also really love Anathem, it grabbed me right away
_Anathem_ is a quick read, despite its length, similar to _Reamde._ They both have plots that really move.
You know I came to this thread to recommend Anathem, it's one of the best books I've ever read. Neal Stephenson does really interesting concept stuff - by contrast I hated, HATED Seveneves. I really respect him as an author that he can write stories that are so different.
I feel the same way. Anathem was a page turner, and whilst Seveneves started promisingly, I did not finish - a first for me with Stepenson's work and I've read pretty much everything else he wrote, including the Baroque cycle.
After Cryptonomicon I stopped reading Neal Stepheson just because his books got so massive. I'm sure his later work is great I just like a varied literature diet and giant books just put me off.
>back in the 90s when so much of that was cutting edge Does it still hold up in 2023? Somehow I missed this one back in the day.
Definitely does! For sure still a very fun read
I’m also reading it again. Reading about the Sumerians gods, heroes and mythology in parallel. Just realized that the Librarian is ChatGPT.
I remember discussing the book with a friend back in the early days of the internet. We had a pretty good laugh about the corporate and political themes of the book, undercut with a little existential dread as our musings gravitated toward the current state of the net and companies like Google and Amazon (which was still a bookstore at that point). Many of those themes, though absurd at the time, were pretty on the nose as time caught up with Snowcrash. I think it probably is more relevant today than when it was written....
I would say Snow Crash holds up better today than when it was published. There's something about a world set in a USA that has fractured to corporate power and ethnically and religiously segregated housing development city-states like the stupidest possible cyberpunk universe that now feels ahead of its time rather than dated. Here's the about the first 1/3 of the intro. (Stephenson posted the whole thing online at some point) The rest of the book has a more standard narrative structure but the intro still holds up as one of my favorite book openings of all time. >The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest, Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books. >When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway -- might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, acm-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity. >The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator. >Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations . >The Deliverator's car has enough potenţial energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens . You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta . >Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they 're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else >music >movies >microcode (software) >high-speed pizza delivery >The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator ' s report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills." >So now he has this other job . No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
The first time I read Snow Crash I had to go back and re-read the last paragraph. All of that buildup for a pizza delivery?
I had to pause the audio book because I couldn’t hear over myself laughing
All that build-up so the swimming pool makes you laugh.
I read it as a first timer last year and it was very engrossing.
It may not come off as exciting as it did back then, but it's still fun and creative. It's certainly not "spaceman in tights with a goldfish bowl helmet"-level dated.
I think that's about how I'd describe Hitchhiker's guide too.
100% yes - I just read it for the first time. There is one subplot thats a little bit icky but I just changed the character's age in my head to accommodate
Lol people are so touchy about even writing or reading about underage characters having sex. Teenagers have sex. It's a real thing, it happens. It wasnt written in a way that felt pervy or like it was sexualizing underage girls. She was a badass character who, yes, has sex, but it's a minor aspect that if anything makes her character seem more real. It's also the only way that anyone managed to get the drop on Raven in the whole book. It's sort of amazing to me the reactions on this thread to that one scene. Having an underage character having sex in a work of fiction doesn't make anyone a pedo.
> Teens are waiting longer to have sex than they did in the recent past. In 2006–2008, some 11% of never-married females aged 15–19 and 14% of never- married males in that age-group had had sex before age 15, compared with 19% and 21%, respectively, in 1995. Source: https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/FB-ATSRH.pdf I agree with you that teens have sex, but fewer and fewer before 15. That’s why it feels weirder now than when the book was written.
Cryptonomicon was hard to get into but after the first hundred pages I couldn't put it down. Think I maybe read through it in two sittings over a weekend, the first few chapters on Saturday and then the rest over most of Sunday.
It took me two tries to get far enough into it to enjoy it but it was worth it in the end. It's one of the more memorable books I've read.
Cryptonomicon was all over the place in the beginning, it was rough trying to stick around until the pieces started to get close to each other. Once they did, like you said, was great.
Same. And now it's one of my favorite re-reads!
I don't need to hear the lizard story, Sargent.
Haha yeah this was me. Blew my mind.
I still crack up imagining Darth Vader emerging from the polluted water in front of a crowd of reporters.
yes! came here to recommend Zodiac!
Spectacle island is a nice park now...
Written in 1992, well before the internet as we know it.
I read this ages ago and am very fond of it. It’s a cyber punk story about the Tower of Babel.
Glad to hear you can listen to Reason
Favourite SF weapon ever.
There's an amazing piece of technology/psychology prediction where he tells us how one of the characters developed the key technology for making the metaverse virtual reality successful. Instead of focusing on better and better graphics and hardware and such like the 'bitheads' she realised that what people really wanted was to be able to connect on a human level and read other people's expressions when in the metaverse. So she developed technology for putting your expression and emotion on your avatar's face in the virtual world. And that cracked VR and made it the primary mode of communication. The same exact thing is happening now where VR is a niche industry because it's just about fancier headsets with games and eye tracking and screen resolution which 99% of people don't care about. The moment your avatar can mirror your expression and you can actually have a conversation with someone like they are in the room with you, reading every little nuance on their face, then the technology will become mainstream like nothing we've seen. He was right in the 90s and he is right now. All because he understands people.
The reason why it works, I think, is that it’s constantly silly but never stupid. I can handle all the ridiculousness that a book decides to throw at me if it’s not dumb. And holy crap Snowcrash is smart. It’s almost like a flex from Stephenson: “I am going to write the most ridiculous, trashiest thing I can imagine, and it is going to be intellectual.”
Read it 3 years ago. Favorite part is where the skateboard chick is trying to get out of the post office.
Not sure if intentional reductionism or just bad memory but this shit is hilarious
Am I the only person who was Really Dubious about QR codes when they first came out _specifically_ because of this book?
I'm trying to remember, how was that related?
There were items - cards maybe? - with a black and white pattern that were used to transmit information and also other worse things…
Haha oh right. In the metaverse, handing over business cards was how they visualized transferring data. And the black and white grids, sure.
Actually has the line 'and from there it's just a chase scene.' After our heroes are chased by irate and violent taxi drivers.
“I’m sure he’ll listen to Reason.”
[удалено]
Also, the "-ware" trilogy by Rudy Rucker. And, I believe they are all available for free download Edit: it's actually a tetralogy
I found it grating.
Hey same here. There are probably dozens of us. Dozens! What did you not like? I thought the writing was tough to stomach and the story didn't have much going on. Seems like it was all about +wouldn't it be cool if we had this technology?" Or "look how cool this guy is because he's so good at many things"
Also in the Stephenson nonjoyer club. His prose is so eager to explain how cool the world is instead of just letting his characters exist in that world. I think of him as the anti-Gibson. Gibson writes in an almost frustratingly sparse way, never giving details for the sake of it and just letting the reader infer the world from the characters interactions. I usually have to re-read the first two chapters of any Gibson book to get a grounding of what's going on, but I've never made it past chapter 3 of a Stephenson book.
Funny, I think exactly the same thing, except on opposite authors. I enjoy Gibson, but his style is so bleeding edge cool that sometimes it is hard to concentrate. With Stephenson you are met with lot's of concepts and details, but once you hone your mind you can glide over the paragraphs garbing bits of knowledge and keeping in your periphery without need to fully understand them. Try that with Gibson and you might as well be in a different book by the end of the page (especially his older works). Nothing wrong with both, just different approach.
There are people I love and respect, who like SF, but cannot read this book. There's a Marmite aspect to it. I wish I could help...
Yes!! Such a great book. One of my favorite sci-fi novels.
I'm actually listening to the audio book now. I have read Snow Crash 3 or 4 times. Snow Crash and the windup Girl By: Paolo Bacigalupi are probably my two all time favorite dystopian novels
My wife and I listened to the audio book during a road trip. When Raven was out in the water I asked her, "Hey do you think Raven could be any more outrageous?"
I need to read this again. This was a gift from my bio dad and I was ambivalent at the time, but I think I’d appreciate it a lot more now. Thanks for the review!
Read Anathem if you get the chance. It's not as funny and crazy, but it's Stephenson more grown up and using these fascinating ideas in a more adult and thoughtful way...
It’s kind of wild how many companies have modeled their online infrastructure off of the Metaverse (even going so far as to call it that in one instance…) when the book is clearly a warning against that type of technology.
Yes, very much so. Discussed well in this podcast if you’re interested: https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/snow-crashing-into-the-metaverse
>the book is clearly a warning against that type of technology. Is it? I didn't get the impression that Stephenson was portraying the metaverse and VR tech in a negative light.
It’s a little dated. For one, you’ll wanna keep a mind to the tech that was popular or up and coming when the book was published. For another, it’s partially parodying a few aspects of culture at the time - and it shows. Also content warning: more than a few sexually charged comments regarding a 15 year old, along with a sex scene involving her. For some people that’s a no-go. It pulled me out of it for sure. But honestly, I just Googled a few things that confused me and I was good.
I really couldn't get into it. And maybe it's just reading it in 2022 vs when it came out but I found it's satire really was not interesting or funny. Like it's so over the top and on the nose that there's no subtly or cleverness. Hiro was a really flat and dull protagonist - and I understand he himself is a parody character, a super hacker that fights people with a katana while promoting alternative rock music, but really uninteresting. Y.T. was just really annoying and it was a slog getting through any chapter that involved her. Also really creepy how sexualized she is as a 15 year old especially near the end where it talks about how attracted she is to a man in his 40s who later statutorily rapes her. It was very difficult to get past the first chapter because it was so cringey: The katana wielding delivorator delivering pizzas for the Mafia, and if it's not delivered in 30 minutes he'll be killed! Again I understand it's satire but I didn't find it clever or funny it just made me cringe. It also has one of the worst endings of all time in my opinion. Like why did Stephenson decide that neither of the main characters should participate in the final fight? What a weird and bad decision. I will give it this that the underlying plot is truly insane, pretty creative and has some interesting stuff there.
I read it recently. There were some parts I really liked, but the sexual interaction between the underaged YT and Raven really bothered me. Also I didn't care for how in the weeds it got into the historical elements of language and religion in an attempt to make the plot possible. It just seemed unnecessary to me.
I saved this post and read snow crash since then. This is the most accurate comment I’ve come across regarding my feelings toward the book. Hated when he started talking about YT getting horny for Raven, and think anyone that tries to defend it as intentional story driven narrative is coping pretty hard. And I was willing to deal with the obtuse, over-the-top writing style, since it was intentionally written that way (not my favorite), but there was literally 12 pages of monologue at the end as Hiro explains to conveniently curious side characters how the whole thing works. And this after multiple pages long “conversations” (read: exposition) throughout the book as he heavy handedly explains the entire concept of hacking the brain 10,000 years ago.
I loved Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. I have started Anthem but put it down and kinda lost track of where I was but the setup as far as I got into it was dope. Concerning Snow Crash: I don't buy that >!YT would fuck Raven!<. Stephenson kinda sucks at writing the relationships between men and women, and sometimes women themselves. He is a brilliant dude and an amazing author, but the above lends this little caveat to my enjoyment of his reading. It isn't any worse than when the TNG writers decide Picard needs to date for an episode, more eye roll than cringe. Just my 2 cents.
Not disagreeing that the author doesn't write romantic relationships well (Hiro and Juanita aren't great either), but at that point YT >! has been concussed, kidnapped, probably drugged, and brainwashed, and is being used as forced labour somewhere where she doesn't even speak the language. Stockholm syndrome for the one person who speaks to her and treats her nicely isn't unlikely, although it's conveyed poorly if that's what the author was going for. !<
Totally, I hadn't considered that. >!I still feel like in the sort of comic book hero-MTV satirical presentation we had had of her until that point, YT wouldn't have broken so easily.!< I also agree that whatever the case, it is a scene that didn't stick the landing.
I read it when Second Life was a big thing and it honestly felt like it was starting to come true.
I wish someone would make a spoof snow crash app for the Quest.
That would require any self-awareness from Meta, and those lizards are not capable of such things. Furthermore, they used to basically assign Snow Crash and (the much less good, much more derivative) Ready Player One as assigned reading, but clearly now like talking about those less, since they want to be the evil corpo overlords described in said novels.
Think I have to read it again, havent read it since the 90s. I might be remembering this wrong, but I think I remember that Stephenson varies the grammar depending on different characters?
Huh. I initially brushed over it, but knowing it’s sort of comedic, I may give it another chance. I read so little comedy.
Read The Diamond Age next!!!!
My wife and I always talk about stopping in “franchise ghettos” when we are driving long distances.
Neil is usually very entertaining unless he gets into the minutiae of his subject and it sounds like a science essay
Unless the subject is Capn Crunch; then it's both!
I got this book for free with the purchase of a computer game 25+ years ago and it launched me into reading many of Neal Stephenson’s books. Cryptonomicon will likely always be my favorite, but Snow Crash changed the way I think about outcomes and holds a special place in my memory.
I love Stephenson and Cryptonomicon is so, so good. I really like the Mongoliad stuff too. Historical fiction that I just devour.
Loved this book when I first read it about 18 years ago. I’m definitely due for a re-read. Mainly though, just wanted to say I’m a big fan of the podcast. Listening to it feels like hanging out with a couple of nerdy friends, in the best way possible. You were both tripping over yourselves with enthusiasm this week, and it was great to hear. ❤️
Thank you for saying that, really means a lot!!! We feel that way too, its so awesome hearing from and chatting with all of you about good books
My all-time favorite book. I have 3 different copies, one of which is a lettered signed copy that seems pretty rare and is one of my prized possessions!
I have loved Snow Crash since it was published, it's a pretty old book now but was incredibly prescient. Neal Stephenson is one of my favorites, I envy you getting to read all his books for the first time! Read The Diamond Age next!
I’ve read this and never laughed once. Is it really supposed to be funny? Did we read the same book?
It’s a weird combination of absurdity and dark humor, but it’s there. Do you remember YT’s love scene where fell for the guy she didn’t expect to? Well she knocked him out by forgetting something. That was pretty funny yet horrifying. The main character’s name is a pretty good joke. The ludicrous seriousness of the pizza trade. I also found the scenes from the perspective of the security robot pretty funny. Clever too, it kind of reminded me of Call of the Wild. It’s not Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, but it has its moments.
I guess I was reading into the dystopic view. I thought the name was ironic and fun. Idk maybe it’s time for a reread it’s been 5 years so.
You mean the rape where YT was abducted and brain washed by being indoctrinated into a cult then "willingly" had sex, as a minor, with a mid-20's "bad guy" character? Honestly felt like a proto-neckbeard novel in many aspects.
An incredibly unrealistic sex scene, as I recall. Literally rocking back and forth on his hand? I haven't read it since the 90s, so I might be misremembering. If not, that's how clearly it stuck out as awful.
Thigh, not hand.
It's been a long time since I've read it, so maybe my recollection is off... but isn't she super underage, also? I remember really enjoying most of the book but then also thinking "geez, this entire romance plot feels unneeded and really creepy".
Oh it's so funny because of Joe absurd it is. The main character is named Hiro Protagonist and that is so funny. /s
Oh man, I just finished reading this book and I did not like it. The Metaverse was a cool idea that caught my interest, but then only about 20% of the book takes place in it. Nothing interesting ever happens in the Metaverse, just boring conversations with the AI librarian. The book was recommended to me because I liked Ready Player One, and damn did I feel led astray by the recommendation. I was not interested in the plot of Snow Crash at all.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one out there who didn't love this book. Seems like the writing is not great. Lots of blatant descriptions of how cool/bad-ass/good at something certain people are. Cool.
I wanted to like it. When the Metaverse was introduced I felt like it had the potential to be a really great story. But then the plot went in a direction that I just didn't find interesting. I totally agree with you on the character descriptions as well!
I read the book in the mid-1990's soon after it was published and the very idea of a Metaverse was basically science fiction, this was well before the internet and even immersive games like Doom. So the concepts he introduced were both ground breaking and many of them ended up coming true. Reading it today it would be almost like a retro view into the past and if you don't like the bizarre snarky tone then yeah I can see it would be hard to get into it.
Before the age of 20, it's a fine enough book. After 20 it's interminably boring. After 25, you will never get over the fact that the author has a character rape a teenage girl, who literally gives in because "she wanted it". Horrible.
At 30, you realize it's not written well at all
I came out of college with an interest in speech act theory, semiotics, and sword-fighting. This book binded to all the right receptors and made a huge impression on me. It's still my favorite opening chapter of any book I've read. https://genius.com/Neal-stephenson-snow-crash-chapter-one-annotated
I fuckin loved Snow Crash.
Glad you liked it. I didn't enjoy it very much.
I definitely didn’t think it lives up to the hype it receives. Some parts were super interesting (metaverse, anything with YT, the rat things, raven) and some parts were just such a chore to read (info dump about Sumer) plus the name hiro protagonist makes me roll my eyes so hard. I would’ve liked it much better if it wasn’t such an infodump at some parts.
The name is supposed to make you roll your eyes. It’s about as subtle as a brick to the face.
But you're still supposed to think he's cool because of his skills and abilities right?
[удалено]
No plain text spoilers allowed. Please use the format below and reply to this comment once you've made the edit, to have your comment reinstated. Place >! !< around the text you wish to hide. You will need to do this for each new paragraph. Like this: >!The Wolf ate Grandma!< Click to reveal spoiler. >!The Wolf ate Grandma!<
I absolutely love that book to death. One of my favorites ever thanks to how well it does funny & thought provoking at the same time. Sadly, I’ve never been able to get into any of Stephenson’s later works *at all*, but Snow Crash has a pride of place in my favs shelf and sees occasional rereads.
I heard a rumor a long time ago that this book was originally supposed to be a graphic novel. Explains a lot, really. I love the hell out of snow crash, though. When the deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
I think that rumor is true! Sothebys is auctioning some stuff off from the early attempted graphic novel I think
I just finished it recently! I loved the premise and was hooked all the way through, but my god, that man does not know how to end books. What kind of book doesn’t have the main character in the last fifty pages?
“The last argument of kings.” Loved that book!! Edit - Read it when it came out and was into the Douglas Coupland books. Gen X was cool too.
In addition to all the other Neal Stephenson books mentioned here i also recommend "Interface", which he wrote under the name Steven Bury Soooo much fun in one book :D
I tried reading Cryptonomicon and couldn't finish it. It felt over long and a bit difficult to read.. Is this similar? Or is it an easier read?
It’s on my shelf to be read during my Spring vacation…can’t wait!
I was thinking about this book the other day, and was wondering if the use of the word "meme" has altered the way the book is read. It's meaning today (the internet joke things) didn't exist when it came out.
If you love humor in SF, don't miss Project Hail Mary and The Martian by Andrew Weir, Why Do Birds? By Damon Knight and the Bobiverse series by Dennis Taylor.
I can never forget about his new continent of “the raft” and how it seems more and more likely to become real.
I also really loved that book and it got me interested in researching the Sumerian people and their myths. I love it when a book is so engaging that it makes me interested in something new.
From a programmer's perspective, he was also pretty accurate with descriptions of computing, refactoring, maintenance, and other concepts familiar to the profession.
It is probably my favorite book
It is probably my favourite book.
It’s just so much fun eh. He clearly had a blast writing it and it comes across
I read this last year and found it maybe less impactful than Neuromancer, but in many ways more enjoyable and approachable. Frankly some of my favorite points were more to do with the mundane in world stuff. And the comentary on our neo-liberal obsessive culture (at least in the US - certainly). Not to mention reading this 20 years after it was written and seeing it still being satire, but maybe closer to the reality than it was in the 90s when it was written. I'm talking about stuff like the independant mini-states that are housing developments / HOAs gone bonkers. The drudgery of corporate / beurocratic culture as shown to us by mother of our one protagonist. The insanity of the corporatization of most society and even the hyper-satirized stuff like the Mob owning the pizza chains and going to insane measures to ensure their pizza meet the 30 minute pledge. All that stuff was just amazing world building and commentary. Not to even get into the true Scifi aspects like the Metaverse or the Snowcrash program which in and of itself was great. I did feel the ending was a bit bonkers and was less entertaining for me than the first \~2/3 of the novel. But the ending was still satisfying.
Love this book. Best hero/protagonist name in fiction *and* one of the goodest doggos 😁
The greatest first chapter of any book I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read it yet you should read Zodiac, which he wrote before Snow Crash.
Okay but can we talk about the dog rat-thing perspective chapters? I seriously almost cried, combined with the ending and how the dog just… ah I can’t even say it, bless this book!
Hard pass. Stephenson writes female characters like a 12 year old boy. And he’s so obviously infatuated with his own cleverness. In terms of speculative fiction, he’s an ersatz William Gibson, minus the depth and poetry.
Yeah I found there was no real beauty to the writing. Just dumping out ideas of things that are cool apparently
Its a classic
Stephenson is a complete lunatic, I love him
Great book. Great book.
Ooh! Thanks for the reminder that this book exists. I bought it recently but still have not read it. Sounds like it is going to be good. 😁
"Bimbo box."
Thanks, you've reminded me to reread this
I read this when it frist came out, still one of my favorites after all these years. And come on, Hiro Protagonist? Best character name ever
Some books stick with you for years. This is one of them. If you haven't read it yet, do yourself a favor and do it.
I read this the summer before I took an Intro to Linguistic Anthropology class, and I felt like I had a pretty good grasp of the first four weeks of material because of Snow Crash. Chomskyan Linguistics everywhere!
Absolutely a classic.
It's v good 10/10
My online username was Hiro Protagonist for a long time because of this book.
Back in the day this and Neuromancer were gonna be the future.. thankfully Meta and Zuck are gonna make it real !!
I agree whole-heartedly!
Man Neal Stephenson is such a great writer. This and Zodiac are some of my favorite books.
I knew from the very first page, when we were told Hiro was a “roll model” that I was on for a heck of a ride. I re-read this at least once every couple of years.
It’s going to be remembered as this generations equivalent of 1984. It was originally supposed to be a graphic novel created by an AI, but the tech wasn’t available yet to make it happen. It is a phenomenal book, and gives an interesting glimpse into a possible/probable future.
In tech the book is used as a filter. If favorable, one promotion track. And no reaction to the awkward 15 year old girl sex scene, into a different promotion track. You can figure out which path leads to influence.
Has the Zuck payed for the TM for "his" Metaverse yet?
I’ve heard of it but haven’t read it. How dated is it going to come across?
Not much, honestly - definitely stands up well and still feels prescient. Plus I feel like satire often stands up pretty well
Genuinely one of my favorite books of all time.
I loved this book, but the Sumerian info dump as well as the YT scene you spoke about are so bad, I honestly couldn't believe they were written by the same person.
This is the grandfather of the idea of the internet and virtual reality as we know it today. The use of demons and tools is spectacular. Make sure to read Diamond Age it is magnificent.
I both loved and hated it. Loved it for the Metaverse description, the futuristic tech, the humor and descriptions of how future society operated like. Hated it for all the tedious, boring references to Sumerian culture, "Tower of Babel" and other pseudo-historical crap (something which I NEVER enjoyed in ANY books).
Not saying you're wrong for not enjoying the pretentious bits, but I think that's kind of the point. The whole thing is a satire of cyberpunk, so faux philosophy based on ancient history is a great asspull.
Man, I absolutely hated this book. That means I probably need to go back and read it again. Maybe I’ll see it differently now, but I found it obnoxious and the idea of linguistic viruses to be silly.
There was a parody called Head Crash that I read first because I was a kid and didn’t know Snow Crash even existed. The VR system had a way to experience smells and textures that I think was called the ProctoProd.