Snow Crash.

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is apparently considered a classic of the cyberpunk genre, even earning a nod on TIME‘s list of the 100 best English-language novels published since TIME itself began publishing in 1923. Until I saw that list, I’d never heard of the book or of Stephenson, and didn’t get around to picking it up until earlier this year. It turns out that I probably did myself a small favor, since a lot of what the book “predicted” has started to come to fruition in the last 12 to 24 months.

Snow Crash takes the basic template of William Gibson’s genre-defying Neuromancer (also on the TIME 100 and also a great book), depicting a semi-dystopian future where top hackers can program and even exist from within a virtual reality that sits on a global telecom network. But Stephenson fleshes that virtual world – called the Metaverse – out in a way that makes it easier for the reader to envision it and to imagine himself in it, which for me is a critical component in my enjoyment of any book (and is one of the major reasons I’m such a cheerleader for J.K. Rowling). The Metaverse is a burgeoning virtual world with streets and buildings, businesses and transport systems, and a programming-on-the-fly feature that allows the more advanced residents to customize certain aspects as they go. It makes Second Life look like the virtual-world equivalent of Pong.

The plot of Snow Crash revolves around an attempt to simultaneously crash the virtual world (“Infocalypse”) and at the same time take over what’s left of the United States, which has devolved into an endless series of independent neighborhood-states run by continent-wide corporations. It’s a bleak view of capitalism run amok, one where many people live in public storage facilities and the Mafia isn’t so bad after all. In a clever bit of storycraft, the twin schemes are intertwined in the narrative, which is then also split between the two protagonists, the too-cleverly-named Hiro Protagonist and the teenaged skateboard courier Y.T. It’s a lot to follow, but Stephenson’s prose is clear and as a result I never lost any of the threads.

The one real problem with the book is that the resolution to the scheme hinges on some esoteric knowledge of the history of Mesopotamia, particularly its languages and its proto-religion. Delivering that knowledge to the reader so that the plot’s resolution makes sense takes up a lot of pages in the dreadful form of lectures from a virtual librarian to Hiro, who sends the librarian on research tasks and then receives the information in a sort of Q&A format. It got old, especially when most of the rest of the book delivers a lot of adrenaline. Fortunately it was over within fifty or sixty pages, at which point the action picked back up and never let up until the second-to-last page.

I definitely enjoyed Snow Crash and recommend it, although I’m not sure about its inclusion on TIME‘s list over, say, Brave New World or Tender is the Night or A Confederacy of Dunces. Heck, if we’re considering a novel’s influence, why not include The Lord of the Rings? But I shouldn’t complain, since I wouldn’t have found this book if TIME hadn’t gone outside the box to include it.