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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.

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Comments

  1. Boston reader and eater
    Jun, 22 2007 / 11:15 am

    Keith,
    You should really try to tackle Cryptonomicon by Stephenson, it really is worth the 900 page read. The guy is a great writer, witty and intelligent. He has grown up quite a bit since Snowcrash. As far as Russo is concerned both Straightman and Empire Falls are excellent, hysterical and study humanity much the way Irving does. Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks is one of my favorites, and I have read Rule of the Bone with my students in the past. Banks is one of the most diverse writers today, stay away from The Darling and you cannot go wrong.

    Also had a great meal at Bonfire in Park Square the other night, might be worth checking out.

  2. Todd
    Jun, 22 2007 / 3:08 pm

    Keith-

    Highly recommend you check out Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (if you haven’t already). It, like Snow Crash, transcends its genre. A recent reading brought tears to my eyes several times.

    To put this in context, my two favorite books ever are Master & Margarita and Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

    Best,
    Todd

  3. Jesse G.
    Jun, 22 2007 / 8:49 pm

    Now that we are on this subject I can elaborate on my suggestion from your last chat. Russell Banks has written a bunch of excellent books from Rule of the Bone to Affliction but, in my opinion, by far his best work is The Sweet Hereafter. This is one of the best and most heartrending novels I have ever read — a true masterpiece.

    I have only read one Russo, Empire Falls, but I really loved it. In fact if people don’t mind I am going to just paste a review I wrote of the book into another comment.

  4. Jesse G.
    Jun, 22 2007 / 8:50 pm

    While I could write a really extensive review of this book, I am sure that such a thing has been done by those who remember the book more accurately and write better than I do. That said, I think this is a phenomenal book on at least two levels.

    Empire Falls is, first and foremost, an amazing family drama about the sacrifices and accomodations that life forces upon us or that we accept because of the myriad commitments to others that we engage in over the course of our lives. It is about the ways in which those moments and decisions we make to put off, abandon, or change our hopes and dreams really shape the paths that our lives take for good and bad. It does an amazing job of showing how these choices can lead to the pitfalls of resentment, bitterness, and vengence or they can lead to love, happiness, and acceptance of life’s indifference to our desires and intentions.

    On another level, Empire Falls, is part of a class of contemporary novels (along with novels by Russel Banks and many others) that do an amazing job of illustrating simultaneously the changing and unchanging nature of small town life in Northeastern United States. The picture he paints of all of the locales in the book has that great quality of being immediately recognizable and totally new and undiscovered.

    All in all a great book and a must read for anyone who likes American novels, specifically contemporary ones.

  5. Dan S.
    Jul, 18 2007 / 9:23 pm

    KLAW…found your blog from a baseball chat…thank you for liking snow crash (one of my favorite books of all time), and yes cryptonomicon is excellent. right now I’m reading Gravity’s Rainbow by thomas pynchon, and it’s basically Snow Crash written 40 years prior, and is all sorts of crazy about WWII, it’s kinda dense, and the references get seriously esoteric, but so far I’m really enjoying it…

Trackbacks

  1. Ubik. : The dish says:
    June 25, 2010 at 10:19 pm

    […] sci-fi novels on the list (along with Neuromancer, a decent novel worthy for its prescience; and Snow Crash, a good read but a poor selection for the 100), along with a pair of fantasy novels and a comic […]