Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

SNOW CRASH is an amazing book on many levels. It's bizarre and brilliant. The future Stephenson imagines is not unlike the noir-ishly skewered dystopian America I read about most recently in Richard K. Morgan's terrific book ALTERED CARBON, but it deals with subjects on many deeper levels than that book. And it takes on a Libertarian vibe that you have a hard time discerning between critical, curious, and supportive.

Stephenson does fault in a few areas, things which presumably he has improved on as a writer since this early book. But still, its beginning could be a little off-putting to someone not familiar with the cyberpunk sub-genre. You could easily start wondering, "is this book just a pulp comdedy about hackers and pizza delivery guys?"

But if you know anything about Neal Stephenson, you will read on. And you will be rewarded with something truly original and very well-written.

There is a whole lot of different stuff going on here, so much that if you don't read quickly or often enough between sittings that you might get a headache, a bit like my experience with the great novel CRYPTONOMICON. But the full-on experience of reading SNOW CRASH is a bit like having a glimpse into the mind of a true genius, the kind of guy that can blink just as quickly as he understands some abstract but totally concrete and vastly important computer code, but whom also is the kind of person who plays dungeons and dragons at the local mega-mall. This is true hacker fantasy-realm type fiction, replete with Samurai swords and beheadings. And with a main character named Hiro Protagonist, you will have no trouble figuring out who wears the white hats. Even though it turns out almost everybody else is wearing a black hat...

The concept of the Metaverse, Stephenson's imagined combination of internet and virtual reality physical dimensions, is not something new today, but when he wrote this book it was probably a little hard to swallow. Now, with books like Tad Williams' OTHERLAND series, the MATRIX movies, and things like Second Life, you really begin to see the enormity of imagination and ingenuity that it took for anyone to write a book like SNOW CRASH in 1991.

The characters are vivid, spunky, and off-the-cuff. There is no melodrama whatsoever, and the dialogue varies between an academic discussion of Sumerian mythology and a 15-year old skater girl's vulgar rejections of authority.

And then there's Raven. One of the coolest bad guys in fiction. I won't even get into explaining him, except to say that I've never quite read anything like it.

The concept of the Snow Crash drug is very creative, although its purpose and the Sumerian historical implications of its inception are a little far-fetched, even though at the same time I really enjoyed Hiro's discussions about it with The Librarian, a computer program--or "daemon"--designed by another hacker to elaborate on some of the complex information stored by the CIC, a sort of libertarian conglomeration derived from the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency, both now combined and in the business of selling information for private enterprise.

Sound weird? It is. But you won't know the half of it until you get half way through a book like this. And on top of it all, there's some really cool action, some chase scenes, and the most surprising sex scene in history.

However, I have to comment on the ending, and I'll try to do it without spoilers:

It builds up to a final chase through a labyrinthine "Raft" on the Pacific Ocean, including The Enterprise aircraft carrier and an awesome super-gatling gun, goes through a helicopter chase toward the California coast, and is buffeted by a motorcycle chase at ten thousand miles per hour through the Metaverse. You expect all of these awesome things to happen, an then they almost do, and then... nothing. It's over. Close the book and think about it, even complain if you want, but that's it. If you don't like that kind of ending, if you are the kind of person who actually thinks it "ruins" an otherwise amazing book, then please don't read this and then go around complaining about it. Because honestly, if you complain about this book's ending after reading it, then you just didn't get the rest of it.

I loved it. I would recommend it to anyone else who is even sort of interested in "books like this." I guess you have to know what I mean, and if you don't, then I'm not recommending it to you. Read NEUROMANCER and be less entertained.

Although not my favorite, Snow Crash is in my top five books. I've read it about three times and it never got dull. From the first sentence to the last it's a joy ride. Neal weaves Sumerian and biblical accounts into a futuristic cyberpunk race to save the world from infocalpyse. In a few words, you will love it. As a matter of fact I am actually kind of mad at Neal Stephenson for creating such a great novel, for now everything else seems dull and slow. Pick it up or buy it today!

What?! No Snow Crash review?!? I'll fix that... If you're going to read anything by this author, you absolutely HAVE to read Snow Crash. It's Cyberpunk without all the pretentiousness that normally follows that genre around. I love both William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the two granddads of Cyberpunk, but they've got nothing on Neal for fun reading. I'll probably never see one of them write a book about an out of work pizza delivery guy and a skateboarder trying to save the world from religious, virus wielding megalomaniacs. Heck, I'll probably never see anything quite like this book ever again! Just the main character's NAME shows there's some fun going on (I won't spoil it). I loved his thing, gave it to everyone I know who reads, and they were never disappointed. If you like a good read that's both intelligent and good-humored, you can't go wrong with this one!