The detail is amazing. Took a long time to read because of it, but it's very impressive. Fantastic all around. ( )

Fun book. Takes place in a future where everything is privatized. The U.S. government has become all but marginalized. In place are huge franchised real estate developments and other businesses (including the Mafia). The CIA and Library of Congress are privatized to become an EBay of information. People live dual lives in reality and in a virtual reality. ( )

Essential Neal Stephenson.

This book was a roller coaster of futuristic vision from chapter 1. Stephenson's wit and imagination are absolutely fascinating. Just the beginning, where Hero Protagonist is a Pizza Delivery boy for the Mafia, was enough to peak my interest of Stephenson's imaginative future.

Anyone who is a serious science fiction fan should read this book - definitely in my top 10, perhaps my top 5. ( )

Pre09:

Gibson may have started it, but this defined Cyberpunk. I love the 'It's never too late to be a badass' line.

Characters: They are all memorable. Even the dog was amazing.
Plot: Convoluted, but well rolled.
Style: Classic cyberpunk. A little dated in parts, but the characters pull it over the top. ( )

Snow Crash is in some ways pure cyberpunk. It suffers in 2009 a little from being 15 years old.

However, there are lots of reasons to read the book still. There's a very central idea of memes, genes and the ability to programme humans. There is a lot about the metaverse, much of which is "right" if you look at things like Second Life, although some of which is wrong and interestingly so.

And although the structure of the USA hasn't changed like this, not in the slightest, it's still a fascinating look at a horribly plausible future culture. ( )

These bits won't hurt...: Beyond what is an enthusiastically rendered tale of the coming world of 3D interactivity (and I personally believe coming sooner than most realize), this was an insightful look at the vulnerability of the social infrastructure that is growing on the web.

Most have celebrated Richardson for foreshadowing the realm of "Second Life" and paralleling the cyberpunk world of Neuromancer. After reading this book 17 years after it was written, I think the idea of "Snow Crash" specifically is interesting when, in 2008, some of the broad imagery has already taken form.

"Snow Crash" is a drug that moved from the physical world and through a battalion of programmers to the digital world wherein it became known as a virus that, in essence, effected the same result as the physical drug. Of course it took an offline set of motives and the story certainly has an offline plot, but Richardson fictionally describes a real possibility as the web becomes more tactile and social. The effect of the virus was a real world infection of human users. The Metaverse became simply a delivery mechanism.

This particular concept is intriguing and left this reader considering our own brains and the future possibility of nefarious psychological influences that might accompany our participation in the digital world. There is certainly significant evidence pointing to the effects of a related concept: subliminal messages. So much concern was expressed that the FCC outlawed subliminal messaging in advertising in 1974 and the UN stated that "the cultural implications of subliminal indoctrination is a major threat to human rights throughout the world."

Its doubtful folks will treat this concept with any real interest for years to come. Many still believe that first-person kill games don't proactively influence violence in the real world. In the future (and somewhat presently), I can certainly see where electronic/online games and other digital environments could be created that could effectively brainwash participants through a barrage of misinformation, self-induced fatigue, and other psychological techniques.

Social groups managed via the web become particularly vulnerable to the spread of such a construct because of the rapidity to which a group of sometimes thousands of people can respond to a call to action from a member of that group. Literally "before you know it" a "Snow Crash" type attack could spread around the globe utlizing the social group infrastucture of the web. This already happens everyday with bits of misinformation such as false news articles and digital attacks such as viruses. I wonder if we should research "anti-virus" for our brains? Worst case we should at least better understand the psychological and physiological influences of the bits moving across our optic nerves...

"Snow Crash" was a great story and sparked many tangents in thinking given its relevance to the Internet world. Enjoy!

Funny as hell, cool, fun, action-packed, flat characters. Great plot, too much telling. ( )

An extremely infectious novel. Much like Cryptonomicon and The Difference Engine, the plot starts slow -- where the two primary characters are provided to the reader at extreme detail. Then, the novel hits a slow transition point, where the storyline gets injected, and then it takes off for what turns into an excellent storyline. ( )

This was a great read - I guess kind of required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in virtual worlds. It's kinda spooky just how similar some of the stuff is to Second Life - especially when you consider when the book was written. I loved the style of writing - naming the lead character Hiro Protagonist appears cool in a lazy/ slackerish sort of way but perhaps it's an ironic reference to the superficial protagonist-objective-antagonist formula. Whatever, it shows that Stephenson's not afraid to lose some suspension of disbelief for the sake of a clever reference.

In fact, although the characters start out as two-dimensional, protagonist-antagonist types, the plot takes some subtle twists and you start to see and understand some motives by the end of the book. The characters become more complex as their histories unfold around the events.

The pace of the book is fast and the perspectives change (for instance first person sections from the perspective of a robot guard dog). All done in a seamless way though. Really very good, I'll be back for more! ( )

This book seems to be classified as humorous fiction. It is not funny like Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books or Bill the Galactic Hero. This book is a little offbeat and kind of way-out-there in terms of plausibility, but it is a GREAT sf/sci-fi/cyberpunk story. ( )

Crazy, strange, exciting, visionary, action-packed, sexy. Reading this book is like watching the Matrix for the first time. Though it may lack pretense of more complex literature, it asks vague and interesting enough questions to match The Bard's sophistry.

Beyond that it is just a great read. It shows a vision of the future that seems eminently likely, but unlike 1984 or Brave New World, has not started to feel stilted. It also lack the long-winded philosophical diatribes and allegories that stagnate that breed of classics. Gibson may have invented Cyberpunk, but Stephenson takes the genre out for a joyride and loses a hubcap on a bootstrap turn.

It was originally planned as a graphic novel, but when that got scrapped, Stephenson filled it out and got it published. Perhaps this is why his other works never match Snowcrash's frenetic teenage energy and sensuality. I wish there were more books this interesting and enjoyable. ( )

Snow Crash pretty much cracked sci-fi wide open. My only regret is not having read it 15 years ago or so - since so many of the ideas inside have become (or are becoming) cliche due to their influence on so many other creators.
If one measure of speculative fiction is how many things the reader sees differently in their day-to-day life after exposure - then this book is among the best I've read.
The concepts involved overshadowed the narrative itself, however, as I found the story to be choppy, inconsistent and poorly resolved.
In the end, it was a bit like a video game that was a hell of a good time to play, regardless of whether or not the plot was the focus. ( )

Avatars, the Metaverse and burbclaves. And swordfights.

“All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, four-wheel drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be.”

Leinenkugel's 1888 Bock
Southern Tier Extraordinary Ale ( )

Executive Summary:Some of the ideas in this book, and some of the puns I really like ('I thought they'd listen to reason'), but overall the book left me disappointed and unfulfilled.The Good Points:There are many things that can be at the core of really good Sci-Fi. One of them is to have a set of ideas which feel very close to being realised, a set of technologies which are only a matter of years or months away, or which you can use right now, although not in their full glory. The best idea in [b:Snow Crash|830|Snow Crash|Neal Stephenson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157396730s/830.jpg|493634] is that of the 'Metaverse'. Simply, think 'Second Life' without the lag, and with much better avatar rendering. The figures in the metaverse reflect the real emotions of the user (even though they don't have to look like the real world person), and by using goggles where the interface is rendered in magnificent wrap around the technology is properly immersive. The other ideas, a world where Government has shrunk to a stub of its former self in the face of super-corporations are less important to the plot and are, subsequently less thought out or rendered. The Bad Points:There is only one really bad point about the book, and that is that the plot feels entirely superfluous to the book as a whole. The plot revolves around an attempt to infect people with a metavirus which will reboot their consciousness and return them to a pre-'Tower of Babel' state of mind. The plot is expounded by long sections on the nature of religious thought, much of it pre-biblical. Maybe I would have got more out of these sections if I wasn't in the mood to be quite so dismissive of religious texts as I am nowadays. After all, the basic premise of the book was a load of mumbo-jumbo which, in contrast to the above technology stuff felt silly and contrived. The lack of plot strength was highlighted as I finished the book. The end comes quite suddenly with only the barest of resolutions.The best thing about the book:By far and away the best thing about the book was the name of the central character, hacker and sword fighter 'Hiro Protagonist'. A great pun...The worst thing about the book:All that tedious nonsense about Sumerian texts, Nam Shubs (vocal 'programs' that can be used to 'program' others) etc. ( )

There is good stuff in this novel. But also some just trendy stuff. It is worth reading, but it is also part of the somewhat odd cyberpunk genre.

There are some hilarious stabs at the real world, but ultimately the novel is just a parody of our world. Bear that in mind and you will enjoy it more. Those used to cyberpunk though will enjoy it at once. ( )

Summary: Hiro Protagonist is the greatest swordsman in the Metaverse, an online world that he helped create. In reality he’s totally broke. But when an online virus that has its roots in Sumerian mythology starts affecting the real world, Hiro must strap on his swords and do what he can.

Review: This is my first book by Neal Stephenson and if this is any indication of his writing, I’ll definitely be back for more. Snow Crash, even though it's seventeen years old, is a vivid, intelligent, wildly creative piece of science fiction that divides Los Angeles into franchised districts and utilizes a wide array of nifty technology, my favourite being Y.T’s dentata. The book starts out running and doesn’t stop. It has an impressively diverse cast (I love that Hiro is half black, half Korean!), and it’s not afraid to be smart. I’ll freely admit that I didn’t understand all of the ideas and jargon, but I respect that.

However, the already intense plotline started popping steroids two-thirds of the way in and suddenly I had trouble keeping up with what was going on. Reading some other reviews, I saw that many people felt the middle section onwards where the sci-fi starts intersecting with Sumerian mythology and linguistics was too dense. That part didn’t bother me. I have background education in religion and linguistics, so I’m the target audience for that kind of stuff. I eat it for breakfast and come begging for more. But the other stuff, the fighting and the breakneck action, made my head spin and not always in a pleasant way. The ending is also not as what I would have preferred. It focused a lot on Uncle Enzo and Y.T, and not so much on Hiro and Juanita, who were my favourites.

But don’t get me wrong: these aren’t huge complaints. A different novel might have bucked under the flaws. But with Snow Crash, the world, characters, and ideas were exciting enough for the aforementioned flaws not to make a huge dent, only a small one. My overall opinion of Snow Crash is overwhelmingly positive.

Conclusion: A wower of a science fiction adventure that shows me how energetic and creative Neal Stephenson can be. The concluding action got a little too confusing, but the book as a whole is strong enough to be excellent in spite of it. ( )

The story itself is very original and is ALMOST worth reading - I ended up skimming/skipping about 1/3 of the book. And not just a paragraph here and there, but pages at a time... and I missed nothing in the story by doing so.

There is a decent story hidden in here somewhere, but unfortunately, there are long parts that seem like a history lesson (i.e. near the middle there is a very very long exposition of the history/source of speaking in tongues - while you do need to understand what speaking in tongues is, you certainly don't need to know its historical origins to follow the story).

This sort of background detail is pointless and slows the whole pace of the story down to a crawl. You have to be pretty determined to finish the story to make it through all this junk description.

A good editing to shrink it to 2/3 its length and this would be a 4.5 star story. ( )

good ( )

Snow Crash is definitely unlike anything I've ever read. The novel is fast paced with moments of dialogue and original writing that made me laugh out loud (okay, perhaps just chuckle quietly in appreciation). I appreciate the book's originality and can only imagine how surreal it must have been to read it when it was originally published in 1992 (by today's standards, the technology that plays an integral part throughout the book is eerily familiar, especially given the book's context). While I was sometimes lost during the technical discussions amongst the hackers about how computers work, I was still able to piece together what was going on (albeit, probably not at the level that someone with more knowledge about computer programming could). To me, the truly fascinating part of the novel involved its incorporation of Sumerian mythology and the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, providing a creative explanation as to the relevance of these ancient stories to a modern and technology based culture. While I enjoyed the novel, parts of it felt disjointed and it suffered a bit from the hype that surrounds it as this resulted in my having certain set expectations before I began reading the book. Otherwise, it was an enjoyable read that I think would be better served by a second reading. ( )

This book has, officially, the coolest opening chapter of any book ever written in English within the last thirty years.

The screwed-up world Stephenson has created here is so intensely detailed and so outrageous, and presented with such an appealingly enthusiastic attitude, that it's impossible not to have fun reading it. The first chapter throws the reader headlong into a vernacular and an atmosphere that, though basically totally unexplained (like most of his characters, Stephenson is not going to slow down to lead a reader by the hand), is very fresh and engaging-- it's difficult not to have your own hallucinatory flights of imagination about this future-past America where franchised businesses rule on their own laws and the 'Metaverse'-- a kind of 3-d, interactive, Second-Life-meets-Internet-- can substitute entirely for real-world interactions.

Stephenson has a great way of describing his grimly-hilarious imaginings from the viewpoints of characters who accept these wacky ideas as normal. There's the excellent opening chapter about pizza-delivery, a few great segments told from the point of view of a local Mafia lieutenant who runs his territory with the attitude of a dedicated McDonald's manager, and a description of the daily routine at a Federal office where cavity checks are a way to prove loyalty and bring-your-own-toilet-paper-rolls-- or BTDUs (bathroom tissue distribution units)-- are the norm. It's great stuff.

Not so great is Stephenson's charmingly nerdy obsession with Babylonian myth. It forms the core of the novel's mystery-- and, therefore, of the plot-- but because it's so complex, and because the characters are supposed to be constantly discovering more about it, he sometimes spends a hell of a lot of time traipsing back and forth over the same well-worn ground. Then, in order to avoid boring us with even more repetitions of the same obscure material, he has certain characters-- whom we have been following constantly throughout the plot-- suddenly appear to know much more about absolutely everything without having had time to learn about it-- either that, or the characters are much more observant and clever than the reader is. Which is, of course, an irritating thought. The mystery works well, though, and doesn't seem stupid at all, despite the fact that it's based off of a lot of interesting yet profoundly weird history that, under Stephenson's treatment, constantly seems to have just been pulled straight out of his ass.

That's the effect, I suppose, of his attitude throughout the book. Everything is AS EXTREME AS POSSIBLE, from the characters to the environment to the weapons and the explosions. This is a book for people who like things that are exciting and intelligent and weird and MAD COOL. It is a book for people who don't mind reading over 450 pages of crazy improbability wrapped in flashy style. It is not a book for people who like their science fiction hard, or for people who like their speculative fiction to resemble possibility in any way whatsoever. It's like what Steve Jobs might have cooked up during a brainstorming session held in the late 1980s-- had he been on speed, had he been a linguistics major, and had he recently been forced to watch Enter the Dragon about ten million times in a row. It's good stuff, basically. But it's SUPER INTENSE and it's not for lameasses. ( )

One of the most influential books in recent science fiction. Stephenson has a brilliant grasp of what sociological/technological changes are only a short distance in our future, and what the impact of those changes is going to be on our world. This book is stylistically all over the place, but if you can get past the seeming chaos, you'll see that Stephenson very accurately predicted the worlds of social networking and deep databases on the world wide web, and he's dead on in predicting such increasingly popular virtual environments as Second Life. In addition to being an extremely prescient science fiction novel, it's also a rock 'em sock 'em adventure and high-tech espionage book, with liberal doses of multi-culturalism and religious exploration thrown in for good measure. Don't pick this book up if you're looking for a traditional linear reading experience. But if you want an excellent example of cutting edge, mind-blowing, high-tech scifi, you won't want to miss this one! ( )

With a breathless opening sequence involving a pizza delivery and a skateboarding courier, Stephenson deftly introduces readers to the two principal characters and the setting of Snow Crash, one of the classic novels of the cyberpunk genre. Published in 1992, Snow Crash looks ahead to a world run by corporations, where nations have franchises instead of traditional borders, and where people live a sort of second life online.

My favorite part of almost any sci-fi or fantasy novel is the process of getting to know the alternate reality being presented, and that was most definitely the case here.The early-21st-century world that Stephenson postulates is of course nothing like our actual world, but I was intrigued by how prescient he was with regards to the power of social networking. I wasn’t even online when this book was written, and Stephenson was writing about an alternate reality (called the metaverse) that bears a striking resemblance to Second Life.

The central plot of the novel involves a new virus in the metaverse that can render catatonic any hacker who views in while jacked into the ‘verse. It turns out that the virus is much older than the metaverse, or even the Internet. The search for the source of the virus leads Hiro to research Sumerian myth, Pentecostal glossolalia (speaking in tongues), the Tower of Babel, and Asherah cults. I couldn’t help but think of Foucault’s Pendulum, although Stephenson’s use of these various ideas is not nearly as complex as Eco’s.

Stephenson’s world is fascinating, the two main charaters, Hiro and Y.T. ,are engaging and likable. As the book went on, however, I felt that they each behaved in ways that served the plot but weren’t entirely consistent with their characters as established earlier in the book. Still, I liked them and wanted to know what was going to happen to them. When the plot wandered away from either of these two, I lost interest.

The last quarter of the book suffered a bit from having too many characters and too many threads to resolve. I think the book would have been better had Stephenson told the story a little more economically, making the relationships between secondary characters a little tighter and a little clearer, and maybe even cutting out a few of the bad guys and bosses.

Despite my frustration with the last quarter of the book, the first half was so fun and so clever that I’m glad I read it. See my complete review at my blog. ( )

The last time I picked up Snow Crash a couple of years ago, I abandoned it after reading 2-3 pages. I was coming out of an overdose of Cryptomonicon, which I had abandoned halfway, after numerous efforts at reading it.

However, two years later and having achieved what I could call, some sort of reading maturity, I think this book is great, as far as science fiction goes. You will like it especially if you are a computer hacker. ( )

irreverant writing and a great main character, Stephenson also predicted the specifics of the 'social internet' really well, and about 15 years before it happened ( )

This book had a few interesting parts. I liked the Rat Thing. But, why, oh why, did it have to take almost 500 pages to execute it? Did Stephenson refuse an editor? Did his editor like repetitive, exaggerated descriptions of the same thing over and over? I think the whole story could have easily been told in under 200 pages.While reading the part about the Sumerian mythology and the Bible, I kept being reminded of Zecharia Sitchin. And I kept thinking that maybe it would mean more to me if I was Christian and knew the Bible better. Not that I want to read the Bible or anything, cause I don't. But, I do get the feeling that sometimes I miss certain blasphemies, hereticisms, and revolutionary ideas.The book also got me wondering about whether or not "virus" was an appropriate term to describe the various brain-washing methods he was proposing. It didn't just spread on it's own, you had to take the drug or see the jpg. It seemed much more like a cult than a virus. I reject the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis and Volosinov's theory. So, I had a lot of trouble believing in the power of this language hack. ( )