Snow Crash (1992)

Updated Review:
I originally gave up on this book after a few chapters (see below) because I thought the book sucked. However, after reading so many comparisons of Snow Crash to my favorite book of all-time (Ready Player One), I decided I had to give it another goal.

To be fair, I can see how the two books compare. They both deal with a virtual environment (Metaverse and Oasis)...and that's really about it. They start to differ pretty drastically.

I didn't hate this book but I certainly had to force my way through it. It started okay...got better...then worse...then blah blah blah...

I am glad I read it, but will never ever read this book again.


Original Review:
Gave this book a couple of chapters and hated it. I love sci-fi and techno-thrillers, and this was awful. I was actually quite surprised because this book and this author is so well respected. I thought about giving it a few more chapters, and just gave up. Wasn't an enjoyable experience. ( )

Excellent story from a visionary cyberpunk author.
This was one of my first ebooks and I sat my Second Life avatar inside a virtual recreation of the Black Sun nighclub while I was reading it. It felt a bit surreal, being in the metaverse while reading the novel that predicted it.
Definitely worth checking out, especially for fans of Ready Player One. ( )

Snow Crash was a pretty fun book for me to read as an IT professional and avid PC gamer. It wasn't spectacular, but it was good considering its size and the fact it's a single volume. Coming from reading longer books and series, Snow Crash felt like a one and done movie night. That's actually the kind of book I was looking for.

I don't write my reviews to convince anyone to read the book. They're just quick summaries. My star rating is most important.

Here are some things in Snow Crash you get to experience:
- Ultra fast motorcycles
- Ninja swords
- Pistols
- Nuclear gatling guns
- Computer hacking
- Virtual world
- Futuristic "real" world
- Cyborgs
- Mafia
- Religious contemplation

A couple things I didn't really like:
- Sex with a 15 year-old girl and grown man. This won't bother everyone since there are no laws in the world of Snow Crash. But I still didn't like her attitude about the situation and her other relationships.
- There were a couple uses of time change that just didn't feel like they made sense. Reading the acknowledgements in the back of the book helps explain why I suppose.
- There were some futuristic ideas that were fun to think about but weren't terribly entertaining to follow a character running around in. In particular, the area is called the Raft. ( )

Review pending ( )

Hiro has resigned from his job as a pizza delivery guy, and is going back to his first career as a tech scavenger. He is the creator of The Black Sun, a virtual street, and wrote the rule book for the metaverse. There is a new virtual drug in town, Snow Crash, that not only works as a computer virus. but leaps the boundaries and physically affects the owners of the avatars.

There is lots to like about this book, Stephenson has written a futuristic thriller that mixes tech with a new social order. There are some cool action scenes and I like the seamless way that people interact with the web. Some of the concepts, like the way that the Fedland (the FBI) works, and the way that the street culture has been conceived is superb, but I didn't think that the plot was that great, with lots of unnecessary complexity and parts that didn't make sense.

This was published in 1992 and things have moved on some what since then, so it did feel dated. In lots of ways it reminded me of Neuromancer, as it was an imagined future, and I think if i had read it shortly after publication it would have been dazzling, but now it is just good.

It is well worth reading if you haven't, as I think it can now be considered a Scifi classic. ( )