Snow Crash

Estive quase a largar o livro ao fim de 5 páginas. Neste momento não consigo parar de ler. Terminei de ler Snow Crash e tenho dificuldade em descrevê-lo. Este escritor torna-se ao mesmo tempo viciante e desgastante: viciante pois constroí uma trama que prende pelo fascínio das personagens e da vontade de perceber como Snow Crash surge, mas desgastante pela construção e invenção de termos e gadgets num futuro que parece muito longínquo mas que mistura referências dos dias de hoje.
O livro aborda uma pseudo-droga chamado "Snow Crash" (estática numa TV partida) que está a atacar o mundo virtual Multiverse (uma espécie de Second Life muito mais elaborado) em particular os Hackers. As duas personagens principais Hiro Protaganist show more e Y.T. acabam por trabalhar juntos para tentar descobrir e parar a causa de algo que é muito mais visto e que pode ser relacionado aos primórdios linguísticos da humanidade, nomeadamente a Suméria. Gostei muito da ligação feita entre o nosso cérebro e hardware e a introdução de dados novos (0 e 1 como os hackers) via hacking ou software, em que somos totalmente manipuláveis e editáveis e o conceito de vírus em analogia com as religiões, que programa as pessoas a acreditarem e pensarem duma forma totalmente formatada. Este é um escritor que fascina pela forma como vê tecnologicamente o futuro sem se desligar totalmente do presente. show less

Rereading this for the first time since some time in the nineties just as Zuckerberg rechristens Facebook as Meta and it turns out there are actual Sacrifice Zones in the US is a slightly disorienting experience, not many books that seemed zeitgeisty in 1993 can do it again so spectacularly in 2021. All sorts of aspects of Stephenson's cyberpunk satire diverge widly from actuality, in that 'the future imagined at a particular time tells you more about that time than about the future' way, but all sorts of aspects, themes, pieces of tech, ideas, beam through with a kind of mutated relevance. Probably tells you a fair bit about masculinity, too, and what was considered cool and alpha and righteous and bad-ass at the time and which seems show more to have been the basis of a variety of different computer game archetypes. Most chilling aspect is the fascist/feudal micromanaged work practices of the Feds, which assorted young preppy techbros apparently read at a formative age and decided to run with for their warehouses, coding mills and assorted industry-disrupting strategies. Before a certain type of guy was missing the point about Fight Club, I think they may have been missing the point about Snow Crash. show less

The best thing about Snow Crash is that it paints a convincingly eerie picture of a potential future society (or perhaps alternative reality), where laws don't exist anymore and the entire planet is ruled by corporations. Everything is incorporated now, including the Mafia, the churches, the police and the military (you can choose between General Bob's Private Army or Admiral Jim's Navy), all the highways are run by two competing corporations and the President of the United States of America is so unimportant most people don't even know his name.

A major component of this cyberpunkish universe is a virtual reality world, called the Metaverse, reminiscent of our Second Life (or even World of Warcraft) online communities. Our main show more character, Hiro Protagonist (heh) is a skilled hacker who knows his way around the Metaverse and uses that to his advantage when thrown into a frenzy of events. These events mostly have to do with programmers being infected with some sort of virus, apparently transmitted both physically and, even more strangely, virtually (that is online through the Metaverse). Along the way, he encounters help from some interesting characters, most notably a bratty 15-year old skater courier called YT.

In order to establish the origins of the virus Hiro has has these long, drawn out conversations with the Multiverse librarian daemon. This is my biggest gripe. These conversations are a mishmash of Sumerian mythology, biblical and Kabbalistic references and who knows what else. I found them to be suspense-killing and simply not too interesting. Perhaps people who are into Sumerian mythology could find these more interesting, but at times I thought it sounded just like some random mythical and mystical references being tied together in order to produce a reason for the virus' existence.

The ending was slightly disappointing as well, as I thought the whole thing came to a rather abrupt halt, especially when compared to how detailedly the mythical virus background was explained. In the end, though, I would still recommend Snow Crash to sci-fi/cyberpunk fans, as the world Stephenson creates is enthralling enough to spend these few hours there. show less

The sky and ground are black, like a computer screen that hasn't had anything drawn into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse and the street is always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance.

I bought this book for my father for Christmas since he has been known to read science fiction from time to time, and the virus of the title is based on ideas from one of his favourite non-fiction books, "The Origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. Now that he has read it, he has passed it on to me with the comment that he liked the bits about the Sumerian mythology, which I assume means that he didn't like the cyberpunk framework of the story. Oh well, show more you can't win them all.

Anyway, this book is set in a near-future America which is divided into a patchwork of burbclaves and city states such as Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong and Nova Sicilia, run on a franchise basis by big business and organisations such as the Mafia. Aptly named pizza delivery man and freelance hacker Hiro Protagonist and teenage skateboarding Kourier Y.T. become involved in investigating a drug called Snow Crash that has recently appeared both in the real world and on the Street in the virtual reality Metaverse (where drugs had been thought to be impossible). They tangle with communications mogul L. Bob Rife, the Asian refugees of the Raft, the Mafia and an Evangelical church whose members speak in tongues in their efforts to work out what exactly is going on and find an antidote to Snow Crash. The only downside that I found to this very exciting story is that I thought that the ending just tailed off and then the book was over. show less

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash was his breakout novel in 1992, and it was a seminal piece of cyberpunk fiction. According to his appended acknowledgments in the 2017 edition that I read, he originally wrote it as the text of a graphic novel or comics series, for which the art was to be entirely computer-produced. He does not describe how that project collapsed into the novel, but the subsequent transmedia influence of the book on such works as The Matrix (1999) is unmistakable.

Set in the early 21st century, the story offers a surprisingly durable technological prognosis, despite its political overshoot postulating the capitalist/libertarian obsolescence of nation-states. Shortcomings include the persistence of payphones along with video show more and audio tape. The description of a virtual reality mediating the global internet comes across as somewhat primerish, given its subsequent development in both fiction and fact. And the bits of jargon that might seem alarmingly dead-on, such as "avatars" and the "Metaverse," are of course largely a function of the book's own influence.

Hiro Protagonist is the hacker/swordsman who serves as one of the book's two viewpoint characters. The other is the fifteen-year-old girl Y.T., who skateboards down expressways by hitching to motor vehicles via an electromagnetic harpoon. These are set against two villains: Raven, with whom the two characters have a series of personal interactions, and the shadowy tech mogul L. Bob Rife. Snow Crash certainly contributed to the 1990s cultivation of a hacker mystique. Unfortunately, our society has become saddled with a number of Rifes who seem to imagine that they are Hiros.

On the whole, the style of the novel is entertaining and fast-moving. The third-person voice is in present tense, and there are a number of high-action set pieces. Stephenson uses assorted techniques to insert the necessary exposition to support his speculative setting. The most conspicuous of these is the artificial personality ("daemon") of the Librarian, a high-end piece of research software, with whom Hiro converses at length. The book has no denouement at all. As soon as the climax is resolved, the text ends. show less

snow crash
[snoh-krash]
verb
1. when a computer crashes at such a fundamental level that it can no longer control the CRT in the monitor, thus the monitor displays a screen of static.

The United States is a thing of the past. The west coast has been carved up by private organizations and entrepreneurs. Gated, heavily guarded communities have become their own sovereign territories. What little remains of the government is limited to small enclaves. Things are just this side of anarchy. Hyperinflation has devalued the dollar so that people use trillion dollar bills or cyber currency. That hyperinflation as had a negative impact on most of the rest of the world as well causing refugees to flee in the hope that someplace else, any place else, show more may be better. Only virtual reality offers an escape from reality. That is until the discovery of Snow Crash.

Hiro Protagonist's business card reads "Last of the freelance hackers" and "Greatest sword fighter in the world." But that's in the Metaverse. In reality he works as a pizza delivery guy. During a botched delivery he meets and befriends Y.T., a streetwise fifteen-year-old girl and skateboard courier. The two become partners in the intelligence business, gathering information to sell. While jacked in to the Metaverse Hiro discovers a virus that is infecting hackers both both their avatars in cyberspace and in the physical world. Soon it becomes a race to stop the spread of the virus before it's too late.

Snow Crash is a futuristic cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It has a complicated and ambitious plot covering a variety of topics: religion, the nature of language and linguistics, ancient Sumerian civilization, archaeology, computer science, virology, politics, globalization and philosophy. The most fascinating part is how Stephenson used the Sumerian myth and the Tower of Babel to create a nuerolinguistic virus. Some of the technology parts are starting to feel dated, though that's not unexpected for a book written in 1992. That said, it's amazing how culturally relevant the story is. Given the current state of politics, it is easy to imagine our society devolving in such a manner.

The characters take a little time to build. Hiro Protagonist (such a silly name) is an out of work hacker trying to make ends meet as a pizza delivery driver. Y.T., which stands for Yours Truly, is a teen aged skateboard courier. Y.T. reminds Hiro of himself when he was fifteen so he befriends her and they form an unlikely partnership. Gradually their personalities and motivations are filled in. Just as they're starting to feel like fleshed out characters, Stephenson lets it all go and they become more like cardboard cutouts used to prop up the plot by the end of the novel.

I listened to the audiobook over the course of two months during random long commutes made for work. This is definitely NOT the ideal way to get through such a complicated story. A couple times I had to look up the Sumerian myths because I had forgotten what some of the terms meant. This is not necessarily a bad thing as I enjoy mythology and did not know much about the Sumerian's prior to the novel, but it didn't help me keep the continuity of the story. The narrator, Jonathan Davies, does a great job. There were times I forgot only one person was doing the reading! show less

On a scale of 1-5, Snow Crash is a solid "Hell yeah!", an instant classic, and one of my favorite books. Sure, it's not perfect. The long expository passages on Sumerian mythology drag. YT's character is problematic. And the book doesn't so much end as stop. But that aside, the hyper-kinetic writing is like nothing else. Sentences pop and sparkle like luminescent gems. The ironic tone is spot on, the satire of America as a capitalist, post-rational, franchise purgatory unfailing and all too familiar.

You all better have a really good reason why you haven't read this book.