Snow Crash in On Paths Unknown

Apr 23, 2022 Michael Finocchiaro rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, sci-fi, american-21st-c, dystopian, novels

This book created the term metaverse and for that, it deserves lots of credit. As for the writing, sort of Hunter S Thompson on speed, I'd say. Its character development is thin, but the dim picture of this particular mafioso dystopia was relatively unique (think of Biff's paradise in 2015 in Back to the Future) and frankly pretty fun to read. There is some humor here, but the most enjoyment is just some of the ideas around virtual reality and then reflecting on how he sort of nailed it from a t ...more

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Sep 28, 2013 A. Cantatis rated it it was amazing

Snow Crash is one of the seminal pieces of cyberpunk, responsible for many of the ideas we now take for granted both in SF and on the real live internet. It's also occasionally, unexpectedly hilarious. Take, for example, our protagonist, whose actual name is Hiro Protagonist. He's a half-black, half-Asian computer genius who (because of poor people skills and that damned samurai sword he won't let go of) has been reduced to delivering pizzas for the Mafia. In this dystopian future, the Mafia is Snow Crash is one of the seminal pieces of cyberpunk, responsible for many of the ideas we now take for granted both in SF and on the real live internet. It's also occasionally, unexpectedly hilarious. Take, for example, our protagonist, whose actual name is Hiro Protagonist. He's a half-black, half-Asian computer genius who (because of poor people skills and that damned samurai sword he won't let go of) has been reduced to delivering pizzas for the Mafia. In this dystopian future, the Mafia is an organization at least as open and legitimate as any other...which isn't saying much. Anyway, Hiro doesn't deliver pizzas for very long, or we wouldn't have a story; but before he loses the job Stephenson does manage to fire off this hilarious, over-the-top description of Hiro's delivery vehicle, which is still my favorite passage from the book after all these years:

A row of orange lights burbles and churns across the front, where the grille would be if this were an air-breathing car. The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It comes in through people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconscious, and unearths terrible fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire.

Is that brilliant or what?

Anyway, after losing his job, Hiro teams up with a punky teen who calls herself Y.T. (I'll leave it to the novel's readers to discover what the initials stand for). She's an unusual character: as much of a smartass as a real teenager - and as occasionally spectacularly clueless as a real teenager, too.

But wait - there's an actual plot here, too. It involves mind control via computer viruses combined with (I kid you not) ancient Sumerian mythology and a bad guy so dangerous that not only does he have "Poor Impulse Control" tattooed across his forehead, but he also drives a motorcycle equipped with a hydrogen bomb where the sidecar used to be, rigged to detonate if his brain ever ceases to function.

And did I mention the mind control? People with actual antennas sticking out of their actual heads. Yeah, it's that kind of story. ;-) And Hiro really can use that samurai sword.

Snow Crash is a totally insane, wacky, badass book. I'd given it even more stars if I could. ...more

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