Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt.

Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue.

This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world.

stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress,

Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable.

store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America—

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.

confront him in a climactic thick-crust apocalypse.

Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn’t been properly laid in several weeks.

Back then, the Street was just a necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space.

She glides from the dewy turf over the lip of the driveway without a bump, picks up speed on the ’crete, surfs down its slope into the street.

The white backup lights flash instantly as the driver shifts into D by way of R and N.

BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements—this is how they convince themselves they didn’t get ripped off.

It’s an ornate ironwork number, but harried White Columns residents don’t have time to sit idling at the Burbclave entrance watching the gate slowly roll aside in Old South majestic turpitude, so it’s mounted on some kind of electromagnetic railgun.

You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse.

The user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous.

As for a jail, some place to habeas the occasional stray corpus, any half-decent franchise strip has one.

Premium incarceration and restraint services We welcome busloads!

It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people’s minds.”

And the longtime status of skateboarders as an oppressed ethnic group means that by now all of them are escape artists of some degree.

(everything looks the same in America, there are no transitions now).

The Bible is full of puns.”

‘Disaster’ is an astrological term meaning ‘bad star,’ ” the Librarian points out. “Sorry—but due to my internal structure, I’m a sucker for non sequiturs.”

Like any librarian in Reality, this daemon can move around without audible footfalls.

“Y’know, there’s a story that when Rockefeller bought himself a yacht, he bought a pretty small one, like a seventy-footer or something. Small by the standards of the day. And when someone asked him why he went and bought himself such a dinky little yacht, he just looked at the guy and said, ‘What do you think I am, a Vanderbilt?’ Haw! Well, anyway, welcome aboard my yacht.”

Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America’s like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel.

The kinds of people who have the grit to wear a dark wool suit and a tightly buttoned collar even when the temperature has greenhoused up to a hundred and ten degrees and the humidity is thick enough to stall a jumbo jet.

It’s got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet drapes, and a butler.