Snow Crash Thread 6 : Chapter 51 to end of Chapter 60

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

For discussion of Snow Crash from Chapter 51 to end of Chapter 60.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Lots of action getting onto the raft. Most of the action involves Reason (as in “I’m sure they’ll lis­ten to rea­son,” Fish­eye says), a prototype railgun. I admit to having a tender spot for Reason from my days playing Doom, when the BFG (Big F'n Gun) was the weapon of choice.

Between Raven dumping Y.T. for a few hours while he takes care of them, and Reason crashing at an inopportune moment (I thought it Snow Crashed, but in hindsight I think it was just normally buggy software in a beta development version), none of the Mafia survive, only Hiro makes it. So once aboard the Raft, Hiro uses the Raft's satellite connections to connect to the Metaverse to get a software update for Reason from Mr. Ng, and it's only then that he finds that Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, the Mafia, and Ng Industries are all allied against Rife, Pearly Gates, the Feds and various others. Hiro lays out Rife's entire plan, as he's worked it out, for Enzo, Lee and Ng.

I'm struck by this explanation: "But Enki was dif­fer­ent. … He had the un­usual abil­ity to write new me—he was a hacker. He was, ac­tu­ally, the first mod­ern man, a fully con­scious human being, just like us." This sounds like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which iirc, Jaynes was theorizing was actually happening at about this time (he was talking about Greece, and it might have been a thousand years later, but what's a few years…).

Hiro explains about both the DNA and informational viruses, and then says something that makes no sense at all to me: "A viral idea can be stamped out—as happened with Nazism, bell bottoms, and Bart Simpson T-shirts". Well, besides the fact that I haven't seen any sign of the Simpson t-shirts disappearing (and who'd want them to!), ideas never get stamped out. In fact, attempts to purge ideas tend to work very much like stamping out DNA viruses. They disappear briefly, then pop up again somewhere else. As Nazism does with disturbing regularity, and bell bottoms have at least once since the 60s/70s.

While this is going on, Raven and Y.T. consumate their new relationship. OK, is there a good reason why Y.T. is fifteen? I'm really not happy about someone who must be more than twice her age having sex, even consensual, with a fifteen year-old, even one who's extremely mature for her age.

But, we find out what the dentata does: "…boy, is he ever going to be pissed."

"She could re­ally get to like this re­la­tion­ship with Raven, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s a homi­ci­dal mu­tant."

After ditching Raven, finally Rife pays some attention and she's taken aboard his helicopter as a hostage. Hiro tries to stop them:
“You don’t give me the tablet, I’m gonna empty this clip into the wind­shield of your chop­per.”
“It’s bul­let­proof! Haw!” Rife says.
“No it isn’t,” Hiro says, “as the rebels in Afghanistan found out.”
“He is right,” the pilot says.

LOL! I'm pretty sure I'd heard that elsewhere, but maybe I'm just remembering my first reading of Snow Crash.

Oh, and we meet the President of the United States. Nobody knows who he is, or cares.

[Traveller]

You rock, Derek!
Next thread here : (Sorry, I'd already created it, hope you don't mind.)
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Of course I don't mind, this is YOUR discussion :-)

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

“Rife’s key re­al­iza­tion was that there’s no dif­fer­ence be­tween mod­ern cul­ture and Sumer­ian. We have a huge work­force that is il­lit­er­ate or al­lit­er­ate and re­lies on TV"

Ahem. Sumerian sermonizer sinfully shames satirical … alliteration. That phrase was tickling the back of my mind from chapter 57 to the end of the book, before it finally clicked that "aliterate" was misspelled.

[Traveller]

Yeah, honestly, the bit with Raven and Y.T. was pretty much a bit much for me. Like we've said before, why not simply have made her 16 or 17 rather?

I remember the big hullabaloo around The Reader because the boy in that story became infatuated with a woman in her thirties. people were shouting paedophilia! left right and center, and gave the book like 1 stars and long rants because of this, no matter that the book was actually sort of autobiographical and dealt with a bunch of other complex issues (How post-war Germans cope with the knowledge of the holocaust for instance, and how and why Germans living under the Nazi regime tolerated it and even followed its orders) and also complex issues around social acceptability/acceptance, shame and so forth.

[Traveller]

And farther on, the bits about Sumeria was also pretty much for me. I'm not liking at all that Stephenson is cheering the patriarchal religions, for instance, but besides that, I don't see how the rule of the Pharisees, the Taliban and the RC church are less proscriptive than any cult of Ashera could have been...

But besides that, it doesn't make sense on a practical, physical level either.

The only thing that I rather like, is the idea that 'ideas' can be spread like viruses.

On the other hand, I don't think that 'recipes' for conduct like the me are exclusive to that religion- they are the forte of many religions, after all.

[Traveller]

I've been wondering about Reason, btw--I can't help finding a gun that can only be used in close proximity to the sea or a similar large source of cold water, to be very limiting.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Traveller wrote: "I'm not liking at all that Stephenson is cheering the patriarchal religions, for instance, but besides that, I don't see how the rule of the Pharisees, the Taliban and the RC church are less proscriptive than any cult of Ashera could have been..."

Well, he lost me there, anyway, because he actually equates the Pharisees with the Ashera cult, and he early-on said that Christianity was co-opted within days of the crucifixion, but then makes the RC church the last bastion of defense against Ashera.

Back in ch. 26, Hiro asks Juanita:
“Do you be­lieve in Jesus?”
“Yes. But not in the phys­i­cal, bod­ily res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus.”
“How can you be a Chris­t­ian with­out be­liev­ing in that?”
“I would say,” Juanita says, “how can you be a Chris­t­ian with it? Any­one who takes the trou­ble to study the gospels can see that the bod­ily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story sev­eral years after the real histories were writ­ten.”

Really? I have actually known Protestant ministers who get by without believing in the resurrection, but it's a pretty fundamental part of the Roman Catholic catechism. In any case, I don't know what one should be able to see in the gospels that suggests the resurrection is any more mythological than the crucifixion (an unlikely punishment under Roman law) or even the entire preceding life.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Traveller wrote: "I've been wondering about Reason, btw--I can't help finding a gun that can only be used in close proximity to the sea or a similar large source of cold water, to be very limiting."

I don't think that's really the case, it just lets you eliminate a huge engineering issue in a beta-release piece of equipment. But if it is only really usable aboard warships, that doesn't make it worthless.

[Traveller]

Well, since Hiro couldn't take it on board the Enterprise with him...

Earlier on, one sort of gets the idea that this is one uber-weapon, and then it turns out to be less so.

But I guess Hiro had to be at a disadvantage (view spoiler)[ in order for Juanita to save the day. ;) (hide spoiler)]