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Snow Crash - Final reactions
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The other John
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Mar 17, 2008 09:01PM
Now that I've finished the book, I find myself wishing that Hiro would deliver another pizza. I'm ashamed to admit that out of all the things that made up this fine tale, I enjoyed the initial car chase the best. It made me feel twenty years younger. (Not that I ever drove like that in my own burbclave...)
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That part was extremely fun! I loved how he drove up and they load his car with the pizza. I pictured an aircraft carrier having a jet land and reload.
Oh yeah, and the initial descriptions of what goes into Pizza delivery were great, too!I kept wondering though how the burbclave could have been so different! Did he make a wrong turn somewhere, was it a newer burbclave with updated features? Or was it just old fashioned individual home owners updating their houses?
I felt that it ended as well as it started. It's interesting to see that despite all the plans that were laid, it was the most unpredictable, uncontrollable chance that defeated Rife for good.
I would have liked to see more of a fight between Raven and Uncle Enzo, that would have been sweet. And I would also have liked him to be a little clearer on whether Enzo and/or Raven lived. I felt kind of cheated that he didn't clear that up more.
All in all, I really enjoyed it!
This was a good book, it was really the first Sci-fi book I have read. I kinda wish the end had been a little more, I wondered what happened later to the characters. And that could've been because I was really into the characters. I loved the part of Hiro getting closer and closer to the ship... hiding in the different villages. Perfect! I thought when I first started reading this book that I wasn't going to like it, and it turned out to be so exciting and fun!
Robert said: I kept wondering though how the burbclave could have been so different! Did he make a wrong turn somewhere, was it a newer burbclave with updated features? Or was it just old fashioned individual home owners updating their houses?
It may have been any of these, but I also wonder if it wasn't a subtle suggestion from Stephenson that Hiro isn't the badass he thinks he is. He thinks of himself as a master of pizza delivery, but is he really? Here's my take: like some of the other characters, Hiro seems to have named himself. He sees himself as a hero, as a badass, as the protagonist of whatever story is going on (and he gives the name some Japanese flavoring both for cultural reason and because the samurai is the particular sort of badass-ness to which he aspires). This is who he wants to be.
And in the Metaverse, he is. He's the best sword-fighter ever there because he's one of the best programmers. He knew enough about sword fighting to write the code that even makes sword fighting possible, but as a hacker he's much more able to make his virtual self as cool as he wants to be, and this is true beyond just sword fighting.
We see a hint of the contrast in "real life" after his encounter with Raven, from the way that he starts to work harder practicing to the realization that he's never actually killed anyone in the real world until he does, to the chapter that starts off "Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest..." etc.
From Hiro's perspective, Snow Crash is a story of working to become the hero in real life that he's styled himself as in the metaverse.
Anyway, that's my take on it.
I agree with your take on Hiro--I think the story shows how he goes from a hero in the metaverse to one in real life. He isn't at first in "real life". A very clever, funny book as well.
That is a very good interpretation! He does start as a bad-ass metaverse/lame-ass real person. I hadn't thought of that one before, thanks for the perspective!
This is classic... in the book I loved how when you were a criminal they would tattoo words on individuals foreheads. Well here are some people who did it in real life, there are curse words in the article so it may be offensive to some:http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/...
These guys are Genius!
Snow Crash is definitely staying on my bookshelf for re-reading at some point in the future! I enjoyed almost everything about this book. A friend of mine who has read it said he had wondered why he hadn't read it before then. I thought the same thing! What took me so long to get to this awesome book?!
I'm wondering about some loose ends, or maybe there're just things that I missed that are nagging at me.Like, why did Hiro lie about knowing Vitaly when YT asked if he'd heard of them? This is two weeks before we see them sitting together in their "flat", and Hiro later said he'd been designing Vitaly's avatar's for a couple of years - implying a longer relationship. What did I miss?
What exactly happened to Raven at the end? It just describes him as standing there, stunned. And...?
There were some other things that I never really got, and I dare say none of them are important - like why is it that sometimes when they're in the Metaverse their bodies in Reality follow the same movements, and other times they don't? - but I just wanted to put this out there, because there were a lot of things about this book that didn't quite make sense to me. The whole concept of the virus etc. was probably the most straight-forward concept in the entire book.
I still liked it, though :)
Raven was killed by all the glass weapons he carried. :) The shock weapon on the front of the skateboard shattered all the glass and sliced him up. At least that was what I interpreted from it. Anyone?Someone above stated what I felt also. I wish the ending was longer. I kept wondering what happened 'after the fact' to the characters.
Also...I almost shed a tear when Fido gave his life to rid the world of the 'evil man'. What can I say...I'm an animal lover.
At first, I also had thought Raven had died, but then, if he had, his nuke would have gone off. Granted, it may have been back at the Raft, but I still think that would be too large of a plot hole to not at least mention in passing. After all, that was the whole reason nobody wanted to kill him in the beginning, I doubt he just threw it away after a few chapters.
I have to say that while I really enjoyed this book, I found this less cyberpunk-ish. Maybe because I'm used to Dick's and Gibson's style. I kept waiting for Hiro to bust out some mad hacking and it never really came. It wasn't until page 350 that he did any real sort of hacking at all.But despite that, I really liked the story. It was like the Godfather meets 1984 meets sci-fi. I really enjoyed the whole Sumerian mythology and how he linked it to computer viruses. It made me wonder if Wachowski brothers weren't influenced by this at all (or did their own Sumerian study).
I just finished the audio book. I don't have much to add right now other than I loved the book and that the narrator (Jonathan Davis) did a wonderful job.
I'll have to check that out--love audio books.
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I finally finished the book! (I am always right at the end of the month) While I probably won't be joining any Cyberpunk fan clubs anytime soon, I have to admit that I really liked Snow Crash. The story kept me engaged even with the technology tangents. And I am in awe of the work that it took to weave all of the elements together. I never would have picked this book up on my own and am glad that I got to read it.
I thought that it was interesting to read how Stephenson spent a lot of time with Apple/Macintosh. Hence why his metaverse is so similar to what the internet is like nowadays (considering they were part of the pioneers of this technology).
