[Book Reviews] ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson

"Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson

Every now and then, I read a book that makes me want to give up the idea of being a science fiction writer. Sometimes, it’s because the book is so popular, and yet so awful, that I don’t think it’s worth my trouble to write for an indiscriminate audience. Other times, it’s because the book is so good, and so far beyond what I could accomplish on my own, that I just want to curl up in a corner and sob while I reread it.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is definitely one of the latter books. How I’ve made it through 17 years without knowing that this book existed is a testament to the terrible science fiction I’ve been reading, I suppose.

I don’t think I could fully describe this book if I tried. It’s wonderful. It’s part cyberpunk, part dystopian satire and part linguistic primer. The story takes place in a future where government is broken down and people live in territories controlled by franchises sold by organizations like the Mafia, Mr. Lee’s Hong Kong, the nation of Nippon and yes, even the United States government. The world is a lawless place where violence reigns and the authorities are privatized. One of the main characters, a 15-year-old girl with the moniker Y.T. (“Yours Truly”), is a Kourier — a skateboarding delivery girl who catches rides on the back of cars with a magnetic “poon” cable. Her partner in crime is a half-Nipponese, Half-African man named Hiro Protagonist, the last of the freelance hackers and the world’s greatest sword fighter (if you can believe his business card, anyhow). Hiro and Y.T. are working together to gather information for the CIC (a combination of the CIA and the Library of Congress that has since become the backbone of the Internet) about a street drug called “Snow Crash” — a strange new synthetic drug that can wipe out a human mind like a computer virus. Their quest takes place both in the real world and in the Metaverse, a 3D virtual world where users interact with lifelike avatars and own virtual property (think Second Life, but keep in mind that Snow Crash was first published in 1992, long before most people were even talking about the Internet). The idea is like the Virtual Reality concepts of the early 1990s, but far more developed.

The “snow crash” virus turns out to be something that’s rooted in Sumerian mythology and linguistics, and Hiro spends a good chunk of the book investigating its origins. Y.T., in the meantime, gains the attention of the Mafia boss Uncle Enzo and is recruited to run several missions that involve a lot of danger and explosions. She also attracts the attention of the villainous Raven, a giant Aleut with homicidal tendencies. Raven is a unique villain in that there is a disincentive to stopping him — he lugs around a hydrogen bomb that’s wirelessly linked to his brain. If he dies, it detonates. Thus the private law enforcement tries to contain his killing sprees instead of taking him out.

Snow Crash has a great sense of humor about it, and the first chapter, while a little out of place thematically, offers a nice introduction to the world and the two main characters by chronicling the adventures of “The Deliverator,” a high speed pizza deliveryman who faces certain death if he misses that 30 minute delivery guarantee. As the book goes on, it gets a little more serious, and I was actually quite annoyed to see the main characters (particularly Hiro) start dropping into soliloquy mode towards the end. The near-final showdown between Hiro and Raven involves a long, drawn-out conversation between the two characters about their fathers which is seriously hard to believe. I suspect Stephenson was running out of room to cram in all the story he wanted to tell, and this was the only way he could do it. (His solution in more recent books is to just keep on writing, and reader be damned; his last series, The Baroque Cycle, was 2700 pages long across three volumes!)

Still, I’m stunned by the “big ideas” in this book, of which there are three: the idea of franchise-states, the idea of the Metaverse, and the idea of a linguistic virus. The third one is by far the centerpiece of the book, and something I find quite annoying because a) I came up with a similar idea a year ago and b) Stephenson did it so much better than I could have that I almost want to fold up my laptop and forget about writing ever again. I have to take consolation in the fact, however, that Stephenson’s first two novels bombed before he achieved success with Snow Crash, and despite the many, many great reasons for reading this book (if you haven’t read it, go get a copy right now and get started!), I still spotted minor grammatical errors, continuity blips and plot holes, suggesting that the novel still needed another pass in the revision phase. But those are microscopic gripes for such a magnificent novel. It’s one of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read, and I highly recommend it.

I’ll be reading Stephenson’s next two books, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon, once I finish off the stack of science fiction books I just picked up, so check back in a few months for reviews of those. Hopefully, by then, I’ll be over having my creative soul crushed by Stephenson’s amazing talent and back to working on developing my own ideas again.

SEAN’S RECOMMENDATION: If you enjoy science fiction of any kind, you should read this book.  It’s a bit on the “hard” side of science fiction, and cyberpunk’s certainly not for everyone, but it’s plotted well enough that it’s a rewarding read.