Snow Crash
The science fiction novel Snow Crash (1992), written by Neal Stephenson, follows in the footsteps of the cyberpunk novels by such authors as William Gibson and Rudy Rucker, though Stephenson breaks away from the typical "techno punk" stories by embellishing this story with a heavy dose of satire and jet-black humor.
Snow Crash rocketed to the top of the fiction best-seller charts upon its release and established Stephenson as a major science fiction writer for the 1990s.
Background
The story takes place in an semi-America of the future, where corporatization, franchising, and the economy in general have spun wildly out of control. Snow Crash depicts the absence of a central powerful state; in its absence, corporations take over the roles of government. The United States has lost most of its territory in the wake of an economic collapse and its residual government has very little impact; the lost territory has become a series of enclaves, each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" or the various residential burbclaves). This arrangement bears a similarity to anarcho-capitalism, and that theme continues in Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age (a distant sequel to Snow Crash). Hyperinflation has devalued the dollar to the extent that trillion dollar bills, Ed Meeses, are little regarded and the quadrillion dollar note, a Gipper, is the standard 'small' bill.
The Metaverse, Stephenson's successor to the Internet, permeates ruling-class activities, presenting Stephenson's vision of how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future. Although there are public-access Metaverse terminals in Reality, using them carries a social stigma among Metaverse denizens, in part because of the low visual quality of the avatars (the Metaverse representation of a user). In the Metaverse, status is a function of two things: access to restricted environments (such as the Black Sun, an exclusive Metaverse club) and technical acumen (often demonstrated by the sophistication of one's avatar). See Second Life and The Palace.
Plot
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
The story centers around Hiro Protagonist, an out-of-work hacker and swordsman, and a streetwise young girl nicknamed Y.T., who works as a plank Kourier for a company called RadiKS. The pair meet when Hiro loses his job as a pizza delivery driver for the Mafia, and decide to become partners in the intelligence business.
The pair soon learn of a dangerous new drug, called "Snow Crash" - both a computer virus, capable of infecting the brains of unwary hackers in the Metaverse, and a drug in Reality being marketed through a nearly-untraceable chain of sources. As Hiro and Y.T. dig deeper (or are drawn in), they discover more about Snow Crash and its connection to ancient Sumerian culture, the fiber-optics monopolist L. Bob Rife and his enormous Raft of refugees, and an Aleut harpooner named Raven, whose ambition is to nuke America.
Stephenson spends much of the novel taking the reader on an extensive, impeccably researched tour of the mythology of ancient Sumeria, while theorizing upon the origin of languages and their relationship to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The deeper meaning of the novel can be summed up with a quote from William S. Burroughs: "Language is a virus from outer space". The book also reflects ideas from Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976).
Quotes
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. - Chapter 36
Editions
See also
