Snow Crash
One of the benefits of rainy days and a week long vacation is the opportunity to do some reading. I just finished Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" and must say I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I've read a couple of Stephenson's other books, including "Cryptonomicon"
The book is the story of Hiro Protagonist -- a little alliteration and labeling for the literature mavens -- a freelance hacker (read: programmer) who also happens to be the world's best swordsman. The adventure takes place in a post-national America, where each suburb (aka burbclave) has become its own nation-state and multinational companies operate more like gangs. It's a kind of post-apocalyptic dystopia that is familiar and yet strangely unique at the same time.
Hiro, making ends meet as a pizza delivery man for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza, is thrust into a plot that threatens to turn the world's hackers -- people who have trained themselves to think in terms of 1s and 0s -- to gibbering vegetables and everyone else into mindless automatons.
The book includes a few amusing asides. I found especially funny the extensive description of the federal government's policy (there still is one, but it doesn't really appear to be in charge of much in Stephenson's world) regarding employees pooling together money to buy toilet paper for the office bathroom. The memo includes this bit which I found amusing. Note that in Stephenson's world hyperinflation has occurred to the point that one hit of the drug snow crash costs 1.5 quadrillion dollars -- you do the math.
In this vein, the B & G people would also like me to point out that many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid of have been trying to kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue. While creative, this approach has two drawbacks:
1) It clogs the plumbing, and
2) It constitutes defacement of U.S. currency, which is a federal crime.
It's an exciting, wittily written story. So, if you're looking for a good read this holiday season, check it out.
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Snowcrash is one of the few books I've read twice. Like Neuromancer, it's a paradigm changer. But unlike Gibson, Stephenson is laugh-out-loud funny, and dangerous to read when other people are sleeping. The Diamond Age is equally brilliant, and don't let the environmentalist angle scare you away from Zodiac. Fearing an eco lecture, I put that one off for years, but it's a great read.
[...] finally putting down “Snow Crash”, I quickly turned to the plethora of other books weighing down my bookshelves and picked up [...]
Snow Crash was a very humorous read. I found that it tried to be different books, almost like it was started as one thing and became something completely different during the course of writing. The Diamond Age: a young lady's primer is, in my opinion, his best book. It has a sophistication that Snow Crash lacked in the early pages and creates an interesting, possible future. Cryptonomicon was enjoyable, but I found the Baroque Cycle to be a sort of literary masturbation where it appeared Stephenson was trying to show everyone how great a researcher and writer he was. He is a lot like Gibson in his writing style, though I think that Gibson "gets it" and recommend Pattern Recognition over the likes of Quicksilver.
I'd have liked Snow Crash better--it's central conceit about brainwashing was clever--if it hadn't relied on SF's stock villains.