WIJFR: Snow Crash

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It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet–incarnate as the Metaverse–looks something like last year’s hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist–hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what’s a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue.

Snow Crash” was the first novel I ever read by Neal Stephenson and since earlier this year I finished reading the entire “Baroque Cycle” and then re-read “Cryptonomicon” I decided to re-read “Snow Crash” as well.

When Hiro’s hacker friend Da5id ends up a vegetable after being exposed to a new “drug” called Snow Crash in the Metaverse, he finds himself caught up in plot that involves Sumerian tablets, ancient languages, religious cults, and viruses (both biological and technological). He’ll end up working with the Mafia, the U.S. government, a 15-year old skateboard courier, and his hacker friends against a media mogul, his religious followers, and a crazy brute with poor impulse control and a nuclear warhead in the sidecar of his motorcycle. It’s a fun and fast read.

I read a lot of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling when I was younger, so I was no stranger to cyberpunk, but something was different about “Snow Crash.” Gibson gave us cyberspace, but Stephenson gives us the Metaverse. I also don’t think I ever came across the phrase “neuro-linguistic hacker” in any of Sterling’s work.

Funny side note: while I reading the book, I came across my purchase receipt, nested in between some pages.

snowcrash-receipt-736069If memory serves, I purchased this book while I was in Pleasanton, CA (hence the 510 area code) at a PeopleSoft training class (I found an old Delta boarding pass with the receipt as well). So it’s been about 12 years since I first encountered Neal Stephenson. His next book, “Anathem” is due to be released this fall.

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