Snow crash

March 10, 2023

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
dates: 2023-02-26 - 2023-03-19:
Goodreads

5 starts just because it was first published on June 1, 1992, reading it 30+ year later after the initial release makes some significant difference in your reading experience.

The start is a bit confusing - the delivery guy with the samurai sword works for the mafia owning the pizza chain. Waaaat??!

Yeah, Snow Crash is set in the early 21st century, probably in the 2000s or 2010s. A specific year is not given, though we could make some calculations based on character's age. Hiro is in his late twenties, and was born between 1983 and 1987, so adding 26-29 = 2009-2016, and Raven is in his early forties, and he was born in 1972, so most probably the events happen around 2011-2013. And the main actions are set in Los Angeles after an economic collapse. Which seems to occured to many other countries and ended up in separation to an distributed armed microstate. Companies became states too, as they hold resources and power. And this makes a bit more sense now.

Cool stuff:

Metaverse. ta-da, so unexpected.. Back in 1992 when the book was writen it was fantastic. Just realize that WWW was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the general public on 23 August 1991. Stephenson basically written about the thing which very little people could imagine as a technology at the time. Now we got a hype wave the Facebook ranamed to Meta and spent a billions of dollars on building Metaverse, there're a lot of eary stage metaverse platforms like Second Life, VRChat, Roblox, and Facebook Horizon, even Minecraft. And now we ended up with roblox condo games. Sorry.

And if you're looking for Meraverse stuff, you can check out or revisit Ready player one as it was inspired by Snow Crash and depicts everything in more vibrant colors

Distributed countries. Stephenson really like it and also used at least in The Diamond Age. It's really cool concept, though to make it true some group of people should create so powerfull protection weapon and tooling that no one will try to brake this security. Once the first such country pops out, others monorities might be interested in such separatism out of their national countries by byuing this new protection technology. It's like Israel which was surrounded by hostile countries and made it success on the advanced weapon and communication which gave them so much advancement during Six-day war. When The Diamond Age makes a huge progress in there by using nano technology weapon which protects such countries. Snow Crash depicts a world where most government functions are on the private corporations or franchises hands. Now cities are divided into sovereign enclaves run by different entities such as Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong or Mafia Pizza Delivery. There is no central authority or law enforcement, instead people rely on private security guards or mercenaries for protection. It's just satire on capitalism and consumerism on society.
The Babel myth, Sumer and neuro-linguistic programming: The concept suggests that ancient humans had a primordial language that enabled them to communicate directly with each other and with God, but was corrupted by a virus that caused linguistic diversity and confusion. In Snow Crash, this theory is presented by a character named L. Bob Rife who wants to restore the original language and use it to control people’s minds. He believes that the Tower of Babel was an attempt to create a radio transmitter that would broadcast the virus worldwide. And Snow Crash is a virus which exploite a vulnerability in humans language processing systems. That's really cool. I always super excited about linguistic.

Not so good:

Computers. It was definitelly hard to predict in 1992 our current level of technologies with pocket phones capabale of sending a starship to the Moon. The computes in the book are really bad. Still they run Metaverse.
Plot a bit weak and characters got questionable motivation That's an universal critic's move, but we have what we have. I guess even John Wick got more motivation than Hiro. But it's okay, I read Stephenson's books for a high level concepts and he's really good in it.