snow_crash

SNOW CRASH by Neal Stephenson

1992. Penguin Books. Paperback.

Neal Stephenson is my favourite modern US Science Fiction writer. I
sometimes call him the Slashdot author since his books are always
reviewed and promoted on that newssite and he covers hacker topics
that the Slashdot readers all enjoy.

I've read the major Stephenson books, Cryptonomicon twice, Quicksilver
twice, The Diamond Age and now Snow Crash. Snow Crash was a stop/start
read for me but I was able to get back into it easily enough even
after the book hadn't been touched for one or two weeks.

Snow Crash has a strong cyberspace/avatar virtual life theme like
Neuromancer (one reviewer calls this book Neuromancer meets Vineland).
The other concerns are viruses (both biological and computer
transmitted), languages, early religion and a post-government society
where the power resides in different groups behind various fast food
franchises. A large travelling island of boats and refugees off the US
West Coast reminds me of a real-life travelling garbage island that no
mainland city wanted to touch.

Skateboarding, Motorbike riding and Japanese sword play are
incredibly cool in this book.

An interesting theme of the book is that a monoculture is too
susceptible to viruses. The tower of babel scattering of languages
from the common Sumerian is painstakingly researched and discussed and
re-enacted in the book's climax. I've heard it suggested that Linux is
important in the OS world because it won't be targetted by virus
writers as much and should survive a catastrophic virus event.

I wish I'd read this book at a steady pace but I'm very glad to have
finished it and I enjoyed it a lot. I'm tempted to re-read it at the
right pace but I have plenty of unread books to read first.

The Penguin Books author page says Stephenson is the author of
The Big U, Zodiac, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon.
I've never heard of "The Big U" and went looking for it on Wikipedia.
It's Stephenson's first published work and is a "satire on campus
life".

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Stephenson has said he is not proud of this book. When Stephenson's
Snow Crash was published in 1992, the book that became a best-seller
and vaulted him to fame, The Big U was out of print and Stephenson was
content to leave it that way. When original editions began selling on
eBay for hundreds of dollars, he relented and allowed The Big U to be
republished, saying that the only thing worse than people reading the
book was paying that much to read it.
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                                            28th August 2024.

My book reviews are at https://github.com/stucooper/booksiveread