Customer Reviews

Snow Crash.

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Only Neal Stephenson can bring out a relationship between Ancient Sumerian and binary, and that connection causes knowing either one well to make a person susceptible to control by others. Only he could get away with giving the main character a name like Hero Protagonist. This Book is full of absurdities, yet Neal Stephenson manages to pull them off with grace and beauty. In a future vaguely similar William Gibson's, Hero try's to find out why an old colleague has gone catatonic and who caused it, and also hopes to renew a romantic relationship in the process, not to mention make a few bucks on the way.

WARNING: This is the GERMAN language edition. For English see Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book).

I received this book as a gift at one of the Silicon Valley Hackers/THINK Conference where I was elected to membership in 1992 or so, and it remains for me the first window into the cyber-chaos that results when CIA and the Library of Congress merge and everyone is a collector, producer, and consumer of digital information.

This book is ESSENTIAL reading, and foretold by decades the ineptitude of the US Government and the deliberate refusal of corporations to get a responsible grip on cyber-reality.

See also by Winn Schwartau:

Winn Schwartau - Terminal Compromise
Information Warfare: Second Edition
Cybershock: Surviving Hackers, Phreakers, Identity Thieves, Internet Terrorists and Weapons of Mass Disruption

And by Howard Rheingold:

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds - and How It Promises to Transform Society

Finally, to get deep into doing it right (I published these books, they are also free online):
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty

Too many to list here, see the various review categories at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, for my structured reviews of non-fiction books related to this topic.

Well, I opened up the pages and I found something awesome... it was entirely in german! The description didn't mention it was in german, but I plan on using this version alongside an american version I own for learning by transliteration :D

If you want to know the future of MMO games, then this is a must read.