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Snow Crash Paperback – January 1, 2000
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Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions.
Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary.
But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state).
Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He’ll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.
- Print length440 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2000
- Dimensions5.46 x 1.32 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-100553380958
- ISBN-13978-0553380958
- Lexile measure970L
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From the Publisher
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Snow Crash: Deluxe Edition | The Diamond Age | Interface | The Cobweb | |
More from Neal Stephenson | Now in a gorgeous new hardcover edition featuring never-before-seen material, the breakthrough novel from Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators. | Vividly imagined, stunningly prophetic, and epic in scope, The Diamond Age is a major novel from one of the most visionary writers of our time | In this now-classic thriller, Neal Stephenson and fellow author J. Frederick George tell a shocking tale with an all-too plausible premise. | In this now-classic political thriller, Neal Stephenson and fellow author J. Frederick George tell a savagely witty, chillingly topical tale set in the tense moments of the Gulf War. |
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Stephenson’s cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks . . . still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today’s tech landscape.”—Vanity Fair
“Hip, surreal, distressingly funny . . . Neal Stephenson is a crafty plotter and a wry writer.”—The Des Moines Register
“[Snow Crash] not only made the name of its author Neal Stephenson, it elevated him to the status of a technological Nostradamus.”—Open Culture
“A cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland . . . This is no mere hyperbole.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the twenty-first century.”—William Gibson
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway–might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is a tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it in to the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.
The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doo-hickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.
Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstration.
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the f*** they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can f***ing stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it–we're talking trade balances here–once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say; "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved–but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can’t you guys tell time?
Didn’t happen anymore. Pizza delivery is a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was f***ing inalienable. Sent psychologists out to these people’s houses, gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn’t respond without committing a venial sin.
The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn’t fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator’s head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator’s car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box’s built-in RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down.
If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself–the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator’s nightmares, the Capo and prime figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated–who will be on the phone to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer’s yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and give him a free trip to Italy–all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow, he owes the Mafia a favor.
The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you had to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late f***ing pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteen-year-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House Worlds (January 1, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 440 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0553380958
- ISBN-13 : 978-0553380958
- Lexile measure : 970L
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.46 x 1.32 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,666 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #39 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- #44 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books)
- #130 in Science Fiction Adventures
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer, known for his speculative fiction works, which have been variously categorized science fiction, historical fiction, maximalism, cyberpunk, and postcyberpunk. Stephenson explores areas such as mathematics, cryptography, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired Magazine, and has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (funded by Jeff Bezos) developing a manned sub-orbital launch system.
Born in Fort Meade, Maryland (home of the NSA and the National Cryptologic Museum) Stephenson came from a family comprising engineers and hard scientists he dubs "propeller heads". His father is a professor of electrical engineering whose father was a physics professor; his mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, while her father was a biochemistry professor. Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in 1960 and then to Ames, Iowa in 1966 where he graduated from Ames High School in 1977. Stephenson furthered his studies at Boston University. He first specialized in physics, then switched to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe. He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in Geography and a minor in physics. Since 1984, Stephenson has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and currently resides in Seattle with his family.
Neal Stephenson is the author of the three-volume historical epic "The Baroque Cycle" (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) and the novels Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
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Thus, make no mistake, Snow Crash is an important book. The most important Chapter is 56 if you want to cut straight to the chase. In it, Stephenson brings the entire "Metaverse" of his creation into the concept upon which the book has been based. Specifically, all human reality, at least the part we make sense of in our consciousness, is only possible through the language embedded in our main processor, our brain. Consciousness does not exist without language. Let’s remember this is called science fiction, and I note, some of the critical remarks made about Snow Crash, specifically refute this particular claim. This is an unfair critique for multiple reasons, not the lease of which, perhaps, is to note that all current advances in evolutionary biology, and all current evolutionary biologist, owe their science to perhaps one book, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, by Julian Jaynes. This book, although not a novel, or science fiction, has been heavily divorced of any real tie to science or biology, nevertheless, it remains at the forefront of the science of “What if?”. And the questions still remain. I mention Jaynes because Stephenson indicated that his book was an influencing factor upon which he based some of his fictional speculation. Now as off as Stephenson could be with regard to the notion that language programs our consciousness, he is not wrong that language programs our computers. Not human language however, machine language. The language of “one’s” and “zero’s” that are used to program a computer. Unfortunately, Stephenson isn’t perfect there either, but the analogy is strong enough. What if?
What this means, then, is that just as a hacker can hack a computer with the right injection of malicious code, someone intent on brain washing a human, need only hack them in the right language and inject their malicious message straight into your brain. But just like a hacker doesn’t attack the source code, or the multitude of potential higher-level languages we use to program computers, the adroit hacker attacks the operating system, the code embedded on the hardware in the brain of the computer, it’s processor. Stephenson correctly reaches into the basic of Neuro-Linguistic Programing, or NLP which is to many charlatans, the source of their magic power. NLP can be studied in the book “The Structure of Magic” from 1975, by Richard Bandler.
What follows is a powerful saga. Ninja-come-hacker pizza delivery boy meets skate-boarding-message-delivery girl (safe-space trigger warning, she’s 15 years old) in a coming-of-age story across the barren landscape of a suburban environment undergoing economic collapse where the only respite from hard work and religious assimilation is the escape into the Virtual Reality of the Metaverse. It wasn’t a quest for the “keys” to solve the puzzle as in “Ready Player One” but a quest to find the source of the drug “Snow Crash”. A drug so powerful that it reprograms your brain simply by looking at the code. Their epic journey together takes the reader deep into a re-envisioned Mafia, where the God Father is a grandfatherly figure whose only real concern is making sure his pizzas are delivered on time, and deep into the heart of Sumerian culture where human language, as we know it, was both invented and destroyed. Invented, when everyone spoke the same language, and destroyed at the Tower of Babble, when many languages emerged and no one could communicate. Seems like they didn’t have a very good open standard or set of APIs back then, or in their future, either.
Stephenson explored more than his virtual Metaverse. He explored artificial intelligence with “Daemons’ being useful servants in the Metaverse, in particular his speaking librarian who could answer any question but couldn’t understand certain context is right out of Google. He explored robotics both with the prosthetics that helped the disabled navigate reality while in virtual reality, and of course his lovable “Rat-Things” which were simply reimagined dogs akin to the robotic animals of Philip K. Dick’s “Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep” from the sixties, except Rat-Things are a lot faster.
In the end the book is too long and it was difficult for me to read. In fact, the first time I tried to read it was in 2015 and bailed after the first 90 pages. I reengaged during a recent drive to Florida, and then one to Ohio, did I mention it’s a long book, where I turned up the narration to 1.5X. At that speed it was fast moving and engaging. But still took forever. It is an important book packed and repacked with concepts we will always return too. Start with 5-Stars for “Snow Crash” and this epic and important entry into the world of VR novels. Deduct 1-star for strained an obtuse language struggling to be entertaining…and his Asian Rap lyrics. Horrible and most likely a bit politically incorrect these days. Deduct 1-star for the audacity to claim ownership of ideas that came before him. Add 1-star back for his undeniable love of dogs. He calls them doggies. And when doggies live in Virtual Reality, they run on endless beaches, eat steak, and catch frisbees. I want a rat-thing of my own... 4-Stars for this cyber-space classic!
Ah, my problem lies right there. I can’t identify with avatars. That may not be a problem for anyone born in the last 30 years, but that’s possibly going to be the defining difference between people born in the 20th versus 21st centuries, because I can see that the digital world, particularly virtual reality and artificial intelligence, is changing concepts of human struggle and social involvement.
What is fascinating about this book is that it represents the Rubicon between the two ages. Snow Crash was written in 1992 and it’s set in a world of real and virtual fluidity. The book imagined the metaverse long before the term found its way into dictionaries, and its characters move so seamlessly in and out of it that you’re never sure where they are. Not that it matters, because the author, Neal Stephenson, is such an energetic and creative wordsmith that you just stumble along after him, letting him take you wherever he wants to go. By the end, I concluded that the most stimulating and inspiring metaverse is the mind of a truly creative writer.
It's a book you need to own.
He also coined the term 'avatar' but admits in the credits that it was already in use in Japan at the time.
The book is a high-speed, somewhat cheesy, but entertaining sci-fi novel about a futuristic world set in what used to be California. The world has devolved largely into private, mostly autonomous city-states with a bureaucratic remnant of the US governing in the interstices. Hackers dive into the Metaverse and run into a new virus which threatens both the virtual and real worlds. Hiro Protagonist, hacker and katana swordsman extraordinaire, enlists a partner and fights the bad guys in both worlds.
Stephenson weaves in a fair amount of anthropology, speculating on the relationships between operating systems, machine language, the human brain, religion and viruses--both human and computer-related. It's pretty heady, but interesting territory.
Fun. Recommended.
Top reviews from other countries

What the actual F is wrong with you, Neal Stephenson??


El autor nos presenta descripciones, acciones y estrategias en el "metaverso", lo que ahora llamamos realidad virtual, pero ese metaverso es aun más potente de lo que al presente se hace y disfruta.
Introduce el concepto de "virus" psicológicos, es decir, afectaciones mentales por medio de imágenes y sonidos. Cosa que creo ya es realidad.
Es un libro que deja huella, buena huella.

The plot is sufficiently complex with plenty of twist and turns. The characters are fun, but other than the primary two, no development really happens.
The world is fun and the author builds it up to a satisfactory level.
Overall very enjoyable albeit silly read.
