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Snow Crash: A Novel by [Neal Stephenson]

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Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Neal Stephenson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Now featuring never-before-seen material, the “brilliantly realized” (The New York Times Book Review) breakthrough novel from visionary author Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators

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 length

480 pages
Language

English
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Publisher

Spectra
Publication date

August 26, 2003
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13243 KB
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Popular Highlights in this book

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The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.
Highlighted by 2,198 Kindle readers
Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same.
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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“One of the most popular sci-fi books of all time . . . It stands as a foundational text of the cyberpunk movement.”—Wired

“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

From AudioFile

In the reality of a post-apocalyptic America, Hero Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza Inc.. but in the Metaverse he's a celebrated hacker, a warrior prince who won't sacrifice principle for profit. He encounters a sinister computer virus that threatens to bring about a collapse of the information system. With the help of a young messenger on one of the coolest skateboards ever described, he traces the virus to its source and confronts his nemesis in person and in the Metaverse. Along the way, he explores Babylonian metaphysics and Old Testament theology. The pacing is good, even in the unabridged version. And his descriptions of America are a biting commentary on our society. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

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 fuck 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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.

But he wouldn’t drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way. You know why? Because there’s something about having your life on the line. It’s like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. Other people–store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America–other people just reply on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we’re in competition with those guys, and people are noticing these things.

What a fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn’t have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don’t work harder because you’re competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy–but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That’s why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or 15:15 or the occasional 20:43.

The Deliverator is assigned to CosaNostra Pizza #3569 in the Valley. Southern California doesn’t know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot. Not enough roads for the number of people. Fairlanes, Inc. is laying new ones all the time. Have to bulldoze lots of neighborhoods to do it, but those seventies and eighties developments exist to be bulldozed, right? No sidewalks, no schools, no nothing. Don’t have their own police force–no immigration control–undesirables can walk right in without being frisked or even harassed. Now a Burbclave, that’s the place to live. A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything.

The Deliverator was a corporal in the Farms of Merryvale State Security Force for a while once. Got himself fired for pulling a sword on an acknowledged perp. Slid it right through the fabric of the perp’s shirt, gliding the flat of the blade along the base of his neck, and pinned him to a warped and bubbled expanse of vinyl siding on the wall of the house that the perp was trying to break into. Thought it was a pretty righteous bust. But they fired him anyway because the perp turned out to be the son of the vice-chancellor of the Farms of Merryvale. Oh, the weasels had an excuse: said that a thirty-six-inch samurai sword was not on their Weapons Protocol. Said that he had violated the SPAC, the Suspected Perpetrator Apprehension Code. Said that the perp had suffered psychological trauma. He was afraid of butter knives now; he had to spread his jelly with the back of a teaspoon. They said that he had exposed them to liability.

The Deliverator had to borrow some money to pay for it. Had to borrow it from the Mafia, in fact. So he’s in their database now–retinal patterns, DNA, voice graph, fingerprints, footprints, palm prints, wrist prints, every fucking part of the body that had wrinkles on it–almost–those bastards rolled in ink and made a print and digitized it into their computer. But it’s their money–sure they’re careful about loaning it out. And when he applied for the Deliverator job they were happy to take him, because they knew him. When he got the loan, he had to deal personally with the assistant vice-capo of the Valley, who later recommended him for the Deliverator job. So it was like being in a family. A really scary, twisted, abusive family.

CosaNostra Pizza #3569 is on Vista Road just down from Kings Park Mall. Vista Road used to belong to the State of California and now is called Fairlanes, Inc. Rte. CSV-5. Its main competition used to be a U.S. highway and is now called Cruiseways, Inc. Rte. Cal-12. Farther up the Valley, the two competing highways actually cross. Once there had been bitter disputes, the intersection closed by sporadic sniper fire. Finally, a big developer bought the entire intersection and turned it into a drive-through mall. Now the roads just feed into a parking system–not a lot, not a ramp, but a system–and lose their identity. Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail. CSV-5 has better throughput, but Cal-12 has better pavement. That is typical–Fairlanes roads emphasize getting you there, for Type A drivers, and Cruiseways emphasize the enjoyment of the ride, for Type B drivers.

The Deliverator is a Type A driver with rabies. He is zeroing in on his home base, CosaNostra Pizza #3569, cranking up the left lane of CSV-5 at a hundred and twenty kilometers. His car is an invisible black lozenge, just a dark place that reflects the tunnel of franchise signs–the loglo. A row of orange lights burbles and churns across the front, where the grille would be if this were an air-breathing car. The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It comes in through people’s rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconscious, and unearths terrible fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire.

The loglo, overhead, making out CSV-5 in twin contrails, is a body of electrical light made of innumerable cells, each cell designed in Manhattan by imageers who make more for designing a single logo than a Deliverator will make in his entire lifetime. Despite their efforts to stand out, they all smear together, especially at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. Still, it is easy to see CosaNostra Pizza #3569 because of the billboard, which is wide and tall even by current inflated standards. In fact, the squat franchise itself looks like nothing more than a low-slung base for the great aramid fiber pillars that thrust the billboard up into the trademark firmament. Marca Registrada, baby.

The billboard is a classic, a chestnut, not a figment of some fleeting Mafia promotional campaign. It is a statement, a monument built to endure. Simple and dignified. It shows Uncle Enzo in one of his spiffy Italian suits. The pinstripes glint and flex like sinews. The pocket square is luminous. His hair is perfect, slicked back with something that never comes off, each strand cut off straight and square at the end by Uncle Enzo’s cousin, Art the Barber, who runs the second-largest chain of low-end haircutting establishments in the world. Uncle Enzo is standing there, not exactly smiling, an avuncular glint in his eye for sure, not posing like a model but standing there like your uncle would, and it says

The Mafia
You’ve got a friend in The Family!
Paid for by the Our Thing Foundation

The billboard serves as the Deliverator’s polestar. He knows that when he gets to the place on CSV-5 where the bottom corner of the billboard is obscured by the pseudo-Gothic stained-glass arches of the local Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise, it’s time for him to get over into the right lanes where the retards and the bimbo boxes poke along, random, indecisive, looking at each passing franchise’s driveway like they don’t know if it’s a promise or a threat.

He cuts off a bimbo box–a family minivan–veers past the Buy ‘n’ Fly that is next door, and pulls into CosaNostra Pizza #3569. Those big fat contact patches complain, squeal a little bit, but they hold on to the patented Fairlanes, Inc. high-traction pavement and guide him into the chute. No other Deliverators are waiting in the chute. That is good, that means high turnover for him, fast action, keep moving that ‘za. As he scrunches to a stop, the electromechanical hatch on the flank of his car is already opening to reveal his empty pizza slots, the door clicking and folding back in on itself like the wing of a beetle. The slots are waiting. Waiting for hot pizza.

And waiting. The Deliverator honks his horn. This is not a nominal outcome.

Window slides open. That should never happen. You can look at the three-ring binder from CosaNostra Pizza University, cross-reference the citation for window, chute, dispatcher’s, and it will give you all the procedures for that window–and it should never be opened. Unless something has gone wrong.

The window slides open and–you sitting down?–smoke comes out of it. The Deliverator hears a discordant beetling over the metal hurricane of his sound system and realizes that it is a smoke alarm, coming from inside the franchise.

Mute button on the stereo. Oppressive silence–his eardrums uncringe–the window is buzzing with the cry of the smoke alarm. The car idles, waiting. The hatch has been open too long, atmospheric pollutants are congealing on the electrical contacts in the back of the pizza slots, he’ll have to clean them ahead of schedule, everything is going exactly the way it shouldn’t go in the three-ring binder that spells out all the rhythms of the pizza universe.

Inside, a football-shaped Abkhazian man is running to and fro, holding a three-ring binder open, using his spare tire as a ledge to keep it from collapsing shut; he runs with the gait of a man carrying an egg on a spoon. He is shouting in the Abkhazian dialect; all the people who run CosaNostra pizza franchises in this part of the Valley are Abkhazian immigrants.

It does not look like a serious fire. The Deliverator saw a real fire once, at the Farms of Merryvale, and you couldn’t see anything for the smoke. That’s all it was: smoke, burbling out of nowhere, occasional flashes of orange light down at the bottom, like heat lightning in tall clouds. This is not that kind of fire. It is the kind of fire that just barely puts out enough smoke to detonate the smoke alarms. And he is losing time for this shit.

The Deliverator holds the horn button down. The Abkhazian manager comes to the window. He is supposed to use the intercom to talk to drivers, he could say anything he wanted and it would be piped straight into the Deliverator’s car, but no, he has to talk face to face, like the Deliverator is some kind of fucking ox cart driver. He is red-faced, sweating, his eyes roll as he tries to think of the English words.

“A fire, a little one,” he says.

The Deliverator says nothing. Because he knows that all of this is going onto videotape. The tape is being pipelined, as it happens, to CosaNostra Pizza University, where it will be analyzed in a pizza management science laboratory. It will be shown to Pizza University students, perhaps to the very students who will replace this man when he gets fired, as a textbook example of how to screw up your life.

“New employee–put his dinner in the microwave–had foil in it–boom!” the manager says.

Abkhazia had been part of the Soviet fucking Union. Where did they get these guys? Weren’t there any Americans who could bake a fucking pizza?

“Just give me one pie,” the Deliverator says.

Talking about pies snaps the guy into the current century. He gets a grip. He slams the window shut, strangling the relentless keening of the smoke alarm.

A Nipponese robot arm shoves the pizza out and into the top slot. The hatch folds shut to protect it.

As the Deliverator is pulling out of the chute, building up speed, checking the address that is flashed across his windshield, deciding whether to turn right or left, it happens. His stereo cuts out again–on command of the onboard system. The cockpit lights go red. Red. A repetitive buzzer begins to sound. The LED readout on his windshield, which echoes the one on the pizza box, flashes up: 20:00.

They have just given the Deliverator a twenty-minute-old pizza. He checks the address; it is twelve miles away. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

After terminally cute campus high-jinks (The Big U) and a smug but attention-grabbing eco-thriller (Zodiac), Stephenson leaps into near-future Gibsonian cyberpunk--with predictably mixed results. The familiar-sounding backdrop: The US government has been sold off; businesses are divided up into autonomous franchises (``franchulates'') visited by kids from the heavily protected independent ``Burbclaves''; a computer-generated ``metaverse'' is populated by hackers and roving commercials. Hiro Protagonist, freelance computer hacker, world's greatest swordsman, and stringer for the privatized CIA, delivers pizzas for the Mafia--until his mentor Da5id is blasted by Snow Crash, a curious new drug capable of crashing both computers and hackers. Hiro joins forces with freelance skateboard courier Y.T. to investigate. It emerges that Snow Crash is both a drug and a virus: it destroyed ancient Sumeria by randomizing their language to create Babel; its modern victims speak in tongues, lose their critical faculties, and are easily brainwashed. Eventually the usual conspiracy to take over the world emerges; it's led by media mogul L. Bob Rife, the Rev. Wayne's Pearly Gates religious franchulate, and vengeful nuclear terrorist Raven. The cultural-linguistic material has intrinsic interest, but its connections with cyberpunk and computer-reality seem more than a little forced. The flashy, snappy delivery fails to compensate for the uninhabited blandness of the characters. And despite the many clever embellishments, none of the above is as original as Stephenson seems to think. An entertaining entry that would have benefitted from a more rigorous attention to the basics. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Back Cover

"Stephenson has not stepped, he has vaulted onto the literary stage with this novel."
--Los Angeles Reader

"A cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. This is no mere hyperbole."
--San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the 21st century."
--William Gibson

"Brilliantly realized...Stephenson turns out to be an engaging guide to an onrushing tomorrow."
--The New York Times Book Review

Look for other Bantam Spectra novels by Neal Stephenson:

The Diamond Age

"(Stephenson) has gotten even better. The Diamond Age envisions the next century as brilliantly as Snow Crash did the day after tomorrow."
--Newsweek

"The Diamond Age establishes Neal Stephenson as a powerful voice for the cyber age....At once whimsical, satirical, and cautionary."
--USA Today

Zodiac: An Eco-Thriller

"(Stephenson) captures the nuance and the rhythm of the new world so perfectly that one almost thinks that it is already here."
--The Washington Post
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Neal Stephenson is the bestselling author of the novels Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

JONATHAN DAVIS is the founder and chairman of Independent Investor, a specialist financial publishing venture, and a well-known columnist and investment writer. A former business and financial journalist on The Times of London, The Economist, and The Independent, he is a regular columnist for the Financial Times, author of three other books on investment, and a director of three investment companies.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In California of the near future, when the U.S. is only a "Burbclave" (city-state), the Mafia is just another franchise chain (CosaNostrastet Pizza, Incorporated) and there are no laws to speak of, Hiro Protagonist follows clues from the Bible, ancient Sumer and high technology to help thwart an attempt to take control of civilization--such as it is. When he logs on to Metaverse, an imaginary place entered via computer, Hiro encounters Juanita Marquez, a "radical" Catholic and computer whiz. She warns him off Snow Crash (a street drug named for computer failure) and gives him a file labeled Babel (as in Tower of Babel). Another friend, sp ok/pk Da5id, who ignores Juanita's warning, computer crashes out of Metaverse into the real world, where he physically collapses. Hiro, Juanita, Y.T. (a freewheeling, skateboard-riding courier) and sundry other Burbclave and franchise power figures see some action on the way to finding out who is behind this bizarre "drug" with ancient roots. Although Stephenson ( Zodiac ) provides more Sumerian culture than the story strictly needs (alternating intense activity with scholarship breaks), his imaginative juxtaposition of ancient and futuristic detail could make this a cult favorite.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Library Journal

Diamond Age, a Hugo Award-winning romp into a future nanotechnological revolution, doesn't lend itself to concise description. For what it's worth, it explores what happens when an incredibly powerful interactive device falls into the hands of a street urchin, who uses it to reprogram the future of humanity. Got that? Stephenson's books rank among the most popular sf novels of recent years but require such close attention that they pose special challenges for audiobook fans. Jennifer Wiltsie's narration here is uniformly strong and well fitted to the material, but this may not be the right kind of book for the average person. Recommended for libraries that count many young and hardcore sf readers among their audiobook patrons. Originally published in 1992, Snow Crash is a popular sf novel in a genre that some wags have dubbed "cyberpunk." Listening to it is like taking an out-of-control roller coaster ride on a double helix, weaving in and out of Stephenson's fully imagined computer-generated "Metaverse" and a near-future real world comprised of bizarre microstates and a vast Mafia-controlled pizza delivery system. The central character, aptly named Hiro Protagonist, is at once a computer hacker, pizza "deliverator," and samurai swordsman. The story moves at such breakneck speed that many listeners may need to replay the first reel simply to figure out what is going on; however, the highly charged reading by actor Jonathan Davis another Frank Muller in the making helps hold everything together. Recommended for libraries catering to forward-looking sf readers. Kent Rasmussen, Thousand Oaks, CA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Amazon.com Review

From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. 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. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000FBJCJE
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Spectra (August 26, 2003)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 26, 2003
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 13243 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0241629837

Best Sellers Rank: #11,515 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #39 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #64 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #90 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)

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Neal Stephenson

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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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4.3 out of 5

14,786 global ratings

5 star		52%
4 star		30%
3 star		13%
2 star		3%
1 star		2%

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LSDuigi

Seriously hard to decide on review....

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 6, 2023

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Well. Deciding on a final review score for this is... difficult..

The story is mostly great. In fact, if I'd rated the book at around 80 or 85% complete, I'd have had no trouble saying 4.5 stars. But the end there... I don't know how to describe what happened that caused the shift in certainty without spoilers...

Let's just say there's a story event that is deeply troubling as far as why it was even included, and whether the author considers the, ermm, actions that occurred as morally acceptable behavior; or what exactly the intention was when choosing that specific plot piece... When you get to it, you'll know, as it was incredibly uncomfortable to read...

The other issue I kept running into is what seemed to me to be these incredibly lazy (either lazy or otherwise ignorant on the author's part) jumps in logical reasoning when unwinding the what and why part of plotline... I mean, I understand what the end goal was. The "route" to get to that end goal, however, was littered in logical fallacies and historical inaccuracies.

I suppose it could have been a situation of newer information being available here in 2023 vs back in 1995 or so.. But not all of it. There's a lot of use of sweeping generalizations, faulty correlation/causation assumptions, and other cognitive value/judgement biases...

What's not clear, is because of the way the narration is written, it's not clear if the above biases, assumptions, and questionable moralities are that of the author proper, or if they were supposed to be the corresponding character's..

I dunno. I really can't decide right now. I can say the story telling is otherwise great. The world building. The plot concepts. The real-world comparisons and commentaries drawn. It's worth reading, sure. I'm glad I read it... Just.. The sociocultural insensitive bits sometimes felt like they were, well, inappropriate and (at best) unconsciously down-punching tropes and uncomfortable to read.

🤷🏽‍♂️🤷🏽‍♂️🤷🏽‍♂️ I'd still give it a read if you like sci-fi, tech, and/or cyberpunk novels. Just be prepared for some "what the hell" moments when reading.

3 people found this helpful

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Zorro

W O W

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 27, 2023

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Who can combine hacking, virtual reality, the metaverse- a word the author created for this very book, BTW - Babylonian mythology, linguistics, & romance into a single book? And, oh, make it work? Neal Stephenson, that's who.

Helpful

Meh, Not Neil Stephenson's Best

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 4, 2023

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I have been told how great Snow Crash was by people who's taste in sci-fi I know and trust, but after finally getting around to reading it, I was not that impressed. In classic Neil Stephenson fashion, he weaves together a complex and cohesive universe and immerses you deep into it, but in the case of Snow Crash that universe was simply not all that compelling. The characters were only marginally likeable and frankly not all that believable, even within the Snow Crash universe. Worse, the main characters felt somewhat flat (which is unusual for Neil Stephenson). Also in classic Neil Stephenson fashion, instead of bringing the story to conclusion, he simply stops the story and leaves you with an ending that is totally unsatisfying (also leaving most of the character storylines hanging). It was an OK book, but to be honest, it needs some heavy editing since it is simply not worth the time investment required to read it in its current form.

3 people found this helpful

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DMG

Engaging theme, initially interesting plot, bad ending.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 17, 2015

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I will next read Neuromancer (get ready, Amazon) after I found myself strongly agreeing with Psychlist's review of Jan 3, '15. I felt that Snowcrash had a good theme, which to me was based on an extreme overextended analogy between Computer viruses, memes or mind viruses, and the old fashioned DNA/RNA kind. That is what speculative sci/fi is supposed to trade on anyway. But like most all the successful writers of future history, the author only extends popular and famous trends to their extreme ends. It kinda reminds me of novels about the 21st century, written at the same time as this book (1989-1992), in which the Soviet Union played a prominent role.

The tech displayed in Snowcrash is dated now, as other reviewers observed. Action scenes are well-written and engaging. The book starts off like Hollywood, with the reader dropped into a crazy action scene in which some of the basic tenets of the book are laid out. The over-the-top action is self deprecating where it needs to be to maintain suspension of disbelief. The fist half of the book reads like a 'who-is-doing-it' thriller as the funky good guys learn more of what is going on and make contacts with the good honchos whose work they are inadvertently doing. Protagonist (yes, that is the family name of the main character) also gets to know the violent bad guys and their special powers as the first half of the story unfolds.

Spoiler Alert
The mid section is dominated by discussions between Protagonist and a Watson-like archival program, called the Librarian, who informs Protagonist of the connection, down through history of between various viruses; starting with a space borne "metavirus" that seeds all life; going to an improbable theory that, in the beginning, human language tended to coalesce rather than fragment; turning to Sumerian myths and a putative Enki, who was a neurolinguistic hacker who wrote a mind blowing incantation that literally tore the fabric of his culture to pieces, causing Babel and the break up of humanity into competing tribes (something deemed good because unity was causing stagnation): then on to classical antiquity in which champions of the old unity battled those who liked the competing/warring states state of affairs; finally to the present in which the big bad guy has gotten his mitts on the Ancient Sumerian written viruses and is using them to reestablish a unified world of babbling fools under his power. He infects computers with advanced malware, and infects hackers directly with a bitmap that hits their optic nerves, because they have "bits and bytes wired into their psyche" after lifetimes of coding. The rest of us he can mumble the Sumerian verbal malware to and it goes right to our brain bios and scrambles our internal logic.

Where is the Government of the United States of America in all this? It has apparently become a willing and minor accomplice to the big bad guy, and the US Navy is nowhere about when a flotilla of millions of his infected South and East Asian refugees (called 'refus") are about to be dumped onto CA by him. The language used at first to describe this made me wonder if a bit of "Camp of the Saints" was coming at me, but given that Protagonist is black/Korean and the big bad guy is a Texan who goes by the name "L. Bob," this was a false supposition. The author even throws in a scene in which a straw-man racist-bigot becomes sushi at the end of Protagonist's katana.

L. Bob and the President of the US, who no one recognizes until he reminds them, are in the plot together, and are trying to disempower the good guys--the Mafia and a Hong Kong magnate (I assume Triad, for the power he wields) who just want a peaceful breakup of the country and world in "franchulates," sovereign little territorial bits of turf. I forgot to diagram the plot as I read. This would have helped keep things in perspective.

The book did end all too abruptly with L. Bob, and presumably the nondescript POTUS, dying on the LAX runway as their getaway jet is smashed by a good "rat-thing," a dead dog, reanimated like RoboCop, and able crack the sound barrier when excited (here, fido, lets play your favorite, chase and catch the 9mm bullet). Our Protagonist had exited the book many pages earlier after thwarting a logic bomb attempt to fry the minds of the World's code writers. A tertiary character, the head of the good Mafia, though an old man, defeats L. Bob's best, glass knife wielding, henchman extraordinaire on the tarmac, and then the secondary character, a girl named "Y.T." walks out of LAX to get a ride home with her mom in the last sentence. It just felt like an editor told the author that he had to end the novel before it passed 500 paperback pages. The novel could have used a summary chapter to explain how his future world was ordered, and just what was the 'good' outcome, the events leading up to it, we could anticipate, and a bit on how all the main characters lived happily ever after, I'm so old fashioned.

5 people found this helpful

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David Brookes

Snow Crash

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 12, 2019

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I didn't love it. The high octane opening seems to have fooled everybody. The opening feels like a short story that was later built on to make a novel, so irrelevant is it to most of the plot, and even to the protagonist.

It's very long and draws a lot of spurious analogies between biological and computer viruses that don't really fly, mixed in with clumsy pages of information about Sumeria or somewhere which turns out later to be relevant, but only as flimsy justification for a fairly boring plot device.

There's some good action, but it sure does go on a bit. The whole novel does. It should have been 100 pages shorter at least, and not as accomplished as people seem to make out - I'm really not sure why this didn't sink into the slush of post-Neuromancer 90s sci-fi and disappear forever. Its vision of virtual reality isn't just poor in retrospect, it's poor even for its time, unimaginative and filled with convenient rules that serve the plot but not the world-building.

Bizarrely, regular coders employed by corporations to do their jobs are referred to as 'hackers'. That's not what a hacker is, Neal.

Points for: Strong female lead, even if there's constant partial-nudity and sex references; fantastic opening chapter or two; consistent writing and plenty of action, if that's what floats your boat; diversity.

I can't say I recommend it, unless you mainly read sci-fi, in which case it's definitely not the worst of 90s sci-fi.

6.5/10
David Brookes
Author of 'The Gun of Our Maker'

34 people found this helpful

Bobby1

Don’t read this book based on its cover

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 16, 2019

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The book arrive within 5 days of ordering it, which was good. As for this book, and its genre of Science Fiction, based loosely on Computer hacking, viruses, Mafia, Religion, Morality, sex, it fails utterly to have even a half believable story. YT and Hiro are the heroes, they are the original pizza delivery guys, and then YT gets involved with Uncle Enzo, the Mafia chief. I tried to visualise it as a bit like the graphic image film Sin City, but this was poorly researched and very dragged out. I only purchased it as I’m in a Book Club, and am ashamed to admit I voted for this book based on its title. Avoid this nonsensical story, and give to charity instead.

9 people found this helpful

Owxn

A gripping insight into a possible future - not the future, but a future

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 19, 2022

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Snow Crash is where the term "metaverse" originated from, and I struggle to see why most big tech companies are so desperate to bring it to fruition. The metaverse described in this book is a horrid virtual society driven by intense class divide and hypercapitalism, and I suppose this is what it's already shaping up to be in the real world.

From start to finish the book is an action packed, complex and thoroughly enjoyable ride through an alternate future where oddball corporations rule the world, governments run by pizza companies and highways by paramilitaries. Would definitely recommend considering the state of our world today.

2 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Dystopian conspiracy thriller

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 28, 2023

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Well told narrative of two heroes fighting against insurmountable odds in an alternative US.

Dialogue is funny, with an robust structure. It would be easy to lose one's position in this book at times, but I maintained awareness of place. It is rich in ideas, environment and character description. So the author did well to summarise where necessary and have in depth exploration elsewhere.

I would love to read more details from a technical perspective about virtual viruses physical impact on users health. Additionally, the story would have been wonderful with emphasis on Raft life.

The book had ambition, punch and confidence. I found it entertaining. The pace and force of the writing powers through to the end. A book crafted in a movie style, maybe it will be on the big screen soon.

One person found this helpful

tallmanbaby

impressive

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 7, 2017

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This is a sprawling tale of a decidedly dystopian technofuture.

It is probably responsible for putting the term avatar into common usage.

As with Neuromancer there are only a couple of elements (references to cathode ray tubes) to signal that it was written some time ago, otherwise it still seems as prescient now as when it was written.

This is epic story telling in the old fashioned style, in the manner of Dickens and Trollope it has big story and it is in no hurry about telling it. Although the story certainly does not drag, it may require some determination to stick with it till conclusion, but it is worth the effort.

[There is quite a lot of stuff in the middle of the book about language and programming, those with an interest might want to read some Wittgenstein and research the Sapir Worf hypothesis, neither of which were mentioned, as I recall, but are potentially of interest.]

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