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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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Neal Stephenson
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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 2,284 Kindle readers
Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same.
Highlighted by 2,197 Kindle readers
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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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: #25,480 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #62 in Humorous Science Fiction (Books)
- #81 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #98 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Kindle Store)

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4.3 17,464 ratings

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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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Jim Muccio

Do Avatar's Dream of Electric Rat-Things in the Oasis?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 14, 2021

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Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson was published in 1992 a full seven years before Al Gore claimed he invented the internet. In that context it’s very fitting that Stephenson would claim he invented the word Avatar so many years in advance of the necessary technology. Although Stephenson recanted, after he discovered that he had not actually invented the word Avatar. Nevertheless, he filled 500 pages with other important ideas about Avatars and the Internet. Almost 20 years later, Ernest Cline's great novel, "Ready Player One", would capitalize on both concepts in mega fashion resulting in a blockbuster movie with Stephen Spielberg producing along with a sequel, “Ready Player Two”. Some quick research reveals Snow Crash may finally find its way onto the screen as a mini-series now some 30 years. I can’t wait, but I also digress… giving credit where credit is due, Cline's book is better, but the Oasis, is the Metaverse, Stephenson was first in.

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!

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Jerry Davis

Cool Story

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 31, 2023

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I bought this book on a reference to it in a news article a couple of weeks ago and read it. The story begins at a rather quick pace, and some of the sentence structure was unusual, but I decided to read 40 pages and see how well I adapted to the story-telling. Sure enough, I continued reading the entire book and finished it in about one week. It was hard to put down, actually. And it looks like the movie will actually happen, but in a couple of years. Books are waaaay better than movies. I recommend this book. Its cool.

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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.

13 people found this helpful

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BRIAN ROYS

Only book I've read a second time through!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 18, 2023

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There are some sections that are just so masterfully written I have to stop and say 'wow, I want to write like that!'.

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Josué Cabrera

Buen producto

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on May 1, 2022

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The quality of the cover is not the best but it's good

Jacques De Wilde

Le classique pour comprendre le concept de métaverse

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on July 8, 2022

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C’est à parieur de ce roman d’anticipation que les GAFA et autres acteurs du numérique envisagent l’avenir. Pour autant, cet opus réserve des surprises bien différentes et, avouons-le, plus humaines et prometteuses. À lire en anglais si possible.

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Jeremy Borot

Great to read the first metaverse novel

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on May 13, 2022

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Metaverse was invented in this novel. It has become a historical read. And it is a pleasant one on top of it. Read it!

Johannes

Interessante e as vezes engaja

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on September 30, 2020

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O livro é bom e recomendo.
Pode ser um pouco longo e explicar demais as coisas, mas vejo como um aspecto bacana pra narrativa. O autor é ótimo na narrativa, mas as cenas de ação poderiam ser melhor trabalhadas.

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Cliente Amazon

La nascita di metaverse e avatar

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on November 11, 2021

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È un libro storico che per primo introduce il concetto di metaverse (ora ripreso per realizzarlo davvero) e di avatar (già usato in un videogioco, come citato dall'autore, ma non sviluppato con le diverse implicazioni).
Ha un andamento discontinuo alternando momenti di grande tensione (spesso inutili per lo svolgimento della linea narrativa, ma molto godibili), con momenti da pseudo-cultura (per altro documentata). Apre interessanti possibilità e riflessioni su metaverse, ma anche sullo sviluppo della società, che nei successivi 30 anni stiamo vedendo che si stanno indirizzando nelle direzioni che qui vengono esplorate nelle diverse implicazioni. Potrebbe ad alcuni sembrare troppo discontinuo, ma le occasioni di riflessione sono interessanti e molti meccanismi narrativi decisamente coinvolgenti.

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