Snow Crash

Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson is a very fast paced cyberpunk novel. There was never a dull moment throughout the entire book. This was my first time reading cyberpunk and I rather enjoyed it. I like books where something important is happening on every single page. There was a lot of dialogue, which helps me better understand the novel. For some reason, I understand a lot better when the characters are talking to each other rather than just the narrator talking or the author. The idea of this world that Hiro Protagonist (great name for a main character) and Y.T. (Yours Truly) live in is not so far fetched from where we are now in the world. Being that technologically advanced and having our lives depend on big business and the internet is way more believable than driving flying cars or living on mars. The world they live in is a world without laws so nothing is illegal anymore. The mob, whose figurehead in Uncle Enzo, is pretty much in control of the place. He owns everything, including pizza delivery chain stores. You can tell the book you are reading is going to get kind of wild when you find out the main character in the beginning is a pizza delivery guy who carries samurai swords on his back and lives in a U-Stor-It (which is hilarious by the way) by LAX and also is a freelance hacker. The heroine is a fifteen year old smart ass girl who works as a skateboarding kourier. It really is an underdog story. The world described by Stephenson in this novel is kind of scary. It is like all the nations just blurred together, so there are random properties that represent certain nations like the Greater Hong Kong and even the Untied States is a heavily guarded section on the world. Nobody even really knows who the President is either. The mob had more power than he does.

The whole idea behind this book is that we have gotten so advanced in our technology that now our own brains can get viruses from the computers we use by showing us crazy amounts of code which in turn, crashes our systems, literally. Somehow they package this reaction as a drug and sell it on the market as Snow Crash. Since everyone in this world is either a programmer or a hacker, almost everyone is in danger of catching the virus. When the world spends more than half of their time living in this alternate metaverse (virtual reality), which is where they catch the virus, it becomes even more dangerous. This metaverse is something we kind of see in our world right now. All the people out there who are plugged in into these role playing games often enjoy that life way better than their real life. In the metaverse you can be whomever you want to be (with limitations of course). These ideas are scary because they are not the far off from where we are now. We are already plugged into our phones and computers half the time anyway, so why not set up a whole other life where we can escape to.

There was so much going on this book, it is hard to pinpoint anything in particular. A lot of it had to deal with ancient religions and language. L. Bob Rife, this crazy Priest guy is also in charge of things similar to Uncle Enzo. Rife is the bad guy and Enzo is the good. Crazy right? I guess to sum it up, if we ever get this advanced watch out for crazy religions that make you speak in tongues and do not take random programs from strangers in the metaverse. That is how you end up a lifeless vegetable in the real world. If you are in danger, just hope that a pizza delivery/master swordsman/freelance hacker will be there to save you, along with a wise cracking tough-as-nails skateboard kourier chick. And just one more thing, do not let random huge dudes with glass knives have the atomic bomb. It just makes things more complicated.