Snow Crash
Within the Metaverse, Hiro is offered a datafile named Snow Crash by a man named Raven who hints that it is a form of narcotic. Hiro's friend and fellow hacker Da5id views a bitmap image contained in the file which causes his computer to crash and Da5id to suffer brain damage in the real world. This is the future we now live where all can be brought to life in the metaverse and now all can be taken away. Follow on an adventure with Hiro and YT as they work with the mob to uncover a plot of biblical proportions.
Stats for nerds
364recommend
1,283mentions
977people
2007–2026years
32% recommend60% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- J.R.R. Tolkien: The lord of the Rings (lost count)
Philip K. Dick: Ubik, Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, etc. too many to count (many more than twice)
William Gibson: everything at least twice
Neal Stephenson: Snow crash (three times, I think)
Clifford D. Simak: City
H. P. Lovecraft: everything at least twice. There is a French compilation of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Silver Key, and Through the Gates of the Silver Key that I've read countless times. I've used two editions and I'm at my third.
Maurice G. Dantec: Babylon Babies (three times)
Possibly many others.
- I haven't read Anathem yet (adding that to my reading list) but Cryptonomicon is high on my list! Snow Crash was incredible and it's one of the few books where I still remember most of the characters in it.
- Honestly, IMHO it's complete and utter crap compared to the AMAZING, INCREDIBLE work Stephenson did with everything that came before.
Snow Crash? A milestone in modern sci-fi. Diamond Age? A truly incredible work of art! Even lesser stuff like The Big U or In the Beginning Was the Command Line were really, really good.
Then came Cryptonomicon, and it was good too ... but he was already deteriorating into loving the sound of his own voice way too much by then, so you had to wade through a bit to get to the good stuff.
And then there was Anathem ... where he made up half a language and required you to learn it to read the book (and it was like ten zillion pages long). Good writing is NOT about just throwing whatever brilliant ideas you have onto the page ... it's about cutting it down to the good stuff. Stephenson just stopped doing that by the time he got to Anathem.
To be fair, lots of people were willing to wade through all that fake language BS and Stephenson writing 100 words when 10 would do, and they all report loving the book ... but as a complete and utter Stephenson fanatic, even I abandonded him at Anathem.
- I loved Snow Crash, and I still think about Diamond Age fairly often, 20+ years later. The ideas in Diamond Age were really just incredible.
I even enjoyed his first book, the Big U.
But I also agree about Cryptonomicon. After eating up Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I've tried to make it through Cryptonomicon twice and failed. I just can't seem to finish that book.
- I recommend his older stuff to anyone else looking to check him out: Snow Crash is an undeniable classic, Diamond Age was absolutely incredible, and even Zodiac and In the Beginning Was the Command Line are both very good (although the last one is obviously more for computer people).
His newer stuff is very ... verbose. It started with Cryptonomicon (not sci-fi and WAY longer than it should have been) and by the time he got to Anathema he was so full of himself he not only wrote a giant text ... he wrote it in a made-up sub-language he created (and expected you to learn) just to enjoy the story.
He's one of my absolute favorite authors ... or at least he was for the first half of his career.
- 20 years ago I read a The Guardian article about the "top geek novels". I immediately read a bunch of those.
Recently I managed to find the list again, and it's been endless pleasure:
- American Gods -- Neil Gaiman
- Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
- The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett
- Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks
- Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson
- Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell
- The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson
- The Dispossessed -- Ursula K Le Guin
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick
- Dune -- Frank Herbert
- Foundation -- Isaac Asimov
- Giles Goat-Boy -- John Barth
- Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon
- The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams
- I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
- The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula K Le Guin
- The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick
- Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
- Neuromancer -- William Gibson
- Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
- Orlando -- Virgina Woolf
- The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner
- Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
- Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner
- Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein
- Trouble with lichen - John Wyndham
- UBIK -- Philip Dick
- Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
- Woman on the Edge of Time -- Marge Piercy
(I am creatively interpreting "The Colour of Magic" as "all Discworld", "Dune" as "the six Dune books", etc.)
