Book 97: Snow Crash
Book 97: Snow Crash
Author: Neal Stephenson, 1992.
Genre: Science Fiction/Cyberpunk.
Hiro Protagonist is a freelance hacker and pizza delivery guy for the Mafia living in a near future 21st Century Los Angeles. He loses this latter position in the opening chapter and in the process meets YT (short for Yours Truly), a 15-year old skateboard-riding girl, who is employed as a Kourier. Hiro and YT soon team up as partners in the intelligence gathering business. Although Hiro is broke, he was one of the original developers of the Metaverse, an on-line environment based on the real world but without its physical limitations in which humans interact via created avatars. This gives him a certain status on-line among the hackers that is enhanced by his reputation as a swordsman in both the physical world and the Metaverse.
Hiro becomes aware of a new drug called 'Snow Crash', which is unusual because it effects are experienced in both the real world and the Metaverse. His ex-girlfriend and fellow hacker, Juanita, asks Hiro to help her uncover the mystery of Snow Crash that has fried the brain of a mutual friend. In doing this he and YT are drawn into an increasingly dangerous and fast-paced plot where ancient Sumerian myths impact on a post-modern civilisation.
I wasn't quite sure how I'd respond to this December selection for our library book group as I had not ventured into cyberpunk before. However, I found that I loved it for its dark humour, its complexity of ideas, its interesting characters and its plot that towards the end became a rip-roaring adventure. Its hypothetical future is close enough to our own to be recognisable and yet different enough to make it science fiction.
It was a little strange reading a book such as this some 15 years after its publication. When it was first published the World Wide Web had only just been developed and certainly was not the cultural phenomena it is today. Therefore, I can only imagine what it must have been like to read Snow Crash back then; exhilarating and inspiring I would think. Stephenson's vision did have his Metaverse as a single corporate entity rather than hodgepodge of interlinked sites that the WWW is. Also, his Metaverse was 3D and immersible using goggles rather than the flat 2D internet we have into which immersion is intellectual. When I read the description of the Metaverse with its avatars I thought immediately of Second Life. Then I discovered that the founder of Second Life had been inspired by Snow Crash to create a user-defined world in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate. So in Snow Crash there is a case of science fiction directly inspiring innovation.
This was a book that I found I appreciated on many levels, will certainly reread and enthusiastically recommend to others. I am also planning to tackle further novels of Stephenson.
Author: Neal Stephenson, 1992.
Genre: Science Fiction/Cyberpunk.
Hiro Protagonist is a freelance hacker and pizza delivery guy for the Mafia living in a near future 21st Century Los Angeles. He loses this latter position in the opening chapter and in the process meets YT (short for Yours Truly), a 15-year old skateboard-riding girl, who is employed as a Kourier. Hiro and YT soon team up as partners in the intelligence gathering business. Although Hiro is broke, he was one of the original developers of the Metaverse, an on-line environment based on the real world but without its physical limitations in which humans interact via created avatars. This gives him a certain status on-line among the hackers that is enhanced by his reputation as a swordsman in both the physical world and the Metaverse.
Hiro becomes aware of a new drug called 'Snow Crash', which is unusual because it effects are experienced in both the real world and the Metaverse. His ex-girlfriend and fellow hacker, Juanita, asks Hiro to help her uncover the mystery of Snow Crash that has fried the brain of a mutual friend. In doing this he and YT are drawn into an increasingly dangerous and fast-paced plot where ancient Sumerian myths impact on a post-modern civilisation.
I wasn't quite sure how I'd respond to this December selection for our library book group as I had not ventured into cyberpunk before. However, I found that I loved it for its dark humour, its complexity of ideas, its interesting characters and its plot that towards the end became a rip-roaring adventure. Its hypothetical future is close enough to our own to be recognisable and yet different enough to make it science fiction.
It was a little strange reading a book such as this some 15 years after its publication. When it was first published the World Wide Web had only just been developed and certainly was not the cultural phenomena it is today. Therefore, I can only imagine what it must have been like to read Snow Crash back then; exhilarating and inspiring I would think. Stephenson's vision did have his Metaverse as a single corporate entity rather than hodgepodge of interlinked sites that the WWW is. Also, his Metaverse was 3D and immersible using goggles rather than the flat 2D internet we have into which immersion is intellectual. When I read the description of the Metaverse with its avatars I thought immediately of Second Life. Then I discovered that the founder of Second Life had been inspired by Snow Crash to create a user-defined world in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate. So in Snow Crash there is a case of science fiction directly inspiring innovation.
This was a book that I found I appreciated on many levels, will certainly reread and enthusiastically recommend to others. I am also planning to tackle further novels of Stephenson.