Snow crash first edition

Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Snow Crash. Disliking this book seemed quite impossible. After all, it had all the necessary ingredients: the pervasive air of nerdy geekiness or, perhaps, geeky nerdiness , an unexpected take on linguistics, a kick-ass female character, a parallel virtual reality, a hefty helping of admittedly, overexaggerated satire, and just enough wacky improbable worldbuilding to satisfy my book loving soul.

Or so it seemed. Joey was baffled that the rest of the gang found the dish unpalatable: 'I mean, what's not to like? Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, good! I came to it infinitely biased in its favor, ready to love it to pieces, prepared to find in it the same irresistible allure that so many of my Goodreads friends appreciated. Alas, after the first few pages my good-natured amusement gave way to irritated frustration, then to impatience, and eventually, as the book was nearing its final pages, my feelings changed to dreaded passionless indifference - akin to the emotions stirred by a disclaimer on the back of a pill packet.

It is very disappointing when a book leaves you indifferent after hundreds of pages spent with the characters and the plotlines - especially when it is a book with such immense potential as 'Snow Crash' had based on all the reviews and snippets I have seen, with all the ingredients for an amazing sci-fi adventure I listed above. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Urban legends.

Crackpot religions. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. Hiro Protagonist, our hero and protagonist cleverly annoying or annoyingly clever, I'm not quite sure is a hacker in a future completely corporatized and fractured by consumerism America. He delivers pizza for the Mafia franchise by day and in his spare time hangs around Metaverse, a computer-based simulated reality where he is a sword-fighting badass with a juicy piece of expensive virtual real estate and important friends.

Uncle Enzo is the head of the Mafia franchise, and does not like late pizza deliveries - he has his reasons. As for the antagonists, we have L. Ron Hubbard L. Bob Rife, a computer magnate and a leader of a questionable religion; the Feds that have lost their power but retained their bureaucracy; and enigmatic Raven, equipped with a motorcycle, a few deadly spears and another weapon that earns him more respect from the authorities that that a few small nations get.

To me, the concept of Snow Crash initially evoked the memories of Delany's Babel , a book that I loved for all it's strangeness and far-fetchedness and irresistible pull into the blend of linguistics and sci-fi. But then 'Snow Crash', having barely taken off, disappointingly crashed. Pun very much intended. Maybe this had something to do with the clumsily thrown in heaps of infodump, painfully interrupting already shaky and unsteady narrative, adding tons of poorly placed and far-fetched exposition which it mistakes for layers of complexity, basking in self-importance while being needlessly silly and, frankly, needless.

Maybe it was the sheer number of complex plot threads that weaves complexity but ended up going nowhere, with few admittedly, memorable exceptions. Maybe it was what I can only perceive as casual racism so pervasive in descriptions of most 'ethnic' characters and entire groups featured in this novel, so present in every casually thrown stereotype.

Intentional or not, it was unpleasantly grating. Maybe it was the lack of dimension in Stephenson's characters. Hiro appears to be created as an embodiment of a teenage computer whiz's dreams, not developing in the slightest throughout the novel, only acquiring more and more badassery in the throwaway 'why not? Raven and Uncle Enzo, frustratingly underdeveloped.

Juanita, whose character could have been interesting, appears to exist solely as potential mate for Hiro. The only times I felt any connection to the characters were the appearances of the robotic dog, and I am not even a dog person. She has spunk and heart and confidence that is engaging and does not strike fakes notes that often.

She made me almost care, and for this I appreciate her character. If only the rest if the book had the same spirit Maybe it was the inability to interweave the plot threads into a coherent storyline, to create a bigger whole out of separate parts. The ideas are there, the concepts are there; what's missing is cohesiveness able to pull them together, untangle them and weave a net captivating the readers' brains and imagination. Without this cohesiveness, even the wildest and most daring ideas - like Stephenson's unconventional approach to viruses, for instance - remain disjointed, underdeveloped, unfinished, unpolished, like the refugee Raft in his novel, made of heaps of refuse clumped together trying to make a whole but failing at it.

Honestly, I can't help but see how this book would have worked so much better in a graphic format, being it a comic book like, apparently, it was initially envisioned or a film; the action scenes would have looked splendid while the awkwardness of language with overused frequently clumsy metaphors and the jarring present tense which really doesn't work for this story would have been cast aside.

I wish I had the ability to overlook its flaws, but the indifference I felt when reading it precluded me from caring enough to let its good moments overshadow the bad. View all comments. Wow, wow, wow. Turns out, Gibson was the prophet, but Stephenson was the barbarian, breaking ground with a riveting, relentless new age thriller.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is a wild trip. A fun conglomerate of Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick, Anthony Burgess and John Brunner, written 8 years after Neuromancer and 19 years before Ready Player One this is a bright light on the cyberpunk literary landscape. Set in a near alternative future, Stephenson introduces a world where governments have collapsed and societies are held loosely together by anarcho-capitalism. The book was nominated for a Prometheus Award but what could be a libertarian dream may also be seen as a laissez-faire nightmare.

This is a blitzkrieg of ideas, a cacophony of sci-fi, techno-socio-economic observations, a kaleidoscope of theological and philosophical concepts thrown together in a Mark Twainian fantasy hopped up on Red Bull and amphetamines.

Above all this is an intelligent, modern adventure that expertly weaves in elements of pre-history and archeological thrill seeking. And, if Stephenson had not boiled it all together enough into a steaming cup of Have At You! A very, very Goodread, five stars, two snaps and a bag of chips. As great a hero as Hiro is, the scenes between Raven and YT are those that I recall the most and Raven is a character about whom more could be written.

The casting of Ravinoff by Jason Momoa would be a good one. View all 47 comments. Oct 31, Mario the lone bookwolf rated it really liked it Shelves: stephenson-neal. What would VR and AR be without being hooked on a potentially fatal wonderdrug, as only chance to escape bleak reality, in an anarcho capitalist nightmare controlled by corporations, organized crime, and the rest of government mutated to a bizarre self satire of bureaucracy.

In contrast to the somewhat Dickensian Diamond Age, this one is pure cyberpunk, accelerating the badass dystopian transhumanist ideals to degenerated turbo capitalistic free market terror. One of the most famous, best, importa What would VR and AR be without being hooked on a potentially fatal wonderdrug, as only chance to escape bleak reality, in an anarcho capitalist nightmare controlled by corporations, organized crime, and the rest of government mutated to a bizarre self satire of bureaucracy.

One of the most famous, best, important, and mind boggling ideas of this work is that any ideology, memes, manifestations of epigenetic and cultural evolution in progress, sadly often faith and sick ideologies, are parasitic, viral information, infecting the minds of humans as a first, single, abnormal mutation in the brain of just one, possibly a bit incestuous, ape.

Mix this with the cool, quick writing style, extreme high complexity and density of ideas, philosophy, switching between action scenes and deep, linguistic introspections, inner monologues, dialogues, and social criticism, and one has a milestone of sci-fi and literature in general. I wonder how many sci-fi movies have been influenced by literature, someone should consider making a list, because I watch close to no TV and will thereby never be able to compare it.

In this case, I am not even sure if Gibson, Stephenson, or a forgotten, unknown author was the first one to mix economic criticism with VR and humanities.

View all 6 comments. Written by someone who -unlike William Gibson- actually knows computers, this anime in novel form is one of those rare SF books that is read by many non-SF readers.

When I first read it, I was working at a pizza place, just like the protagonist, and I actually got fired around the same time I got to the point of him losing his job as well. Also, my first name is Hiroshi and he goes by Hiro.

Cool, huh? OK, aside from those neat little coincidences, we are not at all alike. It just made reading it all the more fun for me. Plus I hated that job.

Still, there is some fun bit of social commentary and parody on just about every other page, and Stephenson satirizes globalization years before most people even knew what globalization is. There is also some really fascinating stuff involving the concept of memetic viruses, which he ties to Sumerian mythology and the Tower of Babel. I know that a lot of people find this part of the book to be boring, but I was fully engrossed.

The kind of thing I live for when I read SF. View all 20 comments. The review is updated on In this case I found it to be very difficult to do as it will have to be very vague or contain huge spoilers.

Think of this book as a grandfather of The Matrix movie. The near future is a libertarian paradise: the government intervention is practically non-existent; the law enforcement agencies are private and competing with each other. Enter Hiro Protagonist yes, this is his r The review is updated on Enter Hiro Protagonist yes, this is his real name.

In the beginning of the book he almost failed at pizza delivery - this is a very serious business in the future handled entirely by the Mafia. Fortunately a skateboarding courier Y. I need to mention her skateboard makes famous hoverboard from Back to the Future look like a children bike with training wheels.

You want a mutant Aleut who is deadly with his spear against a squad of hit-men armed with guns? You can have it here. Atomic-powered Gatling handgun? Cool, here you are.

Computer hackers building Metaverse and then bending its rules to suit their needs? Come this way, please. The book was written in I was only able to understand this after I was half-done with it. The reason for this being exposed to the mostly crappy things I mentioned above which did take themselves seriously. Finally in the second half of the book I got a clue when things went WAY over the top. There were some things which bothered me, some I hated, and some I found annoying.

The biggest one: the book is written in present tense. If somebody gave me a reason for this, I would be really grateful. What is wrong with past tense which was used since the dawn of times to tell a tale? Present tense makes for clumsy read sometimes. The ending was practically non-existent: the story just stopped. The computer industry moves at a very fast rate even these days. As a result some info in the book is hopelessly out-of-date; this cannot be helped with any book of this genre cyberpunk.

On the related note some of the explanations of the computer-related technology were too long and boring and some were not entirely accurate, but I work for IT industry so it might be just me: I can only imagine what doctors and lawyers think about countless TV shows about their professions.

The final rating for the book is 3. Initially I rounded it up for the sheer fun factor and the way the book caught me unprepared with its over-the-top plot. However my conscience began bothering my after some time: on my own scale the novel does not deserve such a high rating.

It has too many outdated and slow spots. Finally I realized I really need to update the rating; so here it is: 3 stars. View all 36 comments. I was a little disappointed by the ending. Also, I had a hard time with the active voice used throughout this book. Reading it felt like a friend pitching a movie to me. The language-as-programming concept was terrific though, even though I think that Max Barry obviously influenced by this book wrote a much more compelling story using the same high concepts when he wrote Lexicon.

View all 14 comments. Well, with Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson is that kid grown up. Stephenson latches on to all kinds of ideas and then regurgitates his reductionist, lopsided version of them in 'novel' form.

The effect it had on this reader, is similar to what the screeching of chalk on a board does to most people; it set my teeth on edge. There are so many lopsided, half-developed ideas with huge holes in logic in them, in this novel, that I cannot mention them all and remain as brief as I am sure that you, dear reader, would prefer me to be. Most of them pertain to Stephenson's lopsided extrapolation of how a virtual reality world would work, and his to me loopy ideas on neurolinguistics, ancient history and religions.

I was ambivalent about his snarky depiction of capitalism taken to the extreme. In the Snow Crash world, everything is privatised to the point that civil services such as police and prisons are privatised, and 'burbclaves' small city states have their own laws and services to the point that America doesn't have federal law anymore--yet there are still Feds!

The latter institution is highly satirised by Stephenson, with regard to the typical bureaucratic yards of red tape and the tech and intel gathering overkill and so on. I admit that I found these bits humorous. I reckon Stephenson is, by their inclusion into a state that has no laws, and where the federal government seems merely a token from days gone by, saying that the FBI was superfluous to start with in any case, hah.

But the overall effect of the Snow Crash background setting is that of an almost schizophrenic collage of bits and pieces stuck together to create a highly disjunctive world. I enjoyed the action sequences and I very much enjoyed his two female protagonists; slightly less so the male one. In this early novel, Stephenson shows faint glimmerings of promise. His clumsy explanations of the tech aspects of the world is jarring and often nonsensical, so the main little points of light lie with the action sequences and the characterization, the latter which I found not too bad since many of his stereotypes were slightly more rounded than actually stereotypical and many of the characters were relatively believable and even likeable in spite of the clumsiness.

The hero Hiro, or shall I say, Hiro Protagonist, the protagonist did feel paper-thin however, like just a another piece of deus ex machina. So, four stars for the fact that the novel passes the Bechdel test, and for having created the eminently likeable character Y.

But minus a star for the jarring racism and lack of cultural and ethnic sensitivity, and minus another star for setting my teeth on edge with his loopy ideas and his lopsided, cartoony projections into a future consisting of what feels like a world constructed of cardboard cutouts.

And minus a virtual star for positing that patriarchal religions are more rational than matriarchal ones. Oh, and pretty important to me is to mention the subtraction of another virtual star for the sex with a fifteen year old girl, and her 'relationship' with a mass murderer more than twice her age.

Add half a star back for the humor. Many people credit Stephenson with being the first person to think of a cyberverse in which humans could participate represented by avatars, but by his own admission, Lucasfilm with Habitat was there before him.

Please be my guest and Google them. Randall Farmer recounted their experience as the designers and managers of a virtual community that used computer graphics as well as words to support an online society of tens of thousands. Much of that conference in Austin was devoted to discussions of virtual-reality environments in which people wear special goggles and gloves to experience the illusion of sensory immersion in the virtual world via three-dimensional computer graphics.

Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar stood out in that high-tech crowd because the cyberspace they had created used a very inexpensive home computer, often called a toy computer, and a cartoonlike two-dimensional representation to create their kind of virtual world.

Farmer and Morningstar had one kind of experience that the 3-D graphics enthusiasts did not have, however--the system they had designed, Habitat, had been used by tens of thousands of people. I relented and added a half star for making YT female and such a fun character and subtracted a quarter star for making her blonde, then added back a quarter star for the way in which NS made fun of the FBI bureaucracy.

View all 56 comments. I'm not talking about all the commercialized Matrix-saga and the weird hype I actually had to add it to my "favorites" list. Can't believe I'd never heard of it before?! As for you fellow females, if you enjoy a great action romp like I do It has everything: Mafia pizza delivery tycoons, robot dogs, samurai fights, brainwashing hackers, ancient Sumerian gods, hydrogen bombs, hallucinogenic drugs, punk skateboarders A couple tiny complaints: There wasn't nearly enough of Raven, the villain.

He ranks right under Hannibal Lector and that guy from the movie Serenity to me Also, Hiro Protagonist wasn't much of a He did a little too much research and not quite enough slashing people with his katana for my taste.

Raven's foil, Y. Not like I minded. I'm all for a year-old skater chick saving the world. Rated R for an isolated sex scene, medium violence, and consistent swearing. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven.

In a way, this is liberating. The position is taken. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him.

Very post-modern. BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements--this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped off. Interesting things happen along borders--transitions--not in the middle where everything is the same.

All destined to wear blazers and shuffle papers in suburbia. You don't respect those people very much, Y. But I don't respect them much either, because I'm old and wise. The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it. View all 18 comments.

Shelves: lame. Juvenile nerd power fantasy in a nutshell I'm a big fanboy of the cyberpunk genre. I should have liked this book. Instead, I can honestly say that hate this book-- and I also feel bad saying that about someone's work, because it's almost like saying you hate someone's baby.

I found myself rolling my eyes a lot. And when I wasn't doing that, I was asking Juvenile nerd power fantasy in a nutshell I'm a big fanboy of the cyberpunk genre. And when I wasn't doing that, I was asking myself things like: "Do people really think this is the Cyberpunk cream of the crop?

How many pages to go? Apparently some people's funny bones get tickled by similes comparing military bases to boils on someone's ass, metaphors about valleys and geological cunnilingus, and clever wordplay like calling refugees "Refus" Refuse, har har har, get it?

To an elitist douchebag like me it just sounds juvenile and unimaginative. Combine all that with clunky, corny writing, and it's just downright lame. The other big problem was that I did not care about any of the characters.

Hiro was annoying as hell because it's obvious that he's just a nerd's fantasy of what he wishes he could do. She could have disappeared in the middle of the book and I would not have missed her.

There was nothing likeable or interesting about either of them. Ironically, among all the cartoony, shallow characters, the only ones that had some sense of deeper humanity were Ng and Raven. Another letdown was that the book's ideas were not that great, which did not help the plot. I just did not buy the whole "neurolinguistic hacking" angle as it was used.

People becoming brainless zombies from watching some binary code on a screen , or listening to some Sumerian "namshub"? I get it. Brains are just like computers, so they can get viruses, binary code, 0's and 1's, blah blah blah.

Seriously, I can suspend disbelief, but you can only take a metaphor so far before it starts to look stupid. Finally, for a book that's supposed to be a belly busting satire, the humor in this book is rather lame and nerdy. I read people talking about how this book made them howl with laughter, but almost everything fell pretty flat for me.

The only section that got a half-assed 'heh' from me was the government policy on the use of toilet paper, but by the second page the joke had already become stale. All in all, I doubt that I will buy another book from this author. Judging from what little I've read in Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age, there is little that has changed for me to warrant another look. View all 31 comments. I expected this to be bizarre. I was not disappointed! In the past I have not had much luck with Cyberpunk.

It is just a little but too out there, to the point of being a chore to push through, from time to time. This book goes from cinematic action to humor to religious philosophy to computer hacking to mafia violence with great abandon.

In discussin I expected this to be bizarre. In discussing this with my book club we had to clarify timelines and how one chapter might relate to another because of the fuzzy jumps in the plot. But, then I would find giant sections of great and extremely interesting clarity.

It really did keep me on my toes! But, be warned, I feel like the majority might find it to be a bit of a chore and lose interest quickly. View all 16 comments. Written in the present tense, which is awkward and unengaging, brimfuls of technological deus ex machina remove all tension from an already slow plot-line. The characters are interesting, hence the two stars, but even they felt lacking and emotionally disengaged from their own story, which had the futile makings of something original.

The ending is atrocious, preceded by wastelands of chapter-length explanation, and a fairy-tale misinterpretation of Neurolinguistics that seems to have been writte Written in the present tense, which is awkward and unengaging, brimfuls of technological deus ex machina remove all tension from an already slow plot-line. The ending is atrocious, preceded by wastelands of chapter-length explanation, and a fairy-tale misinterpretation of Neurolinguistics that seems to have been written solely to remind us that not everyone is cut out to be a scientist, as some people must invariably grow up to write pop-fiction.

If you're looking for cyberpunk, read Altered Carbon View all 19 comments. Jan 09, carol. First published in , Snow Crash is considered one of the seminal cyber-punk novels. The opening scene of a mad-cap pizza delivery quickly draws the reader in. Hiro Protagonist cringe , thirty year-old hacker, chronically unsuited fo First published in , Snow Crash is considered one of the seminal cyber-punk novels.

Hiro Protagonist cringe , thirty year-old hacker, chronically unsuited for the career-track, has now found his longest term employment delivering pizzas for the Mafia, who now run pizza chains along with more dubious enterprises. His delivery credentials get him through most of the gated suburbs, but a short cut lands him in deep water. Thankfully, a skateboarder who was hitching a lift using a special skater harpoon takes pity on him and completes the delivery with seconds to spare.

Her actions bring her to the attention of Uncle Enzo. It goes on to involve a shared computer simulation, religious evangelicals, an ear-destroying rock concert, a sociopath on a motorcycle, a fusion-powered attack dog and a floating raft-like armada. View all 9 comments. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy.

Hiro Protagonist is a hacker and pizza delivery driver for the Mafia. He meets Y. 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. Hiro meets his ex-girlfriend Juanita Marquez, who gives him a database containing a large amount of research compiled by her associate, Lagos.

Juanita advises him to be careful and disappears. Jun 25, Jen rated it really liked it. Brother Christoff removes his giant power-hammer from the magnetic holster on his back, its shaft telescoping to full length in his gauntleted fist. He grips the holy sledge Homeostasis Fucker and admires the warm light emanating from its massive head as radioactive isotopes engage in holy fission.

Actuators within his suit hum as he hefts the instrument aloft. Both pressing their fingers to their necks as if detecting a pulse, causing visors of gunmetal gray to shroud their faces. Dual slits open and glow with a cold blue light as associated visual tech augments their paltry biological capacities.

Withdrawing her somewhat diminutive, ordinary tack hammer and rapping it across her palm. Like unto when he removed his socks and slit his trousers to proceed stealthily against a foe most worthy. He of the Fu Manchu and the molecule blades. And Lady Jaunita did condense fact from the nuance of vapor. An incongruous boil of life on a mummified ass.

Both unarmed. A sentinel of arachnid origins, equipped with primitive slug thrower, patrolling outside. Anvil with Homeostasis Fucker high over head, leading the way. Have you ever, while nurturing a bolus of combat stimulants deep within the nested hierarchy of your experiential existence, found yourself stricken with an incredible need for Cyberpunk in the vein of Brother Gibson?

Fluorescent chemicals glowing in the ultraviolet spectrum across its exoskeleton. Pincers working the lever of the slug thrower. Tail poised to strike and deposit venom. Brother anvil, with servos screaming, crests embankment of detritus with titanic speed, leaping high into the air with spring loaded grace, rocket packs deploying calculated thrust to maximize parabolic grandeur.

Citizens of the wastes! Its pincers, still clutching the gun, are jettisoned into the atmosphere where they discharge both barrels as if in impotent rage. The rapid expansion of superheated air around the buried maul creates a peel of thunder, sending out a spray of errant scrap as the shockwave expands, flattening nearby double-headed oxen and ripping the siding off several proximate tenements, revealing a man squatting above a hole and a woman rising from her agitated half sleep now in mortal fear.

In which Pitbull terriers, cloaked in the vestments of cybernetic enhancement, locomote in fashions super sonic. Where the bestest good boy, verily, I say unto you; Fido! Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i. CDs, access codes etc. Also find Softcover First Edition. Published by William Morrow, Used - Hardcover Condition: Good. Condition: POOR. Noticeably used book.

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