Snow Crash - BookWyrm

440 pages

English language

Published Aug. 13, 1992 by Bantam Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-553-08853-3

(2 reviews)

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.

20 editions

technicat@bookwyrm.social reviewed Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Why isn't this a movie?

5 stars

One of my all-time favorites (although not quite my favorite Neal Stephenson book, that would be The Diamond Age), I read this way back when, and it's held up over time and many rereadings. If I'm wandering a bookshop and don't see anything that grabs me, I'll just get another copy of this book. It's a fun, zippy read (not as epic an undertaking as his later 500+ page behemoths), and its metaverse still sparks the imagination more than the present-day Meta metaverse. The characters are all great, but for emotional depth, I'm going with the Rat Thing.

Libbum reviewed Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Review of 'Snow crash' on 'GoodReads'

5 stars

I knew nothing of the content of this book coming in, although it's been on my radar to-read for 20 years now. Being late to the party I suspected a somewhat dated cyberpunk hacker expose: similar to Gibson's Neuromancer.

This is true in some sense, although I don't think it dates as poorly as Neuromancer does. There's not a gigantic amount of technical jargon that's fallen out of use (PROM - programmable read-only memory) is perhaps the only concept that kids growing up now wouldn't understand directly (even though we still use it a lot in our daily lives, RFID for example).

What I wasn't expecting was the connections to ancient Sumer, religions and gnosis; language hacking, culture exploration and a whole raft (!) of other tropes tying together to uncover an answer to one of societies oldest questions.

A thrilling ride all in all.

The ending felt a little …

I knew nothing of the content of this book coming in, although it's been on my radar to-read for 20 years now. Being late to the party I suspected a somewhat dated cyberpunk hacker expose: similar to Gibson's Neuromancer.

This is true in some sense, although I don't think it dates as poorly as Neuromancer does. There's not a gigantic amount of technical jargon that's fallen out of use (PROM - programmable read-only memory) is perhaps the only concept that kids growing up now wouldn't understand directly (even though we still use it a lot in our daily lives, RFID for example).

What I wasn't expecting was the connections to ancient Sumer, religions and gnosis; language hacking, culture exploration and a whole raft (!) of other tropes tying together to uncover an answer to one of societies oldest questions.

A thrilling ride all in all.

The ending felt a little sharp perhaps. Things tied up, sure, but I may have liked a epilogue.