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A review by vylotte
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
5.0
Reread for book club, I picked up this version at a 30th anniversary reading he did locally. Greg Bear had just died so he spent the time, understandably, remembering him and reading their joint work from The Mongoliad.
I first read this in the 90s, when the metaverse and living your life online was but a distant postulation. Reading it now is a vastly different experience, because in a lot of ways we've met up with Stephenson's vision of the future. Mega stretches of strip malls repeating the same franchises over and over. Check. Working, gathering, playing online? Check. Crooked megalomaniacs using religion to grab power from the masses? Okay, that's basically a human constant. And right when I start to get complacent about just how much of this very reasonable future came from the author's mind, I'll see something he got wrong. Computers using CRT. Y.T. pulling a calculator, notebook, and phone out of her pocket when now it's all the same device. It just illustrates how much he was theorizing.
He's definitely gotten better over the years with his female characters. Y.T. was well done and pretty fleshed out but Juanita was there to be one-dimensional and convenient. Y.T.'s mom was yet another caricature of a female trope. Y.T. herself was problematic at age 15. The story itself, however, was engaging, better written and more robust than I remembered.
As with all the other Stephenson books, this has stretched my brain out at the edges. Random throw-away sentences that make me stop, put down the book and think (like the concept that our brains are hardware and the languages we speak are different software running on it). A paragraph that throws three separate massive concepts down, links them together, and makese SENSE. And how did he take the Tower of Babel, Sumarian culture, and computer viruses, wrap them all together, and layer them all over a darn spot-on near future tech that didn't even exist? He coined the word "metaverse" and usage of "avatar" after all.
Now I will try to read Termination Shock, just to compare and contrast his first novel with his latest, I think that will be an interesting endeavor.
I first read this in the 90s, when the metaverse and living your life online was but a distant postulation. Reading it now is a vastly different experience, because in a lot of ways we've met up with Stephenson's vision of the future. Mega stretches of strip malls repeating the same franchises over and over. Check. Working, gathering, playing online? Check. Crooked megalomaniacs using religion to grab power from the masses? Okay, that's basically a human constant. And right when I start to get complacent about just how much of this very reasonable future came from the author's mind, I'll see something he got wrong. Computers using CRT. Y.T. pulling a calculator, notebook, and phone out of her pocket when now it's all the same device. It just illustrates how much he was theorizing.
He's definitely gotten better over the years with his female characters. Y.T. was well done and pretty fleshed out but Juanita was there to be one-dimensional and convenient. Y.T.'s mom was yet another caricature of a female trope. Y.T. herself was problematic at age 15. The story itself, however, was engaging, better written and more robust than I remembered.
As with all the other Stephenson books, this has stretched my brain out at the edges. Random throw-away sentences that make me stop, put down the book and think (like the concept that our brains are hardware and the languages we speak are different software running on it). A paragraph that throws three separate massive concepts down, links them together, and makese SENSE. And how did he take the Tower of Babel, Sumarian culture, and computer viruses, wrap them all together, and layer them all over a darn spot-on near future tech that didn't even exist? He coined the word "metaverse" and usage of "avatar" after all.
Now I will try to read Termination Shock, just to compare and contrast his first novel with his latest, I think that will be an interesting endeavor.