Book Review: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
I desperately wanted to like this book, but I just didn’t think it was all that good. It is difficult to identify why. The writing style is not very impressive, but it was not a book meant to be stylistically driven. Clearly, this book was about plot and Stephenson’s imagination. It was like the book just seemed trite when it reached its abrupt ending. There wasn’t a great deal of complexity once you removed the cyberpunk and dystopian surroundings.
SPOILER FOLLOWS:
When I say that there wasn’t much complexity, I mean that the book seemed extremely linear. A little character establishment in the beginning for Hiro and KT (and Uncle Enzo), along with the explanation of this corporate franchise city-state version of America. Then da5id gets crashed, and Hiro goes off after Raven. He chases Raven more or less to the end of the book, without much else introduced except for annoying religious psuedohistorical background. The path Stephenson went to get to this bullshit is pretty clear. I can see him saying “You know what would be cool? A book about computer viruses that can infect your brain!” Then, in order to justify this plot, he comes up with some hand-wavy Sumerian stuff. Somehow, though, rather than letting that just be a plot device, it takes on a life of its own. He ends up blowing like 200 pages of the book having characters explain this stuff to each other. I put down the book thinking that it would be a great screenplay, if someone could just compress all of the weird Sumerian mind-virus stuff into about one-minute of dialogue. Consider: even after all the pseudohistoric justification that he tries to create, he still has to infect the hackers by having them look at bitmaps. He says: “because they understand binary.” That’s just dumb.
On the upside of things, since the book was written in 1992, I thought the Metaverse thing was rather foresightful in anticipating how people would use the Internet. Obviously we’re not to his level of interpersonal interaction, or world simulation yet, but lots of things are there. I assume that every legitimate real-world hacker that has read this found (him|her)self thinking about trying to create a Metaverse. In fact, I see that there are a couple of open source projects out there trying to do just that. Frankly, I’ve been thinking about it, too. Actually, I was thinking about it before reading the book, but he creates a nice picture. Also on the upside, I thought the book itself was much better organized than Cryptonomicon. The linearity obviously helped this, as Cryptonomicon is quite nonlinear. I haven’t decided which book I prefer. I enjoyed the greater complexity and reduced bullshit of Cryptonomicon, but I thought that Snow Crash tied things up and ended in a more satisfying way.
Comments from other people who’ve read this?