From earlier threads on hacker news it motivated me to read snow crash. However the book was very difficult to finish. I literally used spark notes to finish it, it got so long in the tooth and boring towards the end.
Is it just me? I like books like the three body problem that are entertaining but snow crash was like a much much worse version of the da Vinci code with some VR thrown in.
Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age are absolute gems. I've read these 3 books multiple times. I've read all the other books but they are indeed weirder and weirder and don't really appeal to me.
I just finished Anathem and felt like the first eighty percent needed a story editor to cut that down, and there were alot of places where he slipped and let some modern tone into the narration instead of speaking consistently in character for the narrator.
That's a good question, because I don't tend to re-read books a lot, I'm a slow reader, but I've read the thousand page Cryptonomicon 3 times and listened to the audiobook once. It is long, but it doesn't feel like it to me.
Seems to alternate nowadays between a sci-fi-tinted-page-turner that goes to some really weird places, and an intellectual sci-fi (that also goes some weird places, but that's pretty common for sci-fi).
Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite novels, and I loved Snow Crash and The Big U. I find I find his current stuff unreadable, but I can't put my finger on why.
It's weird that I so fundamentally disagree; it really drives home how subjective fiction is. I strongly prefer Cryptonomicon to Snow Crash.
I'm a big Stephenson fan, and I find his post-Cryptonomicon stuff more focused (or at least more cohesive? Structurally cogent?) on a conceptual level. I revisited Snow Crash a few years ago, and liked it much, much less than I remembered - I wouldn't describe it as a disciplined novel. It's a baggy mess with the same maximalist bent of his later work. it's a discursive, meandering story that synthesizes disparate concepts in a very fun way. But, it never gels too well; it sort of feels like he lashed a hyper-globalized-strip-mall-hellscape dystopia to a parody of the cyberpunk aesthetic, and superglued both of those things to Julian Jaynes. It just happens to indulge his maximalist tendencies in a smaller page budget, and fails to get the best of either a short novel or a big messy "idea-novel."
Don't get me wrong, like you, I found the first reading of Snow Crash a formative experience as a SF fan. But I'd also never read anything like cyberpunk; I was solidly a Niven Kid in middle school, completely ignorant of post-New Wave SF. I think a lot of what I found special as a kid was actually done better elsewhere.
In terms of that "90's Retrofuturistic So-Cal Strip Mall Apocalypse" brand of cyberpunk, I think William Gibson's Virtual Light was far more satisfying to revisit. It's a more assured, contained novel, and to my surprise, I think the relative restraint yields a much funnier novel than Snow Crash.
> I find his post-Cryptonomicon stuff more focused (or at least more cohesive? Structurally cogent?) on a conceptual level.
Are you looking to be delighted by words rather than ideas? Perhaps I'm extrapolating a bit here, but you seem you like your complex language constructs, so to speak?
English is a second language to me. I wonder if this isn't also a factor.
The ideas in Snow Crash where really the most important things.. next to brilliant writing style (the deliverator...).
> Are you looking to be delighted by words rather than ideas? Perhaps I'm extrapolating a bit here,
Possibly! Prose style is pretty important to me. On the other hand, that's not something I generally complain about with Stephenson. Even when he misfires, the result is usually entertaining. Being bland is a bigger sin, IMO, and not one he commits often.
I think the two go hand-in-hand for me. Having both is best, but I'll take either.
> but you seem you like your complex language constructs, so to speak?
Hah, my writing style owes to more to me not taking the time to edit that I should. Also ADHD. Probably both.
> English is a second language to me. I wonder if isn't also a factor.
Hm. I don't know! I could see some of the sections being a real slog, though.
> The ideas in Snow Crash where really the most important things.. next to brilliant writing style (the deliverator...).
I love the collection of ideas, it was a fun bit of sci-fi! I just felt like it was missing something to really make it fit together better.
I agree that the writing is a ton of fun in it too, I love the opening bit describing how the Uncle Enzo's Pizza company runs a whole battery of experiments to try and understand why people are so aggressive about late pizza. I think about this stretch and laugh very hard every once in a while: "... [Uncle Enzo's Pizza's researchers] studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn’t respond without committing a venial sin."
> In terms of that "90's Retrofuturistic So-Cal Strip Mall Apocalypse" brand of cyberpunk, I think William Gibson's Virtual Light was far more satisfying to revisit.
See also "Islands in the Net" by Bruce Sterling (IMNHO).
Ed: BTW, for a newer book (2017) that plays with some interesting concepts - see "Gnomon" by Nick Harkaway. Just don't read a summary or too much about before you start - much of the pleasure I found in it was trying to "figure out" the book as I read it...
Thanks for the recommendation! I actually have a copy of Gnomon sitting on my shelf that I've been meaning to dig into. I'll have to bump it up the queue!
> It just happens to indulge his maximalist tendencies in a smaller page budget, and fails to get the best of either a short novel or a big messy "idea-novel."
I mean, Snow Crash still works great as an adventure yarn, right up until the entire caper is resolved by Hiro running a program he was programming in the background between scenes.
The Diamond Age was much more meandering and plotted in a confusing way, even if it had better world-building.
I don't mean this in a snarky way at all. I'm being completely genuine. I always thought of Pynchon as the Pynchon of sci-fi. If Cryptonomicon is sci-fi, then Gravity's Rainbow definitely is, if not more so.
Maybe it's because I read Singh's excellent "the code book" right before "Cryptonomicon" - but I found it a mediocre, overly long and contrived take on similar concept/material.
I thought "Snow Crash" was fun, and "Diamond Age" is one of my favorite books - although - come to think of it - it's probably about time I read it again...
The sort of collectible one of his characters would purchase after a successful exit from a crypto startup. But it is beautiful. Also what is this new snowcrash story he was working on!?!
My favourite bit is where he goes "Okay I had to learn a lot about number theory / RF propagation / Victorian literature / 17th Century French politics / exotic timber for this bit, so now you've got to learn it too."
The book was originally conceived as a graphic novel using some sort of software to generate the images from photographs of actors and props. The jacket was a prop for one of those photoshoots. You can see some examples of the art in one of the other items up for auction.
They fit the Snow Crash aesthetic in the torment nexus sense. Though, based on his recent professional decisions it turns out that all along, Neal Stephenson was actually advocating for the torment nexus!
It's a book which helped coin the term "metaverse", written by an author who also published a hit novel about cryptocurrency in the late '90s.
It might not be a bad time to cash in on that nostalgia and new money, especially if you feel bearish about how those concepts are being reified today.
For a science fiction novel it was pretty huge--selling over 125,000 copies[1] in its first couple years, and is ranked near the top 10 of all time. This list [2] has it in 12th place overall, but a lot of the others on the list have also been movies, which raises the profile of books a lot.
There are variations on this in Philip K Dick's work, like the shared hallucinatory visions in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or the shared experiences via the empathy boxes of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which might be the biggest part of the book that the movie adaptations did not attempt to translate to screen.
Anyone in this thread read The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod, the beginning of his The Fall Revolution series? Am I the only one who thought it was like a British, anarcho-syndicalist (in some parts of the setting) version of Snow Crash? Right down to the computer program MacGuffin?
As a young person, malls were still a thing, and my local mall did in fact have a store that sold swords. I think most of their trade was in more practical things like kitchen knives, but the swords were for sale if you had the money and wanted one.
In the early 2000s there was a widely circulated post with someone saying that they were mall security, that they always wore a bullet proof vest, but were looking for something that could stop a sniper rifle. They also bragged about being a master of several martial-arts including ninjitsu. Thus, the legend of "mall ninja" was born.
Seems like a missed opportunity to make an NFT that resembles the Snow Crash data stream that makes hackers go brain dead, or a Nam Shub of Enkidu NFT.
