
Snow Crash Revisited: Grokking a Satire of Mimesis - amk_
https://hackernoon.com/snow-crash-revisited-grokking-a-satire-of-mimesis-23de3ac05f47?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4
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pjc50
"Taken literally, this backstory might remind one of an arcane thriller
written by an over-enthusiastic autodidact."

That's the rest of Stephenson's work.

I'm not sure Snow Crash is really a satire on cyberpunk per se. It's classic
SF over-extrapolation of current trends in a funhouse mirror to shed light on
things. The first of which is over-privatisation: everything in Snow Crash is
a "franchise", including core parts of the government. When YT is arrested
she's given a choice of privatised jail providers and justice systems,
straight out of the libertarian playbook. The "burbclaves" are what happens
when a HOA and gated community upgrades to an armed microstate. And so on.

The other of which is weaponised memes: if these things can be said to be
"viral", can you produce a meme or image that's actually an exploit against
human wetware?

The review criticises the book for "missing" Google, which I think says more
about the reviewer's position in the world. Yes, the world of SC is not
dominated by SV companies, but that's not important. The book does contain a
souped-up realtime Google Earth, and a "gargoyle" who's a human version of the
streetview car.

(Stross takes "weaponised ideas" in a different direction in the Laundry
Files, which are essentially Yes Minister/Lovecraft crossover fiction)

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Although Stross's default stance in the Laundry Files seems to be that
_everything_ is a weapon, or could be one. Camera? Weapon. Smartphone? Weapon.
Pidgeon's foot? Weapon. Your own brain? Weapon. Violin? At least one of them
is a weapon.

~~~
Pamar
Unlike I am mistaken the pidgeon foot is defensive/camouflage but cannot be
used to cause damage to a target.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
You missed some dialogue. You can relatively simply extend the HOG from an
defensive weapon to an offensive weapon (all it takes is a mirror, IIRC). The
pigeon foot is a HOG, and can be used in the same way. It's just that Bob
rarely does so.

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vertis
The reason I love books from Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Charles Stross,
is that, for me at least, they're massive catalysts to my own thoughts and
imaginations of what might be possible.

If I had to pick one book above others from Neil Stephenson it would be
Diamond Age. I just keep going back to it. It's got a lot to say, and I
wouldn't mind seeing a similar analysis by the Author of this post.

~~~
huhtenberg
Stross next to Gibson and Stephenson... hmm.

I tried The Atrocity Archives but I couldn't get past the first half. It felt
like a pile of nerd paraphernalia force-stuffed into a story line.

I mean... Neuromancer is a true masterpiece from the story to the concepts to
the succinct writing, just perfect. Snow Crash is less perfect, but
exceptionally enthralling nonetheless. What would be a comparable read from
Stross?

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andyjohnson0
> What would be a comparable read from Stross?

Accelerando [1] isn't in the same league as Neuromancer in terms of style and
succinctness, but the idea-density is pretty high and it moves along at a nice
pace.

[1] [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html)

~~~
chiph
I can skim through most sci-fi stories. But not this one. I had to slow down
and focus on what Charles was saying. It's seriously dense reading, and worth
the effort.

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n00b101
I read Snow Crash when I was 13. Then I lost countless hours trying to "live
the dream" with Active Worlds [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds)

~~~
guiambros
Likewise. I missed Lucasfilm's Habitat, but tried most of the virtual worlds
after that, from MUDs via telnet in the early 90's, Worlds Chat in 95-96,
Active Worlds right after (my company spent $1,500 buying a server copy), The
Palace, Second Life, WoW, and more recently DK2/CC, etc.

We're getting close from the technology perspective, but the storytelling and
the " _massive_ " portion of an MMORPG is still not there. Visually
impressive, but the social interactions are dull and unsophisticated, without
emotional depth.

It's funny to look in hindsight. What Habitat has apparently nailed in the
80's [1] is what is missing, 30+ years later.

[1]
[http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html](http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _We 're getting close from the technology perspective, but the storytelling
> and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there. Visually
> impressive, but the social interactions are dull and unsophisticated,
> without emotional depth._

However ambitious MMOs and virtual worlds get, I worry that they'll always run
into the same barrier restricting their potential past a certain scale: the
MMO experience is made out of people, and a whole lot of people are awful.

~~~
vertis
Snow Crash actually deals with this if I remember correctly. When you go out
onto the street you're likely to encounter people in the shape of Penises
(etc).

Most chat and social apps deal with this already by limiting your interactions
to selected people that you whitelist.

That shouldn't be hard to replicate into VR.

~~~
guiambros
I think you can solve this by limiting anonymity. You won't see people dressed
in penises once you're connected to your FB friends.

I know there's valid arguments against forced real identities to be used, but
it's always a trade off between signal and noise.

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carlesfe
I just finished Snow Crash and found it too pretentious and convoluted, like
the turn that Diamond Age does towards the ending. Besides that, it introduces
a few interesting concepts, but I feel that similar ideas are developed much
better in DA.

For me, Stephenson's masterpiece is Diamond Age, hands down -- minus the
ending, if that could be a thing. The last chapters are too obscure just for
the sake of obscurity, I've read it three times and I can't get any "deep"
meaning to it, just a bunch of wow-cool-but-irrelevant text.

Regarding Cryptonomicon, the first three books, they're straigtforward,
interesting, and with a lot of references and trivia but it doesn't try too
hard like the "Gods" part of Snow Crash. I really, really enjoyed them.

Unfortunately, I found the Cryptonomicon prequels a nice adventure book in the
traditional sense, but the characters were too flat and un-relatable, and it
bored me.

Anyway, that's my opinion. Diamond Age introduced me to cyberpunk and, to
date, it's my favorite novel of the genre. I've recommended it to many people
and they've always liked it. I still dream of the day when we have matter
compilators, and victorians look like a bunch of hipsters to me, which is both
funny and very realistic. In a world full of technology, rich people will want
to go back to a more... simple and comfortable age. It blew my mind.

~~~
jeeva
Have you tried Daemon and Freedom, a small series by Daniel Suarez?

~~~
vertis
Amazing books. I was pleasantly surprised by Kill Decision as well, not quite
in the same league, but more interesting than I expected.

That, and Ramez Naam's Nexus, Crux, Apex are recent additions to my collection
of awesome books.

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menssen
Downvote me: Infinite Jest is Snow Crash for adults.

(But seriously: similar vision of a corporate-controlled near-future; and IJ
is great, read it.)

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rfergie
I've been trying to decide whether to bother with Infinite Jest or not. I've
heard very good things about it, but also that it is a pretty tough read.

I think your comparison with Snow Crash has swung it for me; IJ is definitely
on my reading list now

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nnethercote
> I've heard very good things about it, but also that it is a pretty tough
> read.

Give it 100 pages. If you don't like it by then -- or at least significant
chunks of it -- then you probably won't like the whole thing.

~~~
krylon
Hehe, that is exactly what I did. By page 100 I was hopelessly hooked. It's
not an easy book, but I thoroughly enjoyed how it was both intellectually
stimulating and extremely funny.

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jhbadger
What I find either funny or depressing (can't decide), are the number of
younger people (as in too young to be using computers in 1992) who read "Snow
Crash" before reading any other cyberpunk and 1) fail to get that it is
actually is a satire of Neuromancer, etc. and 2) think that Stephenson was
amazingly prophetic, not realizing that a lot of what he was writing about
_already_ existed, albeit in simpler forms. 3D avatar environments are really
just an aesthetic improvement over MUDs (Multi User Dungeons/Domains), which
were multi-user text-based games that were all the rage in 1992.

~~~
sevensor
I don't read _Snow Crash_ as a _Neuromancer_ parody. Stephenson has too many
of his own ideas for that. When it comes to ideas, Stephenson is unusually
playful. (See also the Enlightenment philosophers in the Baroque cycle.) He's
not great on plot or characterization, or structuring a novel in general, but
Stephenson can write one hell of a sentence, and he often keeps it up for a
paragraph at a time.

Gibson, whose books I also adore, has basically nothing at all to do with
Stephenson. The only thing connecting them is that some of their books are set
in dystopian near-futures. Gibson at his best is bracingly bleak. Cyberpunk
was a marketing term for publishers and critics who couldn't get their heads
around him. Early Gibson is pure punk. Even more than _Neuromancer_ , read the
stories in _Burning Chrome_ for their hard, angry edge.

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eggy
I like Stephenson, but I guess Snow Crash was late to the party for me, having
already read Neuromancer and a bunch of other cyberpunk books as well as a lot
of cyberpunk-themed movies before finding it.

I enjoyed Snow Crash, but I am more a fan of Cryptonomicon and Anathem. I
stumbled upon Cryptonomicon in the bookstore, because of the intriguing title.
That and the Perl script for Solitaire in the back of the book.

I wish Cryptonomicon had been made into a movie pre-Bitcoin and Snowden; I
hope they still make a movie of it.

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throwanem
I can see that a lot of thought went into this review, but I have to admit I
can't see what came out of it. Perhaps someone with a clearer understanding
than I might lend a hand?

~~~
Animats
The book, or the review?

The book outlines a world where franchisers run everything, including jails.
It's a cookie-cutter world; instances of each franchise are very standardized,
and this is a plot point. The hero delivers pizza for the Mafia run pizza
franchise, when he's not hacking code. The heroine is a 15-year old
skateboarding courier girl with a really good skateboard.

There's a big virtual world, run partly by the Special Interest Group on
Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery. The VR world is a lot
like Second Life but with VR and better graphics; you can buy real estate and
build. The hero spends a lot of time in there, but that's not where the plot
happens.

The Big Bad is a mega-preacher who has a visual data pattern which allows him
to take over, or at least crash, human brains. This involves info from ancient
gods and such. He's trying to take over the world.

It's a great exercise in literary world-building; the plot isn't much and
there's little character development.

A movie was in development, but it didn't happen. It would be great to see it
done it today, now that the graphics are good enough. Would definitely have
been better than Tron 2.

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qwertyuiop924
Heh, yeah. Tron 2 was disapointing to day the least.

Stephenson's novels in general are like this, although Cryptonomicon for one
certainly has better character development than Snow Crash: they're a
disorderly jumble of whatever ideas Stephenson thought were interesting at the
time, wrapped in a skin of plot, and enfleshed in the characters that
surround, encounter, and explore them. Stephenson sometimes jumps the rails
entirely, writing long monologues, dialogues, and digressions that barely
refer to the characters or plot at all, just because he thought the ideas were
neat (most of Randy and Pontifex's discussions in prison, The mathematics of
Alan's bicycle chain, a good stretch of Hiro's discussions with the Librarian
(although nowhere near all of them), and Hiro's adventures in Flatland on the
raft (you can just _feel_ the seeds of In The Beginning Was The Command Line,
struggling to get out)), or for reasons known only to him (probably because he
thought it was funny) (the TP memo, the stockings/Van Eck... thing). To some
people this may be seen as a disjointed, overhyped, overcomplicated mess, but
to the right sort of mind, it's an almost magical experience.

Curiously, these sorts of people tend to be heavily into computing, which is
why Stephenson pervades that culture.

Or that's wrong, and I'm just completely mad. That's also a possibility.

~~~
gbhn
I think you are right, and I've at times struggled to explain why I enjoy his
books as much as I do. I think ultimately he leans regularly on a facet of SF
that in that genre, ideas and abstractions can be the equal subjects of
character development. Cleverly developing an idea (e.g. mind virii) and
circling back on those ideas, exploring how different facets connect in
different ways, is the kind of thing one does with a human character, but can
also do with an "idea character" in SF.

Obviously the craft and virtue of that kind of thing is in the relationships
of the concept to other elements of the tale, both human and non-human. This I
think Stephenson does very well, but I can appreciate that for someone who
doesn't extend subjectivity largesse to abstractions, it can be tedious to
read wikipedia-like explositions, no matter how well done. :-)

~~~
throwanem
Just a heads up - if you're looking for a concise way to convey this idea in
future, the phrase 'high concept' captures it neatly.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Well, that's always nice to know. Although I don't know how many people know
what it means, and I don't think it encompasses all of what makes Stephenson
Stephenson, anymore than "satirical fantasy" comes close to encompassing
Pratchett's Discworld's writing style.

~~~
throwanem
Certainly not! And I hope I haven't given insult. If so, it was entirely
unintentional on my part, and I apologize for my carelessness in so doing.
I'll put more thought into my words next time.

Don't get me wrong - I don't mean to say that all of Stephenson can be
encompassed in those two words. Were that the case, he wouldn't have had to
spend time writing books. I mean only that, if you're looking for a handy way
to convey a primacy of idea over character in what an author chooses to
explore, "high concept" is an adjectival phrase commonly understood to carry
that meaning. Might save you some time, is all. (And, on the Internet of 2016,
a dictionary is never far away...)

~~~
1propionyl
Ah but you see my adjectives are better...

~~~
throwanem
More convenient, perhaps. It's like programming in a way - why reinvent a
wheel you don't have to?

~~~
gbhn
Thanks, that's a useful phrase!

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zem
i love lots of _bits_ of snow crash, but i do not like the book as a whole. i
did not feel like the (admittedly excellent) ideas and snippets were stitched
into a coherent whole in a particularly satisfying way.

on the other hand, "diamond age" is truly a masterpiece, and i strongly
recommend that one to any of stephenson's fans. it's the book of his i'd rate
the highest, though my favourite is "cryptonomicon" just because that's
comfort reading.

