Snow Crash: A Novel by Neal Stephenson (Epub)

Description

In this mind-altering romp—where the term “Metaverse” was first coined—you’ll experience a future America so bizarre, so outrageous, you’ll recognize it immediately • One of Time’s 100 best English-language novels

Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison—a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse.

User’s Reviews

Review “Stephenson has not stepped, he has vaulted onto the literary stage with this novel.”—Los Angeles Reader “[Snow Crash is] a cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. This is no mere hyperbole.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian “Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the twenty-first century.”—William Gibson “Brilliantly realized . . . Stephenson turns out to be an engaging guide to an onrushing tomorrow.”—The New York Times Book Review Amazon.com Review From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet–incarnate as the Metaverse–looks something like last year’s hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist–hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what’s a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway–might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is a tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it in to the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doo-hickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren’t afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstration.The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it–we’re talking trade balances here–once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza deliveryThe Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say; “Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.”So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved–but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can’t you guys tell time?Didn’t happen anymore. Pizza delivery is a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. Sent psychologists out to these people’s houses, gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, 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.The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn’t fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator’s head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator’s car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box’s built-in RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down.If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself–the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator’s nightmares, the Capo and prime figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated–who will be on the phone to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer’s yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and give him a free trip to Italy–all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow, he owes the Mafia a favor.The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you had to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteen-year-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea.But he wouldn’t drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way. You know why? Because there’s something about having your life on the line. It’s like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. Other people–store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America–other people just reply on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we’re in competition with those guys, and people are noticing these things.What a fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn’t have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don’t work harder because you’re competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy–but what kind of… –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ The Bad:Tonal shifts. “Snow Crash” starts with some legendary levels of satire, but the consistency for said tone drops off after 50 or 60 pages. The satire remains, but the more the novel progresses, the more an afterthought that satire seems. In the middle of the book, the tone becomes one of ‘discovery/revelation’ that persists until the end… at which point the tone graduates to ‘let’s get this over.’ The shifts are never quite abrupt, but are somewhat stark.Changing voice. “Snow Crash” never quite feels like it’s written by three different people, but the beginning, middle and end all feel radically different from one another. Some difference is to be expected as a story nearly 500 pages in the telling is unraveled… but there’s a difference between progression of events having a subtle impact on how the story is told and the feeling that the author is changing how they’re drafting the story in their own mind.Wandering plot. Why did Hiro need to go to Oregon to learn that thing about Raven? The Raft was cool, but did it need to occupy so much time or focus for the reader to grasp its significance or otherwise appreciate the information Stephenson was offering? There are a couple of other plot points that beg the question ‘why that’ or ‘why present it this way,’ but the goal is to remain as spoiler-free as possible, so those points will remain unmentioned. There is a fair amount of wandering/meandering in the storytelling that’s hit or miss; for every enjoyable moment of superfluous world building or character development, there is a head-scratching moment to offset it.The Good:The Deliverator (the first ~50 pages, really). Y.T. The ideas behind Babel, protolanguage and religion, in general.The Takeaway:Entertaining if a bit dated (as far as many of the technical predictions or conventions are concerned). “Snow Crash” was no doubt a hell of a read when it was released: immensely entertaining; rife with observations and commentary regarding the era in which it was written (much of which is still shockingly relevant); offering statements about how we got to where we are; great observations about people, their hopes, dreams and motivations.Recommended for: fans of cyberpunk; those interested in a topical examination of neurolinguistics; people looking for a wild, trippy ride that will trigger some fierce 90s nostalgia. Anyone that enjoyed “Neuromancer” or “Lexicon” may want to give “Snow Crash” a shot.“It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.”“Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year old men feel decrepit.”“To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.”“The Deliverator lets out an involuntary roar and puts the hammer down. His emotions tell him to go back and kill that manager, get his swords out of the trunk, dive in through the little sliding window like a ninja, track him down through the moiling chaos of the microwaved franchise and confront him in a climactic thick-crust apocalypse. But he thinks the same thing when someone cuts him off on the freeway, and he’s never done it-yet.”“They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many self-described Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It’s a postrational religion.”

⭐ I enjoyed this book right up until the detailed sex scene between the 15 year old female main character and another character who has been touted as a main villain of the book the whole time. I have a feeling the author wanted to use this as a way to let you get to know the “villain” shortly before he is revealed as not totally villainous but more vindictive. I don’t care to find out. I could of maybe stomached this scene if it matched the rest of the tone of the book, but it doesn’t, it comes out of nowhere, is quickly set up, and happens. I cannot fathom what the author was thinking by taking the story there, all I know is that I wont be reading any more of this author.

⭐ I just read this again for the second time after having read it first about a year ago.First off….someone needs to make this into a series.Please.It’s a great story and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the cyberpunk type science fiction.The only complaint about this work will be that the author gets into a bit of a detailed description that some people might find slow, but he does it in little chunks, so it’s doable.The action-adventure stuff is great and fast moving.The “coming-of-age” aspect is good, the dual hero aspect is really well done.The villains are terrible.The tech is great to read about.Highly recommend this.

⭐ There’s only two novels that I’ve had to stop reading in my life, this is one of them. This book begins to take an odd slant on religion midway through and consistently tries to make analogies about STD’s. It’s a strange combination of uncomfortable and boring. Stay away from this book if your looking for a fun and interesting read.

⭐ I haven’t read anything of Stephenson’s since Seveneves. Before that my only other exposure was with Anathem.With those two books as my previous experience I was a little hesitant to dive into one of Neal’s massive tomes with endless paragraphs of info dump and esoteric scientific explanations.I was PLEASENTLY surprised to find none of that. Yes, there are large chunks of Stephenson’s verbose prose. But while action packed and with an amazing world that only Stephenson can build this was still “light” compared to those novels.A semi-dystopian future where the US is chopped into different enclaves and the mafia are the good guys this story blends real world action with VR/Matrix/Ready Player One simulated drama.

⭐ When I read Snow Crash, I was amazed that the book was written in the early 90s. It accurately describes many of the technologies we now not only have, but have access to every day. For this alone, it is worth a read. Stephenson predicted a lot of what we now take for granted in day to day life and it is really kind of awesome.From a prose stand point, this is not the easiest book to read. There is plenty of tech jargon (some of it made up) and a lot of linguistics vocabulary you might need to parse as you are reading. Also, his description of the corporate states is a little head scratching at first, but I feel pretty confident in saying that if you ignore it early on, you’ll get it by the end.Otherwise, it is an entertaining yarn. I didn’t like it as much the 2nd time I read it, but I still think it is a very good book.

⭐ Stephenson is known for writing books that impart a lot of technical information amidst lively stories. Snow Crash is no exception. The underlying thesis – an ancient virus that is capable of infecting the language center of the brain – could have been an Indiana Jones or a Robert Langdon story in other author’s hands. But it starts out reading like William Gibson and eventually takes a turn toward Tom Robbins. Have I dropped enough literary references?I do have to say that it took me quite a while to read this novel. Some of that may be my fault as I was dealing with personal issues. But I do feel that it took longer than usual for the novel to shape into the story it tells. I was about 50% through before it became apparent that something was going on besides the unfolding action story. I was about 75% through before Stephenson started to reveal the connection between the story and the religious/mythological history that underlies it. This left me confused for the longest time.This is not a book for the timid reader. But if you are a fan of Stephenson or Tom Robbins you will be rewarded by the time the novel ends.

⭐ 2.7/5I’ve been wanting to read this one for a long time due to all the hype surrounding it, but after finishing just half of it I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.It starts out fine, and builds this great cyberpunk/LitRPG environment, and made pizza deliverers seem like the coolest people in the world. I was into it, and was enjoying all the descriptions and car chases and character introductions (Y.T. is probably the best).But once I hit the halfway point everything just stalled. The cyberpunk feel and atmosphere was gone, and it turned into just walls and walls of textbook-like information about history and religion (literally a quarter of the book is this). For the rest of the book it just got slower and less interesting for me. The main character, Hiro, even got less enjoyable, to the point where I didn’t even want to read his chapters anymore. But the female protagonist, Y.T., continued to be pretty cool.There were some cool and unique characters, and moments, but just nothing that could save this book for me.

⭐ I continue to read Stephenson’s books now and again (particularly when they show up on the Kindle $1.99 list), and my reaction is always the same. First, I can’t put it down because his prose is just so readable… Second, I get bogged down in the philosophy and history and technology, which is either too arcane or not detailed enough (or, in the case of Snow Crash, both)… Third, the payoff is jejune, playing out like a bad action movie with an even worse director. So I’m left thinking the book was kind of fun and breezy, but I can’t say I’d recommend it.And, oh yeah, there’s a 15-year-old teen having sex with an adult. It’s necessary as a plot point (though weirdly described), but totally inappropriate, even for a book written in 2003, way before #metoo. It’s statutory rape. The sad thing is that the teenager could easily have been 19 and it wouldn’t have changed the story or plotlines at all. So it makes me wonder a little bit about the author himself…..

⭐ The work has agreed and it shows in some small details, like payphones and in some bigger details like franchise expansion. The worst problem is YTs age and sexual assault. Reading it when I was 26 years old, I didn’t notice, now it’s blatant and shines like the loglo of a in novel franchellete and is painfully glaring. As for the story, it still feels solid with the tech still holding its own which is saying something for a science fiction story that is nearly 25 years old. I’d love to see a modern rewrite like John Scalzi did with Fuzzy Nation. Our even if Neal would do it again. I’d love to see it as the 1000 page more nuanced story that he is capable of now.

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