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The science fiction novel Snow Crash (1992), written by Neal Stephenson, follows in the footsteps of the cyberpunk novels by such authors as William Gibson and Rudy Rucker, though Stephenson breaks away from the typical "techno punk" stories by embellishing this story with a heavy dose of satire and black humor.

Snow Crash (Stephenson's third novel) rocketed to the top of the fiction best-seller charts upon its release and established Stephenson as a major science fiction writer for the 1990s. It has made it onto the list of Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Best Novels.

Like many postmodern novels, Snow Crash has a unique style and a chaotic structure which many readers find difficult to follow. It contains many arcane references to geography, politics, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, history, and computer science, which may inspire readers to explore these topics further, or at least consult relevant reference works. The novel explores themes of reality, imagination, thought, perception, and the violent and physical nature of humanity, in the context of a socially-constructed (virtual) reality imposed on a political-economic system in the throes of radical transition.

Significance of the title

The meaning of the title "snow crash" is explained in Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning...was the Command Line", as the term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer:

When everything went to hell and the CPU began spewing out random bits, the result, on a CLI machine, was lines and lines of perfectly formed but random characters on the screen—known to cognoscenti as "going Cyrillic." But to the MacOS, the screen was not a teletype, but a place to put graphics; the image on the screen was a bitmap, a literal rendering of the contents of a particular portion of the computer's memory. When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a "snow crash."

Background

The story takes place in a semi-America of the future, where corporatization, franchising, and the economy in general have spun wildly out of control. Snow Crash depicts the absence of a central powerful state; in its place, corporations have taken over the traditional roles of government, including dispute resolution and national defense. The United States has lost most of its territory in the wake of an economic collapse; the residual remains of the federal government are weak and inefficient and are used by Stephenson for comic relief.

Much of the territory lost by the government has been carved up into a huge number of sovereign enclaves, each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" or the various residential burbclaves). This arrangement bears a similarity to anarcho-capitalism, a theme Stephenson carries over to his next novel The Diamond Age. Hyperinflation has devalued the dollar to the extent that trillion dollar bills, Ed Meeses, are little regarded and the quadrillion dollar note, a Gipper, is the standard 'small' bill. For large transactions, people resort to alternative, non-hyperinflated currencies like yen or "Kongbucks" (the official currency of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong).

The Metaverse, Stephenson's successor to the Internet, permeates ruling-class activities, and constitutes Stephenson's vision of how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future. Although there are public-access Metaverse terminals in Reality, using them carries a social stigma among Metaverse denizens, in part because of the low visual quality of the avatars (the Metaverse representation of a user). In the Metaverse, status is a function of two things: access to restricted environments (such as the Black Sun, an exclusive Metaverse club) and technical acumen (often demonstrated by the sophistication of one's avatar).

Examples of Metaverse-like "worlds" in reality are There, Second Life, The Palace, Uru, and Active Worlds, which is based entirely on Snow Crash. Some also consider massively multiplayer online RPGs to be similar to the Metaverse as well.

Plot and central ideas

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The story centers around Hiro Protagonist, an out-of-work hacker and swordsman, and a streetwise young girl nicknamed Y.T. (short for Yours Truly), who works as a skateboard Kourier for a company called RadiKS. The pair meet when Hiro loses his job as a pizza delivery driver for the Mafia, and decide to become partners in the intelligence business. The setting is a near-future dystopian version of Los Angeles, where franchising, individual sovereignty and automobiles reign supreme (along with drug trafficking, violent crime, and traffic congestion).

The pair soon learn of a dangerous new drug, called "Snow Crash" — both a computer virus, capable of infecting the brains of unwary hackers in the Metaverse, and a drug in Reality being marketed through a nearly-untraceable chain of sources. As Hiro and Y.T. dig deeper (or are drawn in), they discover more about Snow Crash and its connection to ancient Sumerian culture, the fiber-optics monopolist L. Bob Rife and his enormous Raft of refugee boat people, and an Aleut harpooner named Raven, whose ambition is to nuke America. The Snow Crash metavirus may be characterized as an extremely aggressive meme.

Stephenson spends much of the novel taking the reader on an extensive tour of the mythology of ancient Sumeria, while theorizing upon the origin of languages and their relationship to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Asherah is portrayed as a deadly biological and verbal virus which was stopped in Ancient Sumer by the God Enki. In order to do that, Enki deployed a countermeasure which was later described as the Tower of Babel. The book also reflects ideas from Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976).

Important characters

• Hiroaki "Hiro" Protagonist — As the name suggests, the hero of the novel, a hacker, swordsman, and sometime pizza delivery man.
• Y.T. (Yours Truly) — A teenage skateboard-riding car-harpooning courier who helps Hiro investigate the mysterious metavirus. She is Hiro's "partner," and may be veiwed as a sort of secondary protagonist.
• Juanita Marquez — Hiro's old girlfriend from the days when they both worked for Da5id and were developing the software that supports the Metaverse. Both men were in love with Juanita; she married and later divorced Da5id.
• Da5id Meier — Friend of Hiro, co-creator of the elite Metaverse club The Black Sun. First to fall victim to the Snow Crash virus. He is possibly based on game programmer Sid Meier ('Da' - The; '5id' - Sid; 'Meier' - 'Meier'; Using Leet speak).
• L. Bob Rife — All-around magnate, plies the seas in an aircraft carrier with a city's worth of boat people lashed to it (and possibly may have been based on L. Ron Hubbard and/or Ted Turner).
• Dmitri "Raven" Ravinoff — Rife's spear-throwing, "molecularly sharp" glass knife-making, motorcycle-riding, Aleut henchman. He carries a nuclear warhead with him that is wired to a dead-man's switch for protection. His goal in life is to "nuke America."
• Dr. Emanuel Lagos — Researcher who discovered the metavirus and foolishly told Rife about it.
• Uncle Enzo — Head of the American Mafia, which is now also known as Nova Sicilia and Cosa Nostra, Inc. Also in charge of the pizza delivery service Hiro works for in the beginning of the story.
• Mr. Lee — Head of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong; a franchise that Hiro belongs to and gets helped out by numerous times.
• Mr. Ng — Head of Ng Security Industries, severely handicapped after a helicopter accident in Vietnam, maker of the security pitbull cyborgs commonly called Rat Things.
• The Librarian — An complex but non sentient software application designed by Lagos and passed on to Hiro which helps Hiro understand what is going on and learn more about the Snow Crash metavirus and its possible roots in Sumerian myth / proto-history.
• Vitaly Chernobyl — Hiro's roommate, shares his 20x30 foot U-Stor-It. He is the singer for the nuclear fuzz-grunge band Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns.
• Fido — A semiautonomous security drone partially composed of a stray dog once adopted by Y.T.
• Fisheye — Member of the American Mafia, he joins Hiro on the life raft. Has a glass eye and makes people listen to Reason.

• Bruce Lee — Leader of a pirate gang on The Raft.

Trivia

• "Hiro Protagonist" was used as a nickname to showcase the Xbox 360's Live enhancements.

See also

• Active Worlds - 3D web browser inspired by Snow Crash
• Cyberpunk
• The Diamond Age
• Enki — deity of Sumerian mythology
• Geek canon
• Metaverse
• Motif of harmful sensation
• The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution — a short story by Chrisopher Cherniak
• Second Life — an open-ended virtual world
• Solipsis — free, open-source virtual world software
• Uru: Ages Beyond Myst — computer game inspired by Snow Crash
• Virtual globe - 3D software model of the earth

External links

• Snow Crash title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Neal Stephenson's web site
• Science Fiction Inventions From Snow Crash

• 1992 books
• Motif of harmful sensation
• Science fiction novels
• Fictional drugs
• Postcyberpunk
• Time Magazine 100 best novels