Cyberpunk and Steampunk: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash is a fun novel that has a bit of everything for everyone; it has action, romance, science, humor, language, culture and history. Neal Stephenson balances this excellently with his wealth of knowledge. Stephenson grew up in a family of scientists and he himself studied physics and geography and many other things, he also has a vast knowledge of computing systems. So his writing is very smooth in the book, it doesn’t feel like he did vast amounts of research for his book and then relayed it to you. No it feels more conversational with some extra description put in to move the plot. The rest is up to you to discover, if need be. The parts of the book I loved were the connections of code to old Sumerian and how the virus created a shared language and that the story felt like a loose story of the tower of Babel. That of course eventually had to crumble.

Stephenson is very talented in the arena of multiple topics with in a story, which is why he is so good in the genre of sci-fi. He easily writes multiple layers into a story with out it sounding condescending. Often time’s writers sound mechanical when describing something that is of the future. But Stephenson just breezes right through, which makes it really fun to read his works. Snow Crash is just one of those books, and its really quite amazing how much he predicted, this book came out in the early 90s. We were just getting into the idea of social networking, electronic music, computers, and video games were expanding. The idea of avatars and Internet personalities, a now every day thing, was something completely untapped in the early 90s. And the idea of it being used through virtual reality, a thing that is now coming into the forefront. You gotta give props to this guy. This is the second time I have read this book and I have seen more in it than I did the last time, mostly because I’m on the internet more now. The virtual reality is a really interesting item, he plays it very low key, but its so entangled in this web culture, that I feel that’s really where it’s going to go. I mean sure its being used for video games and porn right now, but Facebook has been interested. I think it’s going where Stephenson has written it. It’s going to be a social playing ground, and hey maybe we’ll interact with some ‘realality’.