Snow Crash / Unabridged

Rating:
Summary: Umberto Eco meets Joe Quirk
Review: Absolutely loved it! This book is for people who like intelligent fiction. Stephenson manages to capture pop-reality without being cheesey. It's a very well-researched and well-written book: silly and sardonic, futuristic and tangible. Potential readers shouldn't be turned off by the cover. The book is much better and more intricate than that silly illustration. Totally five stars.

Rating:
Summary: awesome leap into the cyber future
Review: The book was hard to put down and some of the descriptive passages had me astounded. If this is the future then count me in.

Rating:
Summary: Creative but politically naive
Review: Needless and groundless America-bashing hurt this reader's enjoyability of Snow Crash. I for one would like to see the shrunken Federal Government as portrayed in this book but it's doubtful to happen.

Rating:
Summary: This book creatively and superbly personifies the future
Review: This book has got to be the best book that I have ever read. It is so intense and full of everything that I love in a book. I hope that everyone that loves a good science fiction/fantasy/futuristic/techie book will check this one out. Its the best.

Rating:
Summary: Simply put one of the best books I have ever read.
Review: Snow Crash grabbed me with the title, and had me absolutly hooked with the first chapter. The characters names alone are pure genious. The view points on religion and the "metaverse" are rich detailed and insightfull. The descriptive sentances used are dead on acurate. Stephensons views on the future are funny but with a certain sinister truth about human nature. You will get more and more out of the book each time you read it, not holy grail absolute truths about life, but neat little insights or twisted views on established and accepted norms. Read and re-read this book.

Rating:
Summary: C+
Review: A pseudo-ambitious, weak plotted, scathingly unoriginal waste of publishing resources. The 2-dimensional characters are so shallow they remind me of the leftover aliases to long deleted 8 bit programs. Looks like this wannabe is trying too hard to imitate writers like Jeff Noon and William Gibson. Noon succeeds partially because he doesn't try to explain his fantastic realm in terms of hard-scifi technological facts. Stephenson, amid his slavish but somehow half-hearted kowtow to what he perceives as techno-realism, comes across as desperately trying to unscramble the omelet his college-grade imagination has half-baked. The semi-promethean Gibson can be excused because he was writing in 1983, well before the internet had a chance to saturate the cultural zeitgeist. A decade and a half later, Neuromancer still has more conceptual drive than Snowcrash. I'm sick to death of the endless tide of young interlopers like Stephenson coming along and using the concept of cyberspace as a mcguffin to wank imaginative. As a long time fan of conceptual/philosophical sci-fi, I found nothing even mildly intriguing in NS's concepts; the '80s videogame Tron had more food for thought than the whole of Snowcrash. The plot was nothing more than formula presented in sickeningly unrelenting irony & one-liner adolescent social commentary, pedantically interwoven with a quasi-researched mythico-linguistic subplot.

Rating:
Summary: Neal Stephenson . . . The Best Writer Ever!
Review: Neal Stephenson cannot get better than this! Who else could give his main character the name Hiro Protagonist and have the Maffia running a pizza chain and get away with it? I even found all that culture about Sumeria interesting and the Metaverse would definitely be my hang out if I lived in this new USA. I admire Stephenson for creating this whole new genre of sci-fi and I recommend this book to everybody. The hacker jokes only served to make it better!

Rating:
Summary: A must-read
Review: Neal Stephenson is one of the most imaginative writers today, and this is his breakthrough novel. It is intelligent, witty, and a heck of a lot of fun to read. It got me hooked on his novels and none have disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Great beginning, but loses steam
Review: Like someone else aready wrote, the first 150 pages are beyond description--some of the best fiction I've ever read in ANY genre. But, Stephenson lets the second half degenerate horribly into Mack Bolan-esque shootouts and way too much discussion on Sumerian myths and culture. Its a decent read.

Rating:
Summary: Better than Ice Cream in the Summer
Review: I tell ya what, after reading this great book "Snow Crash", my life is almost complete. I live in Maryland and the other day i visited California. But what was most interesting is how the book progresses from Slow cyberpunk to Fast cyberpunk. I mean, who could resist stopping at the hot dog stand to buy that nice, juicy hot dog with ketchup and mustard and relish? Certainly not me no sir. And out of no where, Hiro's got a crazy psycho ninja sword! Who could have guessed that the little dog would be get hit by the baseball, i mean, I didn't know i had that good of aim. So buy this book cause it's really good and it's good.