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Summary: Future??? It's here! Active Worlds! Inspired by Snow Crash
Review: I had to comment about everyone else commenting about this being the future. Well, it WAS the future and was the insperation behind Active Worlds, the only true, 3d World on the internet to date! Avatars in some worlds include the characters in the book. There's even a Metaverse world along with over 300 others. To all Snow Crash fans, you owe it to yourself to check this out!
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Summary: Entertaining Cyberpunk Conspiracy Thriller
Review: N. Stephenson has showed us the future in Snow Crash. The cyberpunk hero draws us into a world filled with technical wonders and it-could-happen conspiracies.
There already is a long list of reviews here. Suffice it to say, this book is the best written sci-fi conspiracy novel I have read to date.
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Summary: A *GREAT* futuristic cyber-punk adventure!
Review: A futuristic hacker must stop an ancient virus that dates back to Sumerian times. The picture Stephenson paints of the future is a vivid (and not too unlikely) one. The book is filled with tongue-in-cheek humor and is an all around great read. Probably my favorite book.
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Summary: If you liked this book....
Review: Very clever social and cultural satire. If you liked this, you'd probably like the 1950's works of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, also a 1970's book by Jack Vance called "Wyst." (these are satirical but predate cyberpunk).
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Summary: Don't forget about Y. T.!
Review: I agree with the majority of reviewers who say that Snow Crash is a blast. The overlooked gem here is Y. T., the teenage skate-punk herione. For once a young woman is portrayed as sharp, brazen, unaplogetic, and totally independent. She survives on her own wits and power, without much help from the white knights (and in this case, the Mafia) who set out to "save" her. Hiro, and the world, would have been toast without her. I loved the fact that the baddest dude in the book fell hard for her and she blew him off without any sentimental regrets. On a technical note, the Sumerian mythology and linguistic theory subplot was quite convoluted. I have a background in neuroscience and thought the brain concepts were intriguing, but unsatisfyingly underdeveloped--a lot of talk but little substance or real resolution. This is unfortunate since it meant that the whole meaning and mechanism of the Snow Crash plot remained mystifying. My favorite hacker critqued the computer technology and found many bones to pick in that arena as well. Overall, Snow Crash was a wild ride and I salute Stephenson's creativity. And yes, it would make an awesome movie for any filmmaker who really wants to show off his or her CG prowess!
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Summary: Infocalyptic
Review: One of my favorite books of all time. Always a great reader, and never gets boring. its 4/12/98, and i just finished reading it for the 6th time
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Summary: cardboard comic-book characters suck
Review: I'm giving this a four rather than a one because (a) there are a couple of memorable lines ("I'm sure they'll listen to Reason" was good hehe); (b) there are a few cute and quite possibly even prophetic concepts (e.g. a future society made up of franchised suburb-states called burbclaves); and (c) there's some quite imaginative devices and creatures (the "rat things" take the cake). I'd even go so far as to say that this COULD have been a classic work of modern sci fi. Unfortunately, Snow Crash was absolutely ruined by Stephenson's absurdly one-dimensional comic book characters. The main character (let's hope the name "Hiro Protagonist" is tongue-in-cheek only) is not only the greatest hacker but the greatest swordman the world has ever seen; the 15 year old female courier YT has the strength and co-ordination of a Xena Warrior Princess and the maturity of a woman in her late 30s; the mafia Godfather Uncle Enro is such a loveable and uncle-y old uncle; and the villian Ravens-something or whatever his name is is so powerful and menacing, and so skillful at making glass spears that can somehow go through ballistic armour, that it just makes you want to scream. What's the good of writing about the most amazing hi-tech, and the most prophetic socially fragmented future, if your characters look and act like they just popped out from between the covers of Marvel Comic Books. Is it any wonder that science fiction still isn't considered "real" literature? On top of that, I still can't figure out why Stephenson had to put all that Sumerian religious stuff in. That really dragged the story down. It's bad enough to have absurd characters, but an absurd plot-concept is if anything worse. Like this whole thing of Babel and talking in tongues - will we ever be free of this Judeo-Christian mythology? At least Gibson to his credit explored voodoo in two of his novels (not very well, but at least its a change from yet another Bible reference). As for Stephenson's more recent work, I still havent read The Diamond Age yet; well, I've read a bit of it while browsing in a bookshop, and it does seem that he has some more realistic characters in there, even if the basic premise of the book - an ossified future society - seems a lot less imaginative and interesting then a world full of burbclaves. For my money though, if you want a REAL glimpse of the dystopian future, throw Snow Crash away and get hold of a copy of Neuromancer.
The original.
And still the best.
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Summary: This is how cyberpunk should be written
Review: One hell of a book. I think its almost as good as neuromancer. Its not so damn serious its more like a rudy rucker book.
Rating:
Summary: read it
Review: The first third of "Snow Crash" is so much fun and so bizarre, I was instantly hooked. The post-breakdown world he describes is at once surprising and familiar, and--a welcome change from other Bleak Future novels I've read--it is often laugh out loud funny. But after the initial setup, the book sadly fails to deliver. The librarian has lots of fascinating ideas, but I hate being on the receiving end of a lecture, and the librarian was a too-thinly disguised device to deliver a too-long lecture. And the dead-on sendup of contemporary Christians which Stephenson sets up in the first half of the novel starts to sound a little cloying in hindsight: how can you criticize a group for believing their tenuous interpretations of ancient myths are Truth when you are yourself proposing far more tenuous interpretations of ancient myths as Truth? Still, the first 150 pages of this novel are SO good, I recommend it highly. Just check first to see if your library has it before you plunk down your $6. (shhh, don't tell the amazon folks I said that!)
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Summary: It's really cool and I like it a lot
Review: Well, I use to play Gemstone III all the time and when my best friend told me about this book, I said "Wow, what a cool book!". So I went out to the book store and bought it and right when I got home, I started reading...and I kept reading...for 5 hours. I was captivated! I read it so fast that within a week, I was reading it for my second time. Between this book and Gemstone III, I was in virtual heaven. I would just like to recomend this radical book to anyone who likes to sit at the computer and play Gemstone III or even someone who just plain loves books. Even my sister loved it and my friend Kevin, well, he didn't like it but he's not very cool anyways. I love this book! 10's across the board! YEAH!
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