Rating: 
Summary: This is my favorite book
Review: This book has something for everyone. It's funny, sarcastic, smart and totally engaging. If you have read any of the negative reviews of this book (appearing farther up on this page) I feel very secure in stating that they were written by people who simply couldn't grasp the ideas presented in it. If you don't want to have your intelligence insulted, this book is right for you. YOU REALLY HAVE TO READ I
Rating:
Summary: A glimpse into the future ... oh yeah, and some other stuff.
Review:
Not being into cyberpunk (as a genre), I took a friend's advice and read Snow Crash. I wasn't disappointed.
Neal Stephenson's "in your face" writing, grabs you by the shoulders and rockets you through the not-so-far-away future, ruled by franchises such as Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong and The Mafia -- You've Got a Friend in the Family!, and policed by franchises like The MetaCops. A future with public street computer terminals on every corner, so you can log onto the MetaVerse, because virtual reality beats staring at the walls of your U-Stor-It 20x30 space.
Published at a time when CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL were just taking off, Snow Crash gives you a glimpse of how things might (and probably will) be, and as an added plus, gives you a lesson in ancient history. The main characters have just enough attitude to make you care about their mis/adventures through the prefab, neon landscape, and even though the history lesson slows you down, it's not as if you aren't learning anything in the process.
I recommend this book to everyone whose social life consists of booting up and logging on, and to whomever appreciates the type of fast-paced, creative, and humorous writing that Neal Stephenson excels at.
Rating:
Summary: Hiro Protagonist: A Slacker Hacker Swordsman
Review: More brilliant concepts in the first hundred pages than in a year's collected ramblings by anyone who uses the term "cyberpunk" in conversation.
It's too bad the rest of book is only there to justify the fantastic beginning. This seems to be true of all of Mr. Stephenson's work so far.
Read it for the ideas. Be forwarned, as I was, that it goes flat for awhile then throws in everything in the author's notes to finish the book (maybe he was running out of disk space), and you'll enjoy yourself immensely.
Rating:
Summary: Snow Crash is the Greatest of the Great!
Review: There are only two books I have ever read that even compare to this book: A Canticle For Leibowitz" and "The Diamond Age". This is by far the greatest science fiction, in terms of goodness, that I have ever read, or probably will read in the near future. Claiming that ancient Sumerian wasn't the language of all mankind misses the entire point. It is possible (although certainly not likely), and who's to say that the ancients haven't tricked us all? Granted, the end is rather odd, like he was crammed for space, but who cares? It's not supposed to be too philosophically deep, so the ending isn't all that important. Snow Crash is THE HIGHEST LEVEL. THERE IS NONE HIGHER
Rating:
Summary: See page 414
Review: It's good, for all the reasons you can see in other reviews. Having read The Diamond Age first, I was forwarned that he can't do endings. It didn't matter so much here, the ending was "good enough". Loved it. -----HOWEVER---- I thought the lack of acknowledgement to Gibson was cynical. He said that he prefered "Metaverse" over "virtual reality", without mentioning "cyberspace", which must be a deliberate snub to the seminal work. Something must have sneaked through into his sub-conscious mind though. See page 414 (on my book) where he refers to "doing a wilson". In Neuromancer that was the phrase for a noteworth victim of black-ice. In this book it was used for falling off a skateboard.
--------------
Anyone not into cyberpunk must wonder what I'm gibbering on about ! Read this book and discover the genre.
Rating:
Summary: Essential cyberpunk
Review: Ok, so it's not historically accurate and the plot
tends to jump around a bit. But if you've read & enjoyed
books like the Neuromancer series, Islands
in the Net, True Names, and other cyberpunk
classics, this book is for you. It's fast-paced,
absurd, and engaging - just the model we need for
thinking about what cyberspace is and what
we hope it will someday look like.
Rating: 
Summary: Snow Crash: kind of fun, but historically absurd
Review: I am a Mesopotamian archaeologist, and one of my
students lent me *Snow Crash*, to see what I
thought of it. I've been reading science
fiction for almost fifty years, but my
experience of Cyberpunk is mostly restricted to
William Gibson, whose books I like very much.
That being so, my first reaction was that
Stephenson's book, and particularly his heroine,
was a rip-off of *Virtual Light*, though now I
gather that the publication chronology does not
permit that hypothesis. There are a lot of
interesting and amusing bits in the book, but I
found it confusingly plotted (well, I thought
the same of *Neuromancer* the first two or three
times I read it). I was particularly
unconvinced by Stephenson's version of virtual
reality; I really can't believe that a pair of
cathode-ray goggles would give the effects
described. At least Gibson's simstim operates
with impulses input into your nervous system
through a jack in your skull -
uncomfortable-sounding, and hard to keep clean,
but surely more effective.
The major point that I can address, though, is
related to the reason my student lent me the
book: the Sumerian connection. Aside from the
fact that the long passages of rumination and
speculation by Protagonist and his mentor are
excruciatingly boring, the whole basis of the
historical problem addressed is purest BS.
Stephenson appears to think it an extraordinary
thing that once some people spoke Sumerian, and
then after a while they didn't any more. Well,
around where I live a lot of people used to
speak Lenape, but now they don't. Dramatic
historical phenomenon? Hardly. He seems to
think that because Sumerian is (apparently) the
earliest language we have recorded in writing,
therefore everyone in the world must have spoken
Sumerian. Sumerian was spoken by maybe a couple
of hundred thousand people in southern
Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BCE, and there
must have been thousands of other languages
spoken in the world at the time. There are
traces in the earliest texts of at least one
other language whose speakers must have been in
contact with the Sumerians. Sumerian remained a
learned language, like Latin until very recently
in European culture, but had probably been
replaced as a vernacular by Akkadian as early as
2000 BCE; Akkadian in its turn had been replaced
in Mesopotamia by Aramaic by 400 BCE or so - one
of the most normal processes in the world. So
the entire intellectual premise of Stephenson's
book is based on ignorance and an extaordinarily
naive concept of history. Dick
Ellis
Rating:
Summary: a deeply resonant free-form tornado of a book
Review: snow crash bears the stamp of extensive rewrite, and
and the action can sometimes seem out of step. This shouldn't discourage you from missing out on a deeply funny and just plain cool novel that uses its bulk to increase its power rather than diffuse it with chapters of dross. Sanskrit tablets and three-ring catalogue the magic as a skatepunk discovers her worth
and a misguided programmer heads off an informational virus targeting the human mind.
Rating:
Summary: This is the best sci-fi book I have read in a very long time
Review: This guy is a genius. The book made me laugh out loud(really). Stephenson creates characters that are both outrageous and credible. His ideas about the internet are innovative and are beginning to materialize. I wish he would write a sequel to Snow Crash. Outstanding job
Rating:
Summary: Best book ever!
Review: Of the literally thousands of SF books I have read, this is hands down the best!
If you don't like this book, then give up reading.
Warning - this is a long book but hard to put down. You may stay up all night reading it - I did.
After reading this you may have more respect for pizza delivery drivers! :-)
| 
