Rating:  Summary: Fastest, funnest, thought-provoking ride of your life! Review: OK, people! This book is still out there! Why hasn't every copy been bought and read?! This is about the
most realistic, hilarious interpretation of our times. Stephenson draws on some very pertinent facets of
human development to bring us- today! While the memes ideas is certainly not new, the book itself is a
meme bringing some very intelligent ideas with it! Stephenson's vision of human/computer interaction is
very much on target. But most importantly this books is incredibly entertaining and a fixture in anyone's
library interested in gaining an understanding of technology and human development!
Rating:  Summary: A must-read Review: If you haven't read Snow Crash, go and read it. It has the most credible and vivid representation of a 3D virtual world system seen in fiction (much more so than William Gibson's works, either the far-out surrealism of his early cyberpunk books or the more down-to-Earth style of Virtual Light and Idoru, which seems to attempt to follow the lead of Snow Crash in more ways than one. The difference is that the hacker Stephenson has more first-hand knowledge of the technology and its surrounding culture than the almost ludditic Gibson). Stephenson presents us with a panoramic view of a very-near-future world and its bizarre cults and cultures, presented with Pynchonesque piquancy, and some interesting twists, building on Jaynes' "bicameral mind" theory of the origin of consciousness but going some way beyond it; as Burroughs said, the word is a virus.
Rating:  Summary: Absolutely amazing! Review: Stephenson is a force to be reckoned with in the sci-fi genre. The book is hard hitting and cutting edge. I recommend it to everyone who likes sci-fi, and even a few that don't. SC tells us the future that is here and still coming. Much better written than anything by William Gibson. Snow Crash may well be the best novel of the 20th century
Rating:  Summary: The Best SF Book of the Past 10 years Review: This book is beloved of Internet programmers, VRML visionaries, and just about everyone who is wired. The first chapter is simply the most exciting chapter of fiction I have ever read. After each chapter I had to jump on my computer and crank code for hours at a time before I calmed down enough for another dose.
This book is everything you hope happens tomorrow. This book is the girl you wanted to date in high school, the hacker in your brain, and the samuraii in your soul
Rating:  Summary: If you like blood and guts, you'll love this! Review: Quite a pastiche of ideas which ultimately become aligned with some semblance of coherence - a coherence which simply occurs rather than having been preconceived, perhaps a commentary on life itself. The cyberspace events entwine with Sumerian archeology (this latter in a manner reminscent of Julian Jaynes "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamerial Minds" [1976]) and are enacted by comic book characterizations which I found difficult to relate to. However the ideas have a creative bent, which, inspite of their violence, could be entertaining to some
Rating:  Summary: Excellent book, a must read for computer-literate types. Review: A great story and dark vision of cyberspace, and virtual reality, set in a chaotic future society
Rating:  Summary: One of the freshest, most witty SF novels around.
Review: "Snow Crash" is one of the coolest books to come out in the SF scene in the 90's, and I'm not using "cool" as as simple
synonym to "good" here. "Snow Crash" has style. It has ironic humor and a taken-for-granted look at technology that's a very realistic portrait of what is to come. For die-hard Fantasy fans (like me :) it has mythology and the occasional swordfight. Add that to heavy artillery, global virtual-reality networks and one of the freshest views of turn-of-the-21st-century America, and you have a book that's simply an instant classic. Heartily recommended.
Rating:  Summary:
AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID Review:
This book is amazingly hyped and utterly lacking in worth as a novel.
I'll admit, I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters, but it's a steady decline from there. While the author draws on several "cutting edge" concepts, he clearly doesn't understand them all that well. It's just another piece of crappy, trumped-up drivel from the "cyberpunk" tradition.
I'm not always a stickler for "realistic" sci-fi, but this book, which evolved from a "web serial" experiment, just loses it completely towards the end.
Stephenson shows some promise as a cyberpunk writer, though, and I look forward to any future work which has the benefit of a good editor.
Rating:  Summary: Dystopic, fast-paced world, cool ideas: sure to be classic Review: Neal Stephenson takes his anger at society and extrapolates every sinsiter trend today into a hilarious, gripping future where The United States of America competes for space with Pizza Hut.
A ROTFL but fast-paced, glitzy world where corporate law is the only is the only law is the setting allowing for a slick post-anti-cyberpunksomething-type story. The idea is a drug called Snow Crash is being past around cyberspace that "snows"(reduces display to fuzzy static) user's computers and "snows" hackers' minds. The logic for that is actual fact: as someone becomes skilled in an area, their neurons rearrange into patterns to make easier the task. Whether it is finger dexterity for piano players or the ability to read binary for programmers, the brain gradually gets wired to it. And Snow Crash, supposedly, shows hackers a field of specially orchastrated snow designed to shatter through their delciately-wired-to-hacking minds, leaving them insane.
The story takes that cool idea even further, creating a villain seeking to destroy the ability to read computers and destroying computers ability to communicate: Infocalypse. Stephenson supposes even further that another catastophic event like this occurred in the past, the origin of the fact that human languages tend to diverge, no come together. Weaving Sumerian myth and glossalia and cyberspace altogehter in one mind-bending meta-theory, it staggers the reader. Anybodyt who reads this book will "Wander slack-jawed for days, and emerge with a profoundly redifned sense of reality"-Bruce Sterling.
All of this is set to cool characters who you really grow to care about, and some quotes sure to become classic: "Need a loan? Money tight? Call the Mafia! Now you have a friend in The Family!" Hiro Protagonist, Y.T., Raven, and Uncle Enzo, all products of Snow Crash's completely corporatized world, will linger in memory for ever. This book will stick in your brain like glue
Rating:  Summary: huh...wha....um...SNOW CRAAASH!!! Review: If you took every bad direction that America is going in, jacked them up to a computer, chopped them up in a blender and projectile vomited them at the Sci-Fi genre, you'd get something resembling Snow Crash. This book has an eerie semi-probable atmosphere that enslaved me and stole away several hours of my life making me read it. Stephenson has factored in everything worth mentioning or caring about and magically emerged with a marginally cohesive book with a convoluted plot that covers everywhere, nowhere and metawhere at once and gets away with it. To fully grasp the hauntingly realistic, freakishly funny and improbably readable quality of this book, you would have to experience it for yourself. Well....exactly WHAT are you waiting for, anyway??
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