Rating: 
Summary: Buy this book
Review: Have your friends buy this book, then steal it and make them buy it again!Seriously. Stephenson is great at illuminating the world of the hacker. This book does so, but not the overly self-aware coolness associated with Cryptonomicon or Heavy Weather (by Bruce Sterling). It's fun, it's never serious - even when someone is trying to destroy the world - and it makes you turn the pages. I read a lot of science fiction, and am a rabid Gibson fan, and when I read this book, all I could say was 'cool'. The world, and the cyberworld. The arcane references to the Sumerians. Da5id. My personal favorite, Sushi K. And of course, Hiro Protagonist - freelance coder, swordmaster, information seller and pizza deliverydude. Remember, Americans do 4 things better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode and pizza delivery. And the position of baddest mother is taken. Piques your interest? You'll like Snow Crash. Think the attitude is childish? Pass this book up. Read Zodiac instead. Or Diamond Age.
Rating:
Summary: "5th Element" meets "The Matrix"
Review: Stephenson crafts a rich futuristic world in Snow Crash, one that reminds me of two movies. With its lawless society governed by large corporations and independent country-like "burbclaves" like "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong", the book has a definite "5th Element" feel to it. It is in this world that the book's main character, aptly christened Hiro Protagonist, is living in a U-Store-It locker and delivering pizzas for the mafia. When a pizza delivery goes bad, he meets up with his foil, the attractive teenage girl "Y.T.", who is a Kourier (a delivery person of the future, who uses her "magnapoon" to latch onto and surf behind cars). The book takes a decidedly "Matrix" bent, however, when the Metaverse is introduced - it's essentially a virtual reality version of the Internet on steroids (although the world wide web did not exist when Stephenson wrote this book, many of his terms have been adopted today in the real world, most notably "avatar"). Hiro Protagonist is one of the masters of this world, a hacker who helped create it in its early days. The sci-fi plot turns into a mystery novel when a new virus inside the metaverse starts infecting people in the real world. In unraveling the mystery, you will be subjected to a delightful array of innovative creations, ranging from the Rat Things to the dentata, that will have you longing for more!
Rating:
Summary: Best of the "Cyberpunk"
Review: Cyberpunk is a term that defies strong definition. Most people agree it is a subgenre of science fiction, that it has something to do with the relationship to man and his machines, and that it tends towards an idea-rich, "crammed" prose style. Bruce Sterling and William Gibson are the two other others most often associated with this field. Neal Stephenson, in Snow Crash, does the best of all. He proposes many futurist ideas without sacrificing the storytelling, and his characters are amongst the most memorable. If you were turned off to this genre due to the weak plotting and dense prose of Gibson, it's time to give it a second chance with this novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Best cyberpunk book I've read
Review: Snow Crash is by far the best book I have read in the Cyberpunk genre. The story flow is excellent, there are very few dull parts, the character descriptions and settings are reasonable, and the character development flows to the point they seem truly human.
Neal Stephenson truly knows how to write a convincing story, and I must say the plot was well-wrapped and not too blatantly obvious. Compared to other books I have read in the same genre, this is the most plausible plot and the best developed characters. No post-nuclear holocaust here, just an extremely advanced form of Republicanism. The characters are described and seen through enough to provide an edge of personality to temper the realism. There are no super-people here, no cyborgs, and no in-depth description of cyberspace (which is very much like what we have now-not the lethal playground of the advanced hackers depicted in so many other books).
There are a few downsides to this book, however. There is a very heavy correlation to ancient history dealing with religion that, for those many of us who are historically deficient mentally, is a bit overwhelming. Also, this isn't exactly a kiddie book, with many **ahem** colorfully described scenes and scenarios, as well as prolific profanity. For those of us used to modern society, though, this just adds to the flow and believability of the book.
All in all a good read, and on a 5 star system it would get a solid 4 from me. As an explanation for the lacking of the 5th star, I am not truly fond of the cyberpunk genre, being from the digital age. It seems so many of the books in this genre were written before I was born, and I have seen the partial realization of some of the points, and the total failure of others.
Rating:
Summary: Definitely one of the new masters of cyberpunk!
Review: Along with William Gibson, who is sort of the "father" of cyberpunk, and Asimov and Clarke, the "fathers" of science fiction/high-tech, comes Neal Stephenson with one of his many works that will easily add it to his other works, such as "Cryptonomicon", as well as works by William Gibson such as "Neuromancer", "Virtual Light", and so on right up to newer authors of cyberpunk and high-tech in titles such as "Altered Carbon" and "Cyber Hunter". Each of these titles are great in their own right and a true science fiction collector should get them all.
Rating: 
Summary: Snow Crash lived up to its title, it Crashed.
Review: I read this book by recommendation of a friend. This most disappointing issue with this novel is its failed potential. The first chapter really took me by surprise. Hiro Protagonist is a pizza deliveryman in the future and failing to deliver a pizza on time means more then losing your job. It was fresh, hilarious and written with a very snappy satirical edge that sadly never resurfaced as the novel went on. The interesting play use of Sumerian myth and religion created another bit of potential that was never fully realized and ultimately convoluted. The novel slides into a contrived mess by about page 150 and spirals down hill from that point on. The plot line is ridden with holes, and many key issues are not resolved. I'm not the kind of reader who demands that everything be tied up at the end of the story, but I do feel that some very blatant issues that were tossed in at the end of the novel were left hanging with no real reason for their existence and with no real resolve. The characters are just ludicrous and the pop culture perception of hackers is uninformed. Hackers are largely solitary, and an online event where half a million hackers joined at one location is ridiculous. Not to mention the event is tossed in the fray to provide a vehicle for some grand loss were going to nuke the world drama that can only be found in your typical shameless Hollywood epic. The pacing is fast and furious but at times explanations of the plot line drag on (if the scheme of your villain is so complicated you have to spend upwards of 50 pages just explaining it something is wrong), and random unnecessary scenes are tossed in for no real purpose. The whole book comes off feel like a typical cheesy campy summer blockbuster. There are better novels out there, and this one falls prey to the largest sin, starting out on a great foot, dragging you in, and then failing. Holes, cheese, over packaged. Can we say SWISS?
Rating:
Summary: Reminded me of eating at MacDonalds.
Review: A quick, cheap gorging but without much satisfaction. First for the good points that earned the book its two stars. The one thing that this book certainly didn't lack was imagination. The world which he has created is strange, bleak, and sarcastic -- and it's somewhat interesting, though not on any "deep" level. It is full of sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle critiques about the current (meaning 1992) world and the direction in which Stephenson thinks it's heading. There are plenty of reviews here which describe many of the critiques (franchises taking over the world, the absurb beaurocracy of the US government, etc), so I won't delve into them here. The book certainly had that cool techie factor that you'd expect from a cyberpunk novel. A virtual reality "Metaverse"; goggles allowing nightvision, infrared, millimeter-wave radar, ambient-sound processing. A fission-powered, gatling "rail-gun". There's no shortage of such examples, and they're certainly fun to read about; though they're typically not fully fleshed out or justified in the reader's mind. The tech factor isn't as sophisticated as I'd like (coming from a Computer Science background). There are a few utterly ridiculous examples of future technology (such as the Metaverse representation of Rife's information network as a bunch of big colorful blocks with connections between them), but all in all it's enough to keep the interest of the average techie if he's willing to set aside reality. Bad Parts. Put simply, this book just isn't well written. I'm admittedly no English guru, and I typically criticise a book more on its content than its structure, probably because I'm not familiar enough with good structure. But if someone like me can say that a book wasn't well written, that's probably bad. It completely lacked any sense of flow. It's almost as if he had this story in his head and just regurgitated it onto the page (like a movie script, as some reviewers have pointed out). The whole religious subtext was well researched, but then very sloppily (though imaginatively) laid out. I was particularly disappointed in the end when I expected many of these creative subelements of the story to come together and tie up, and they were just severed. This shouldn't throw you off from reading Neal Stephenson. I'm in the middle of reading his (much more recent) book "Cryptonomicon", and it seems the complete opposite of "Snow Crash". It's much more mature, much better thought out, and with less flash. Honestly that makes it a little boring. I'd love him to find a happy center between these two extremes, but until then I recommend William Gibson.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing!!!!!!!
Review: Did this book come before or after "The Matrix" I wonder?? It at least deserves to be made into a film as it is one of the best Sci-Fi books i've read! Stephenson writes brilliantly; the characters are very well developed and the plot is deep. It is a shame that the ending is rather abrupt, it seems as though Stephenson needed to avoid publisher deadline wrath!! Seriously, if you liked The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and American Gods, then this is a book for you!!! Buy it NOW!!
Rating:
Summary: Just can't get enough
Review: This has to be the most mentally uplifting, humorous, and yet deeply serious book I've ever read. Stephenson approaches the entire plot completely seriously, but the actually subject matter is a joke. It's rather hard to explain, especially since the book somehow takes things that make no sense and makes them work. The main character (for example) is a half-black, half-Korean pizza delivery salesman, who is also one of the few freelance hackers left in the world, he has a huge amount of influence in the metaverse, he's excellent at driving, he is a master at using a Katana, his room-mate is an ultra-famous rockstar, oh and did I mention that the Mafia runs his pizza company? The entire book is like this, and at certain points, the normal things make you laugh because everything seems so surreal. Yet it deals with the issue of memes (units of cultural information, in the same way a gene is a unit of genetic information), Sumerian Myths, and what happens when America goes Anarcho-Capitalist, not to mention skateboarders. It's a mix of things that should not ever go together. My only real gripe was one of the love scenes, infact, it was the only love scene, has a situation that I found slightly disturbing, only lessened by the fact it was a book.
Rating: 
Summary: Deep
Review: For many years people have been telling me to read this book. Many people told me it was the best book in the cyberpunk genre ever written. So I dove in and I was surprised how this is not really a cyberpunk book at all.
It is a deep book but very scattered. One gets the feeling that the whole of the story is not as important as the tiny vignettes of the story. In other books this can work but the structure of this book feels a little scattered. Many times I found myself wondering when the story would advance again and not sidetrack. It does pay off in the end when all is said and done. I do not think this is the best cyberpunk book ever written as Necromancer is far beyond it in many ways. What Gibson has that Stevenson does not is a love of English and it's fluidity. As in all cyberpunk books what we miss is any sort of character depth. All players are very much like avatars. One is the hero, one is the skater girl with no growth or depth to any of them. At the end, they are the same as when the started. This could be a commentary of all books in the cyberpunk genre but it could also be a commentary of all Sci-fi books as it deals with ideas and not people. It is a good book with some fun ideas but it's not some great tome or anything.
I noticed some people were offended buy the religion in the book but I think this is a case of not being able to see the trees thru the forest. The religion is a story point, nothing more. There is no message in the end. Or they may be one and my brain is just immune to it.
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