Rating: 
Summary: Loved the story, hated the ending
Review: Loved the story, hated the ending. *shrug*. Felt it was stilted.
Rating: 
Summary: Bring the noise.....
Review: Entertainment, what can I say? Information, religion, chaos, violence and humour, I found this book refreshing and overall an excellent read. Gibson is cool but as angst filled as an ugly adolescent and it was a pleasure to read a cyberpunk novel that was not filled with self-absorbed rhetoric on the dark future of humankind, but rather made fun of our own existance and beliefs. Not scientifically accurate? Well this IS fiction! Not religiously or archaelogically accurate? Religion is based on myths and fables anyway, Christianity more than most having been constantly edited in its brief history, and archaeology is largely the opinions of a select few academics. I loved the Librarians "lecture", regardless of the opinions of those who claimed it as boring!Enjoy your reading, buy it and devour it! Like Carl Hiassen, I love to find an author who can let the reader have some fun. :o)
Rating:
Summary: "Snow Crash" is hip, hysterical and mind-bending
Review: A seminal book; Stephenson creates a dizzy, panoramic world. Savvy extrapolation on information theory and commercialization (the opening pizza-delivery episode is wildly funny). Left me astonished and overjoyed to have a writer of Stephenson's scope and sophistication working in the science-fiction field.
Rating:
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!
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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).
Rating:
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!
Rating:
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
Rating: 
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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