Rating: 
Summary: .
Review: .
Rating: 
Summary: So Hip that it Hurts
Review: My first impression of this book: so hip that it hurts. This book cuts you. (Yeah, I'm being overly dramatic - but I swear, this is what I thought about 50 pages in.) But the style grows on you. It's fast paced, it's fun, it's futuristic. Plus, it's got lots of fun and interesting theoretical stuff involved. Though sometimes the drop from constant action traveling at the speed of sound, to long discussions centering around hypotheticals was a bit - jarring? rough? of a comedown? I don't know - while I enjoyed both types, I might have preferred a bit more of a transition between. (And the end, while workable and very much enjoyable and of a piece with the rest of the book, felt a bit as if he didn't quite know what to do with some of the characters. Fun ending line, though.) I love his version of America. Scary that I can almost see it working
Rating:
Summary: Just Awesome!
Review: This is everything that Neuromancer (by Bill Gibson) should have been. This book is wonderful!
Rating:
Summary: This is cyberpunk? I like cyberpunk, then.
Review: I don't like to label books, movies and music. All I care is if I have fun with them or not. And, reading "Snow crash" I surely did. Neal Stephenson's plots are so crazy and involve elements so appearently unrelated that trying to explain the plot here will only spoil some of the fun. It's enough to say that "Snow crash" is about a near future that is very dark, yet brightly colored by Stephenson's good writing. Add to that a main character that is the greatest sword fighter in the world, a teenage girl who fears almost nothing, a gigantic aleut who carries an atomic bomb wherever he goes, a virtual reality universe called The Metaverse, an enormous conglomeration of boats drifting in the Pacific close to the californian coast, and an ancient sumerian cult that is capable to interact with the human brain in a most unusual way, and we have a sample of what is "Snow crash". But there's more. Stephenson is able to write, in the same breath, sex, action, pursuits, sword fights, and technological stuff. What's best, when it's needed, Stephenson's didatics is great. He deals with some very misty subjects, and yet he is able to make the reader completely at ease. His characters are very unusual, greatly developed, colorful and interesting. Some of his ideas are so crazy that they may be hard to grasp at once. But when you understand the greater picture behind Stephenson's main ideas, "Snow crash" is a very entertaining book. My only complaint is about the ending. I expected a bit more in the final moments of the story. If you have read "Cryptonomicon", there's no way to compare the Snow crash's plot with Cryptonomicon. Cryptonomicon is much more complex and lenghty. But Snow crash has the same allucinating pace, and Stephenson's characteristic style of writing. Which is, difficult but engrossing. Grade 9.0/10
Rating: 
Summary: A real brain spin
Review: This book reads like an action-film on steriods. Its a wild ride, and clearly ahead of its time, being written in 1991. There are great characters, and it handles technology reasonably responsibly with some interesting sub-rasa political commentary thrown in for good measure. Its pretty violent, and typical for Stephenson, the book includes 1 short sex scene. (The age of one of the participants made be a bit uncomfortable, but I am repressed, so it could be just me.)
Rating:
Summary: Great Read II
Review: I read this after cryptonomicon and was a little bit dissappointed, but i think it's mostly due to the difference in length, which allows for the longer book to be a bit more engrosing. It's also a bit less refined than cryptonomicon, so lots of the humor/descriptive stuff seems a more forced than a natural facet of characterization (a la the hilarious but mostly cosmetic samurai pizza hacker bit). That aside, snow crash is a great book to read (i think it took me 2 sittings, minus bathroom and refreshment trips) with a great balance of humor and action, but with the same brezziness of cryptonomicon which made me wish it had been a bit longer.
Rating:
Summary: Snow Crash
Review: was such a great book for its time. That's not to say it's not still a great book. It is. But when I first read it, it blew me away, and it shows how great Stephenson is. If you like this, I recommend Cryptonomicon, which is very different but super cool, too.
Rating:
Summary: Very hip cyperpunk
Review: I really wish I could have given this book five stars. It
was so close. But I can't, because the ending of the novel
just wanders away. If the author had tightened it up a bit, I could easily give this novel five stars. Still, I enthusiastically recommend the book, even with the wandering
away. What's it about? An ancient virus disguised as a modern
bitmap that fries peoples' brains. Enter Hiro Protagonist,
Mafia pizza deliverer (for a while), programer and hacker,
and the world's greatest sword-fighter (at least in the novel's
version of the Matrix). Throw in a 15-year girl as a courier
who skateboards around by hooking onto vehicles with her
magnetic harpoon, a psycho killer with a really weird knife,
and a lot of other characters, and you end up with a novel
that I found absorbing from the first sentence to the last.
Stephenson makes up a lot of his own words, which he doesn't explain, but he doesn't have to, because you pick up what he means
quickly. If there is one cyberpunk novel to read to introduce
you to the genre, this is it.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting read, very fast paced
Review: I am not a usual sci-fi genre fan, but I picked this up after hearing it mentioned a number of times on sites like Slashdot. It was a good read, very fast paced and very entertaining. The future he describes is also interesting to think about, it's one where governments have been disbanded in favor of corporations. I wish the author had talked more about the socioeconomic landscape in his book, but it was still interesting nevertheless. Since this book was written in the late 80s, some of the ideas about technology seem a bit dated. My one qualm with this book was the ending. There was a lot of build-up and tension, all to be resolved in a somewhat cheesy manner in perhaps 5% of the entire book's content (like the last 20 pages). Plus, the ending was too much of a happy-go-lucky ending: all the bad guys die, all the good guys live and walk off into the sunset. It was just kind of a let down to have these big, bad characters killed off so quickly after having spent the previous 430 pages extolling just how tough, crazy, and maniacal they were...
Rating:
Summary: Rave reviews for Snow Crash
Review: This is truly one of the best books I've ever read. Neal Stephenson's talent is right up there with JRR Tolkien's (and that's saying a lot. Rarely do I make such a comparison). Stephenson has a hard hitting, pull-no-punches style that is immediately gripping while being simultaneously humorous. He makes some of the most fascinating analogies throughout the story. The story is an ancient theme of societal sabotage and secrecy, set in a futuristic (non-post apocalyptic) America, in which the president himself is negligable in his power. The small troupe of heros and heroines are faced with subverting the mainstream political paradigm. It's fascinating how they go about uncovering a terrible plot, and brilliant how they overcome it. This book is just an excellent, excellent read.
|
