Snow Crash

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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.

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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

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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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Summary: Well, I gotta admit ...
Review: ... I have never considered myself a fan of "science fiction." I've even gone so far as to state, on more than one occassion, that I, ahem, hate "science fiction." Well, Neal Stephenson has proven me a liar and a hypocrite. Snow Crash, though, is a far cry from the elves and dwarves that I dare say I still hate, but nonetheless I've got to say this book is great. If you're hesitant like I was, read on below and take these people at their word. I did. And I'm glad I did.

Stephenson creates an apocalyptic, not-too-distant, futuristic world and compliments has savvy (read: unlikely?) vision with a cast of characters that are not only engaging, but thoroughly alive within the confines of the written word. Hell, when an author can create a character that makes you gasp when that character comes close to peril you've got something special in your hands.

Do yourself a favor, naysayers, read Snow Crash. It might not turn you on to vampires, elves, dragons and their ilk, but it's a hell of a ride

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Summary: The book Neuromancer should have been.
Review: This is the kind of in-your-face, down-and-dirty futurism I was expecting when I picked up Neuromancer. But while William Gibson bores you with his vaporous descriptions and lifeless characters, Neal Stephenson shocks you back awake with a fully-realized landscape of technological possibilities. It only seems a matter of time before Stephenson's vison of huge pizza conglomerates running the world becomes reality. The book is filled with one engaging character after another, including our two leads: One a pizza delivery driver/programmer/expert swordsman, the other a street-wise courier who makes her deliveries by 'harpooning' cars and skateboarding behind them attatched by a wire. The plot rockets forward at a breakneck pace, only occasionally getting side-lined by some oppressive history lessons used to compare human and computer languages. But if you want to catch a glimpse of the REAL cyberpunk future that may lay ahead of us, expose yourself to Snow Crash

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Summary: Jack into plutonium powered samurai space ganja mafia pizza.
Review:

I'm not a "reader". I read all of Tolkien and Douglas Adams and that's about it, but Snow Crash had me in its grasp from the moment I read the first paragraph. After about a year of prodding by several of my friends I finally picked it up a year ago Halloween and barely managed to stretch it out past voting day (~one week).

I think that other reviewer here must have read it backwards! This book starts out in high gear and only runs down enough by the end to let you not feel TOO bad that it's over. Still, I wish this were a serial publication. ...are you listening Neal!?!? Only now I'm afraid to read anything else for fear of being let down. ;-)

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Summary: Move over William Gibson - This is the Future!
Review: The near future: America is the poorest country on earth, with everything from Mafia controlled Pizza Delivery to a publicly floated Library of Congress and CIA. A land of franchises, where the only thing produced of value is the Three Ms: Music Movies and Microcode. Enter Hero Protagonist - sometime hacker and Pizza delivery ninja. Something smells in the Metaverse, a global fibre optic virtual reality realtime what-we-want-the-internet-to-be place, more real than the REALITY. Something is destoying the hackers that mke the Metaverse run. It's upto Hero to find out what and save himself and his friends from a fate worse than death: snowcrash. But Hero discovers that outside the Metaverse, there is a plan to horrible to contemplate... With a collection of partners including 'YT', a smart talking road Kourier grrl, Hero sets out to defeat a threat that would make James Bond, Arnie, Sly and others tremble. This is a compelling book. Start Friday night and don't plan anything for the weekend. Snowcrash will make you read it all the way through. By turns funny, philisophical, historical and action packed, Snowcrash is a must read for anyone interested in a vision of the near future. READ IT NOW! But beware, you'll find the Internet very boring after reading this book. :-

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, a frightening fore-sight into what lies ahead.
Review: The book was great. Although it starts out rather slowly, (first few chapters), it soon gets you hooked. From dealing mr. super pizza delivery man who goes home and becomes super virtual reality hacker... You gotta read the book, then look at communications technology today. Frightning.

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Summary: A surrealistic yet highly probable look at the future!
Review: The moment I started reading this book I couldn't stop. It offers not only insight into today's society and psychology, but shows what could really be the future of America. This is also one of the first books I have read that accurrately depicts hackers. It's fast paced fun with some interesting intellectual discussions

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Summary: Your basic over-the-top chock-a-blockbuster
Review: This book is worth the price even if you do nothing more than read the opening set-up piece involving a dedicated Mafia "Deliveror" (aka pizza delivery boy). This book defies any easy explanation, and I am convinced that Stephenson's next book _Diamond Age_ won the Nebula Award primarily out of regret for failure to grant the award to this book a year earlier. _Snow Crash_ is the perfect example of a book where the whole is less than a sum of its parts, but there are so many wonderfully bizarre characters, out-of-left-field (and sometimes silly) subplots, and gonzo goings-on in this book that it was to me a mind-blowing reading experience. Those who demand tight plots and dislike loose ends may find this book frustrating. Those who liked, for instance, the movie "Buckaroo Banzai" (and don't mind that they never found out why the watermellon was in the vise) will not want to miss this book