Cult Beat: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

September 6, 2011 by Bryce Wilson

Cult Beat is our reminder to inReaders that some literature can’t help but attract a cult following. Check out how we make that call.

You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the street and you will see all of these.

What’s It About?
The Internet has evolved into a virtual reality known as the Metaverse, while the U.S. has fallen into a nightmare of privatization. Hiro Protagonist, last of the freelance hackers, samurai and pizza delivery boy, encounters a digital drug called Snow Crash that infects users in the real world through their avatars. Concurrently, a language virus is sweeping through the meat space population. A giant man-made island filled with every refugee East Asia had to offer is about to hit the Californian coast and a one man nuclear device is walking around Los Angeles. Got all that? It’s the apocalypse as you’ve never seen it before, and only Hiro, his sidekick, rocket-powered delivery girl YT, and The Mafia stand against it.

Where Does It Come From?
The mind of Neal Stephenson. A revered place for a reason. After his somewhat disastrous first novel The Big U and his follow up, the interesting but flawed Zodiac, third time proved lucky for Stephenson. Snow Crash reads as if it was the last book that Stephenson thought he’d ever get a chance to write, so he shoved everything he ever wanted to write about into one narrative—ruminations on religion, philosophy, politics, technology, economy, samurai swords and motorcycles. Snow Crash feels more like ten books in one than a single work.

Why Is It Cult?
The book is considered one of the defining books of the cyberpunk genre. To really understand why, you have to compare it to the works of the other giant of the field, William Gibson. While Gibson envisioned cyberspace through a dark noir prism, Stephenson’s vision of a candy-colored, never-ending battle of the memes is actually a lot closer to what we ended up with. Stephenson may not have included LOLCATS in the Metaverse, but they would have fit right in. Stephenson was also prescient in being one of the first to see privatization as the next great threat facing America. Like a Tea Partiers wet dream, the federal government is a joke and all regulation is gone. Thanks to this, the world is a nightmare of franchises and corporations, all openly ruled by different factions of organized crime.

How Does It Hold Up?
Hearing Stephenson’s name in high school, I curiously picked up the first volume of The Baroque Cycle. Read the first fifty pages. Chuckled merrily to myself and preceded not to read another word that Stephenson had written for ten years. This year, as I looked for a piece of sci-fi to try on my Nook, I picked up Snow Crash. After I finished, I had only one stunned thought in my head: Why had no one told me that Neil Stephenson was funny?

That Stephenson is funny, very funny (If you can make it through one of the absurdly dry monologues from or about the character Uncle Enzo while keeping a straight face there might be something wrong with you), is something the new reader would do well to keep in mind when approaching Snow Crash. Indeed, those who come to it seeking a straight piece of cyberpunk, action sci-fi will most likely come away disappointed. It’s a satire that plays it straight. An action film that can’t keep a straight face. The pace is so relentless, the events so outlandishly outsized, the development of the narrative so arbitrary, the tone so deadpan, that many people can’t figure out just what they are reading.

And isn’t that awesome?

My advice is just go with it. Like one of Stephenson’s rocket-powered couriers who zips through freeway traffic, if you think too much about it, you’ll get splattered.

Snow Crash isn’t perfect. Stephenson’s style is so dense that it rivals some dwarf stars, and it takes some getting used to. The story grinds to a halt about ¾’s of the way through in order for the most ungodly exposition dumps this side of The Architect, making “concordantly” a dirty word for a generation of genre fans. The book also features one of Stephenson’s patented ending. The type where you’re pretty sure something has been resolved. You just don’t know what.

But this is simply the price of admission for reading an author who genuinely plays by his own rules. I’ll pay it happily.

MOVED BY WHAT YOU READ?

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