his review talks about the book, what I liked about it and what I thought could have been better, and also mentions what I've been thinking about since then, as prompted by the book. There are no spoilers in this review, at least no more than you'll get by reading 50 pages and the back cover.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
Plot: 6
Concept: 9
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/7
Characters: 8
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 7.5

So I liked it, more the concept than the execution, but why? And what's the book about? That's a tough one.

There aren't any dates given in the novel, but when Snow Crash was published in 1992 it was set in a near but greatly- altered future, which means that now, 13 years later, the story is actually set in the past. It's not dated though, and it reads like it's taking place in about 2050, given how many changes there have been to the world. If not for references to several of the older characters having fought in Vietnam or World War II, I would never have thought it was set any time before the middle of the 21st century.

But what's it about? Tough to say, and in fact I've already needed more than a paragraph to even begin answering the question.

Basically, the novel presents the radically-altered state of the future world, combines that with the super-Internet online world, and has a main character racing back and forth between both of them as he tries to stop a deadly virus from destroying the mind of every hacker in the world while the same virus takes over most of the physical world by mutating into a different form. It's far more complicated than that, and throws in all sorts of world history, ancient languages, lots of interesting sub characters, romance, bizarre future sex, wild action scenes, and so on. The basic story is just okay, hence my 6 score for plot. What makes the novel something worth reading is the world state in it, the interesting characters and their interactions, and the almost-glorious interweaving of Sumerian history, language, the Tower of Babel myth, and computer programming.

Want to know more? There aren't any spoilers here.

The main character is punningly and somewhat inexplicably (since there aren't any more awful puns or silly jokes in the book) named Hiro Protagonist. He's a half black, half Japanese male in his early 20s who was raised an army brat and has become a freelance hacker, while working for the mafia delivering pizzas to pay the rent on the storage space he shares with an Azerbaijani heavy metal singer.  Hiro's not really in the mafia though, since in the book's world the US has basically dissolved into free- for- all zones studded with various tiny countries in franchise form; sort of like if every McDonalds and Burger King and 7/11 and Kinkos was its own nation with its own laws and computerized border guards and pass gates. Along with the dissolving of central power, all laws went away, and thus the mafia has become just another corporation, one that runs businesses of all types. They're actually sort of the good guys, at times, though it took me several hundred pages to begin to grasp that fact.

The world of Snow Crash is interesting, though I don't think it would be sustainable for an hour in reality, since so much of it is anarchy and every man for himself, bracketed up against every sort of armed enclave, independent state, pack of lunatics, nuclear weapon-packing extremist, and so on.  It's an interesting setting for a story, but it doesn't seem sustainable.

The other major aspect of the novel is the metaverse, which is a sort of virtual reality internet that everyone who can afford it jacks into and wanders around in. Hiro was one of the original programmers of the metaverse, and as such has certain powers there that no one else possesses, and has extensive contacts there that enable the wild events of the novel to take place. Most of the action takes place in reality, but Hiro and others must constantly plug into the metaverse to get more information, talk to people who are plugged in from across the world, retrieve bug patches for malfunctioning super futuristic weapons, and more.

Oh, and Hiro is also the greatest sword fighter in the entire metaverse, and carries two samurai swords everywhere with him, in real life and the metaverse. And of course he gets to use them a few times.

There are lots of other characters, and in a style I approved of, we get to know all of them well enough to see that there aren't really any bad guys or good guys. The baddies have their own agendas and motivations and it's not at all guaranteed that you'll root against them once you know more about them. And, since most of the things the good guys do are simply motivated by greed, your desire to see them triumph may waver at the same time you begin to feel some sympathy for characters you previously disliked.

Y.T. is the second main character. She's a bit of a cliché attitude-heavy teen girl, a 15 y/o robo-skateboard riding messenger, with lots of high tech toys and a naive mother who works for the antiquated bureaucracy of the Feds; the actual remnants of the entirely irrelevant and impotent US government.  Raven is the apparent the bad guy; a mass murderer and assassin who is actually quite reasonable and charming in person, once you get to know him.  Uncle Enzo is the head of the mafia and a dedicated businessman with old fashioned ideas about loyalty and honor. L. Bob Rife is a megalomaniacal preacher with a worldwide franchise of church stores and a mysterious interest in Sumerian artifacts.  And so on.

All of these characters are pretty one-dimensional, in that they never really change during the novel. What makes them interesting are the bizarre and constantly-shifting environments they turn up in during the story, and the ways they interact. In fact, there's really no time for any of them to change, as many things happen in such a short period of time, and all of the characters are very different from each other in life experiences, goals, desires, methods, attitudes and more. There is certainly a nice variety of traits and types among the main characters.

What made the novel work for me, and what made me rate it much more highly than I would have just based on the interesting and inventive future world and actual plot elements, were Stephenson's efforts to make something more of the story. The book jacket tells of a new computer virus that's taking out the world's programmers and hackers, both in the metaverse and in reality, and you find out about that fairly early in the novel, when Da5id, Hiro's friend and one of the best hackers on earth, reads a scroll given to him in the metaverse and loses his mind in reality as well. Other hackers soon turn up with their minds blanked as well, and as Hiro and others investigate, we discover that the blanked hackers are now babbling along in a language that sounds much like xenoglossia; AKA speaking in tongues.

This seems like a strange detail at first, until the story goes on and we start to see bizarre links between the Tower of Babel myth, the ancient and extinct Sumerian language, religious trances, computer viruses, Sumerian god myths, and much more. That back story, the sort of grand unification theory of the story, is what elevated the book for me, and turned a pretty good cyberpunk tale into something with a touch of greatness.  If you've read The DaVinci Code, it's sort of like that; a pretty decent thriller that wouldn't have been too memorable if not for the religious tie ins that elevated it above being just another adventure novel. I think Snow Crash's background stuff is more interesting and more related to the novel than the Holy Grail stuff was in The DaVinci Code, and if I'd bought the whole legend merging with cyberpunk futuristic thriller aspect, Snow Crash could have been a masterpiece. I didn't though, and that's why this is just a good story, in a very cool future world, with enough literary and historical aspects to make it better, but not enough to make it great.

It's still well worth reading though, and don't be like Malaya and let the stupid pun of the main character's name completely turn you off to the novel without giving it a try.  I didn't expect to like it (I've had the paperback without ever reading it since about 1995, and in fact I brought it back from my dad's house where I rescued it from the oblivion of the bookshelf with all the books I didn't bring up to Malaya's house since there's no room for them here.) and was surprised when I found myself 100 pages in and enjoying the story quite a bit. It saw me quickly through two plane rides and a good two hours waiting in airports during my Xmas vacation, and if a book's good enough to hold my attention in such distracting environments, that's a pretty good plug for it right there.

It has stayed with me also; not the characters or the plot, but Stevenson's vision of the future, and especially the thoughts about how languages and cultures interact and evolve over time. I don't know how historically-accurate the stuff he wrote about the Sumerian culture and language was (I'd go into more details but it ties into the novel's plot so it would be spoilery.) but one of the themes of the novel is how cultures interact and merge in a time of hyper-globalization, and how that sort of interaction has gone on all through human history, especially when it comes to human languages.

Why do some languages persist and adapt and why do others die out? Is it better for a language to be easy to learn and use, even if it's limited when it comes to expressing advanced concepts? How much of language growth is due to the culture that's tied to it? Why do some ideas grow and mutate and form cultures, while others fall out of favor?

The novel doesn't go into get analytical detail about any of these issues, but it brings them up in the course of the action, and I've been thinking about them since I read it, and thinking about reading the novel again to see how it goes on a second run through. And that's something I very, very seldom get from a book.

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