Ian Connel's Reviews > Snow Crash

Written in 1992, Snow Crash was prophetic. But not in the way everybody thinks.

Stephenson's novel is a patchwork of postmodernist garbage. It told us we were headed into a postmodern age, where stories don't need messages, good and evil don't exist, and the highest values are power, or, if you're a cliche Generation X-er like the author, cynicism. "Oh, power is like, so bad, and so hard. I'll just fight against it from here in the coffee shop." Sound familiar?

The X-Files and Fight Club are in the same family as this novel, but I love them. I don't dislike this book because it hates on Christians. I got past that. Sure, it's trite nowadays to make Christians the villains, but there are some bad ones out there. I dislike this book because it fails so hard at humanity. And plot!

"Here are some super cool techno-characters fighting against the stupid people who stayed in the past, brawling over irrational tribalism!" And yet it's plotted like a badly-written TV series. Take some notecards, write out some scenes, stuff each paragraph with cynical commentary to high-five some abstract audience that wants to see itself as above the culture it lives in, shuffle, arrange, read out loud. Could make a fun game for hairy guys at comics shops. Does not make a good novel.

Also having two fifteen year-old girls having sex with anybody - with one of them a sort of mindless female MTV trope who is supposed to be the the sympathetic character in the story - that was creepy. Sorry Neal, it ain't feminism, and it ain't egalitarianism. You put it in a novel, where it's a projection of your ideal. Gross. Ewww. Get me the hell out of here.

EDIT: I gave Stephenson two stars because he got one thing right that has become true recently: people crave interpersonal interaction. The "facial software" detail matches the reason YouTube is exploding now. And what do we see most on YouTube thumbnails? Faces exaggeratedly expressing the (intended) tone of the video.