Mario the lone bookwolf's Reviews > Snow Crash

Don´t do drugs, cyborg metaverse cyberpunk ghetto kids

High VR AR and finally only reality.
What would VR and AR be without being hooked on a potentially fatal wonderdrug, as the only chance to escape bleak reality, in an anarcho neoliberal nightmare controlled by corporations, organized crime, and the rest of government mutated into a bizarre self satire of bureaucracy without any real power.

Not like his second milestone, Diamond Age.
In contrast to the somewhat Dickensian Diamond Age, this one is pure cyberpunk without biopunk elements, accelerating the badass dystopian transhumanist ideals to degenerated turbo capitalistic free market terror.

Humor as black as the world
I had some of the best laughs with the hidden easter egg black comedy. Be careful not to miss them! Kool Aid, lol. This is by far Stephensons`funniest novel, I don´t know why he didn´t continue to expand this element.

Remember the mutating memes
One of the most famous, best, important, and mind boggling ideas of this work is that any ideology, memes, manifestations of epigenetic and cultural evolution in progress, sadly often faith and sick ideologies, are parasitic, viral information, infecting the minds of humans as a first, single, abnormal mutation in the brain of just one, possibly a bit incestuous, ape with full borderline bipolar schizophrenic potential. I don´t want to discriminate against incest proponents, I´m already insulting enough other favorite target audiences, it´s just that one of the many, negative side effects is mental illness.

Action, philosophy, linguistic theories mixed with faith origin ideas, and quick cuts between pure fun and sophisticated mind penetration that will leave one blown away.
Mix this all with the cool, quick writing style, extreme high complexity and density of ideas, philosophy, switching between action scenes and deep, linguistic introspections, inner monologues, dialogues, and social criticism, and one has a milestone of sci-fi and literature in general.

Who combined humanities, tech, and economics first?
I wonder how many sci-fi movies have been influenced by literature, someone should consider making a list, because I watch close to no TV and will thereby never be able to compare it. In this case, I am not even sure if Gibson, Stephenson, or a forgotten, unknown author was the first one to mix economic criticism with VR and humanities.

Cherry pick wisely
I´ve said this before, don´t read all of Stephenson´s work if you aren´t really into sci-fi or like to skim and scan lengthy passages, because Diamond Age and Snow Crash aren´t like many of his other novels. These are often more something like hard-science fiction, space opera, philosophical theory hybrids that are really exhausting to read, don´t care about writing conventions, and could have been much better, if just reduced to an acceptable length and included in a normal, suspenseful plot. Instead of just egomaniacally letting the author drivel about whatever comes to his mind in the form he thinks is cool, that is what sadly made his brick books like Anathem and Cryptonomicon unreadable for many people.

In a parallel universe, Stephenson could have evolved into a readable sci fi superhero
Instead, Stephenson sabotages himself and his legacy, by being too much focused on the high brow, deep, art aspect and forgetting that he once was one of the prodigies of cyberpunk and sci-fi itself before becoming unreadable for a vast majority of the bibliophiles, even sci fi holics like myself. I´ve read many of his works and enjoyed them, but won´t reread them, because the best genre of them all is my lifeblood, but I couldn´t find another author who got so hypercomplex, interwoven, and difficult or impossible to understand as Stephenson with his close to 1k page behemoths of books. Yes, they offer unique and intelligent insights and revelations, but this would taste much less bitter without the knowledge that most readers, for completely understandable, logical, and appropriate reasons, won´t ever become comfortable with it.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...