Nadine in NY Jones's Reviews > Snow Crash

You can't get hurt by looking at a bitmap. Or can you?

Another modern classic that I never got around to reading before. In my questionable defense: when this book first came out, I didn't read it, because I confused it with Snow Bound (a book I HAD read), because there was no GoodReads back then to set me straight, so I thought I'd read it already ... A false case of btdt ... Kind of how I didn't listen to Nine Inch Nails for years, because I confused them with The Nails, and thought, eh, I've heard that before. Or how I kept passing up Beautiful Creatures because I confused it with Heavenly Creatures (in retrospect, I wasn't really missing anything with that book...). Anyway, Snow Crash is referred to SO OFTEN, I really ought to read it.

The plot revolves around the mysterious Snow Crash. What is it?

“Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”

Juanita shrugs. “What's the difference?”

And why is it being pushed? Who is behind it? What do they gain? And, most importantly, how can they be stopped?

I'll be honest: I wasn't expecting much from this book. All I knew about it was that it was written by a white guy, endlessly promoted by white bro-dudes, and touted as a phenomenal novel pioneering cyberpunk. But I'd already read William Gibson's books - THAT pioneered cyberpunk so far as I was concerned. I figured this was going to be some macho testosterone-laden nonsense. So, basically, I wasn't expecting much. I was wrong.

The first chapter certainly fit my expectations: all that fast-black-car Deliverator nonsense, with a katana no less! could it fit the stereotype any better?? But that is just set-up.

There's a lot to talk about here. Stephenson cleverly dumps a shit-ton of info about ancient cultures, languages, and religions (much of this oddly presupposing that the old religious myths were based on truth and not just, you know, myths), draws connections between language and biological viruses, draws other connections between human language and computer programming and computer viruses, then stirs all this together in a bleak, satirical vision of the world in the near future.

This is all fascinating, and the book is populated with quirky and mostly interesting characters, but the plot l-u-m-b-e-r-s. Plot points are forced to unspool so slowly, but yet we are buried in avalanches of infodumps. One character amasses a mountain of info, but won't say what his conclusions are. Another character is researching, but won't say what she is researching. We get vague bullshit like :

Beyond that, Juanita doesn't have much to say. She doesn't want to get into it now, she says. She doesn't want to prejudice Hiro's thinking “at this point.”

and

“Look at the Babel stack, Hiro, and then visit me if I get back from Astoria.”

and

“There's some good stuff in the Babel stack about someone named Inanna,” she says. “Who's Inanna?” “A Sumerian goddess. I'm sort of in love with her. Anyway, you can't understand what I'm about to do until you understand Inanna.”

You know what would go a lot faster? If you just TOLD Hiro about Inanna, and just told him the highlights of the data. Instead of dumping a literal mountain of flash drives on top of him and telling him to hunt for the needle.

This question will come up a lot:

“How and why and what are you talking about?”

But there is not always a satisfying answer.

It gets really annoying, really fast. I understand why the bad guys choose obfuscation, but the good guys shouldn't. It doesn't make any sense. It just makes the book longer.

Mentions of "Soviet Union," "fiber optic cable," "xerox," "audiotape," "videotape," "FORTRAN," and "computer disk" give this a retro feel and had me running to Google to see when this was published: 1992. Funny what you think will sound "futuristic and edgy" and what actually sounds futuristic when you are thirty years down the road. I guess I can't hold it against him that he didn't realize how little anyone would care about the USSR and how mundane and ubiquitous high-speed WiFi would become....

The computer is a featureless black wedge. It does not have a power cord, but there is a narrow translucent plastic tube emerging from a hatch on the rear, spiraling across the cargo pallet and the floor, and plugged into a crudely installed fiber-optics socket above the head of the sleeping Vitaly Chernobyl. In the center of the plastic tube is a hair-thin fiber-optic cable. The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth between Hiro's computer and the rest of the world. In order to transmit the same amount of information on paper, they would have to arrange for a 747 cargo freighter packed with telephone books and encyclopedias to power-dive into their unit every couple of minutes, forever.

LOL, dude! Even Kindergarteners take high speed data transfer for granted nowadays.

Also, I can see how this book heavily influenced Ready Player One: living in storage containers, free lance computer hacker, talented drifter ....

In the worldwide community of hackers, Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago.

I can also see how this book heavily influenced Alif the Unseen, with all the discussion of computer programs being analogous to religious doctrines.

“So the deuteronomists codified the religion. Made it into an organized, self-propagating entity,” Hiro says. “I don't want to say virus. But according to what you just quoted me, the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host. The host—the human—makes copies of it. And more humans come to synagogue and read it.”

... “So the strict, book-based religion of the deuteronomists inoculated the Hebrews against the Asherah virus.”

“In combination with strict monogamy and other kosher practices, yes,” the Librarian says. “The previous religions, from Sumer up to Deuteronomy, are known as prerational. Judaism was the first of the rational religions. As such, in Lagos's view, it was much less susceptible to viral infection because it was based on fixed, written records. This was the reason for the veneration of the Torah and the exacting care used when making new copies of it—informational hygiene.”

And I can see how this book was influenced by other sci fi books that play with religion and multiple realities, such as Zelazny's wonderful and weird Lord of Light.

This made me laugh:

The warm-up band, Blunt Force Trauma, gets rolling at about 9: 00 P.M.

because there really IS a thrash band called Blunt Force Trauma. I've heard of them, but don't know enough about them to know if they got their name from this book or if it's just coincidence.

There is some bizarre humor here:

Y.T. is maxing at a Mom's Truck Stop on 405, waiting for her ride. Not that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom's Truck Stop. If, like, a semi ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom's Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid muscles until she reached a Snooze 'n' Cruise full of horny derelicts rather than go into a Mom's Truck Stop.

There are pithy philosophical observations, like this:

Once she gets over the shock of it and settles into a routine, she starts looking around her, watching the other fish-cutting dames, and realizes that this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.

And fun little shout-outs to the 90s:

“There's money in the storage compartment in front of you,” Ng says.

Y.T. opens the glove compartment, as anyone else would call it, and finds a thick bundle of worn-out, dirty, trillion-dollar bills. Ed Meeses.

“Jeez, couldn't you get any Gippers? This is kind of bulky.”

There is a lot of religious history, which is interesting at first, but after a while my eyes glazed over:

“Who decided to purge Asherah from Judaism?”

“The deuteronomic school—defined, by convention, as the people who wrote the book of Deuteronomy as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.”

“And what kind of people were they?”

“Nationalists. Monarchists. Centralists. The forerunners of the Pharisees. At this time, the Assyrian king Sargon II had recently conquered Samaria—northern Israel—forcing a migration of Hebrews southward into Jerusalem. Jerusalem expanded greatly and the Hebrews began to conquer territory to the west, east, and south. It was a time of intense nationalism and patriotic fervor. The deuteronomic school embodied those attitudes in scripture by rewriting and reorganizing the old tales.”

“Rewriting them how?”

“Moses and others believed that the River Jordan was the border of Israel, but the deuteronomists believed that Israel included Transjordan, which justified aggression to the east. There are many other examples: the predeuteronomic law said nothing about a monarch. The Law as laid down by the deuteronomic school reflected a monarchist system. ...

There is an annoying misunderstanding of what "Freon" is and how air conditioners use it. (Yet another similarity between this book and Alif!)

“The warehouse area is not as dirty as the first place we went,” Ng says reassuringly, “so the fact that you can't use the toxics mask won't be so bad. You may smell some Chill fumes.”

Y.T. does a double take at this new phenomenon: Ng using the street name for a controlled substance. “You mean Freon?” she says.

“Yes. The man who is the object of our inquiry is horizontally diversified. That is, he deals in a number of different substances. But he got his start in Freon. He is the biggest Chill wholesaler/ retailer on the West Coast.”

Finally, Y.T. gets it. Ng's van is air-conditioned. Not with one of those shitty ozone-safe air conditioners, but with the real thing, a heavy metal, high-capacity, bone-chilling Frigidaire blizzard blaster. It must use an incredible amount of Freon.

For all practical purposes, that air conditioner is a part of Ng's body. Y.T.' s driving around with the world's only Freon junkie.

“You buy your supply of Chill from this guy?”

First of all, you can't smell Freon in an open atmosphere, it is too faint (unless it's burning). Trust me, I've been around enough R12 and R22 to know. You can smell R11 (it smells like a swimming pool, from the Chlorine) but that's not a Freon. Freon is the brand name for R12, later expanded to include a set of high pressure refrigerants - go ahead and Google it! Also, they are generally non-toxic and reasonably safe to inhale, provided you're getting enough Oxygen also. Most importantly, a good air conditioning system is leak tight and uses a set amount of refrigerant - it does not go away or "wear out" so you don't need a steady supply! A guy like Ng who can afford the best would have a leak tight system and would not need a Freon supplier. In addition, you can get perfectly cold air from an air conditioner running "ozone safe" refrigerants, too. The degradation is in overall system efficiency (that is: the power required to run the unit), NOT in the chilled air temperature.

The frequent interchanges with The Librarian were excessively wordy to the point of tedium. A brief example:

“Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, ‘Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, ‘The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning ‘master of the divine name.' ”

Yes that paragraph is interesting. But imagine hundreds of those paragraphs strung together. Your feelings about that will be your feelings about the book. If you can't wait to dig into it, then get this book immediately. If that all seems like a bit too much information, then expect your eyes to glaze over while you read this book.

In the end, this was just too long and tedious for me. I realized I was finding other things to do instead of reading this book. I read other books instead of reading this book. I played Zuma instead of reading this book. I cleaned my desk instead of reading this book. So while I appreciate how ground-breaking and influential this book was, I can't really say I enjoyed it.

Even more damning, I never fully understood the motivation of the characters. Why did Uncle Enzo become so inordinately fond of Y.T.? Why did Y.T. help Hiro? Why did Y.T. agree to partner with him in a very undefined way? What is Y.T.'s real name? Also, where did Hiro get the money from for his trip Northwest??? He went from broke to "unlimited expense account." I guess he was funded by Juanita? That was unclear.

And the icky sex between (view spoiler)[Y.T. and Raven was difficult for me. As we are reminded several times, she's FIFTEEN. I don't know exactly how old Raven is, but he's about the same age as Hiro, who is close to forty*. 40 yo man and a 15 yo young woman. That's just icky, I don't care how consensual it is.

* Hiro was 17 when he first met Juanita as freshmen in college. After college he worked in Japan for "a few years" then got a computer job back home, so he's about 25 at this point. Hiro and Juanita begin a serious relationship, so that's another few years. They split up and date others - another two or so years, at this point Hiro is about 30. She dates Da5id and they marry and then divorce, that's maybe another five years, at least. Then she moves to Oregon and they don't see her for a while, maybe another five years, making Hiro, Juanita, and Raven all at least 40. (hide spoiler)] (not a humongous spoiler, just being careful!)

Finally, the number one thing that bugged me: the entire plot hinges on the idea that viruses came into existence thousands of years AFTER humans, and the Pandora story and the apple in the Garden of Eden story were actually about the first virus. That's just ridiculous. Viruses are sooooo tiny and simple, it makes NO sense that humans would exist first. Think about it: bacteria were the first life form on earth. Probably the second life form was the virus that infected that bacteria. I was perfectly willing to accept the future world Stephenson created, the Metaverse, the Franchulates and Burbclaves, the Rat Things, the pooning skateboarders, even the neurolinguistic hackers which are not terribly possible but still plausible within a science fiction world .... But I could not accept this notion that humans were fully evolved before viruses existed.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/art...

On the other hand, the ending was wonderfully open-ended, I couldn't believe it ended so abruptly and I really enjoyed that WTF? feel. So for that, I give it another star, for a total of 3. I didn't love the satirical aspects, but I wasn't overly bothered by them either. I would have liked to see more of Juanita, Raven, Mr Ng, and Uncle Enzo, and A LOT less of The Librarian. Also, Dr Lagos was confusingly named, I wish Stephenson had picked a different name. Overall, I think this is becoming a sci-fi classic, so I'm glad I read it, just so I can get any references I might see in the future.

ETA: I think of this book now whenever I read about floating utopian societies (which isn't really all that infrequently), ESPECIALLY floating utopian societies backed by rich conservative men who are looking to get away from the laws of existing countries, like Peter Thiel:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/peter-thi...
and Patri Friedman:
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechco...