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Nottyboy's Reviews > Snow Crash
Snow Crash
by
by
Juvenile nerd power fantasy in a nutshell
I'm a big fanboy of the cyberpunk genre. I should have liked this book. Instead, I can honestly say that hate this book-- and I also feel bad saying that about someone's work, because it's almost like saying you hate someone's baby.
Maybe it was all the hype I was exposed to before reading it,but I just could not shake a deep feeling of annoyance throughout 90% of this book. I found myself rolling my eyes a lot. And when I wasn't doing that, I was asking myself things like: "Do people really think this is the Cyberpunk cream of the crop? How many pages to go?"
The first obvious problem was the prose. Apparently some people's funny bones get tickled by similes comparing military bases to boils on someone's ass, metaphors about valleys and geological cunnilingus, and clever wordplay like calling refugees "Refus" (Refuse, har har har, get it?). To an elitist douchebag like me it just sounds juvenile and unimaginative. Combine all that with clunky, corny writing, and it's just downright lame. I could have also done without the "Unix In A Nutshell"-like explanations of EVERYTHING that drag down the flow of the book even more.
The other big problem was that I did not care about any of the characters. Hiro was annoying as hell because it's obvious that he's just a nerd's fantasy of what he wishes he could do. Y.T. also got on my nerves. She could have disappeared in the middle of the book and I would not have missed her. There was nothing likeable or interesting about either of them. Ironically, among all the cartoony, shallow characters, the only ones that had some sense of deeper humanity were Ng and Raven.
Another letdown was that the book's ideas were not that great, which did not help the plot. I just did not buy the whole "neurolinguistic hacking" angle as it was used. People becoming brainless zombies from watching some binary code on a screen, or listening to some Sumerian "namshub"? That is so far removed from the fields of NeuroLinguistic Programming and memetics, that this might as well have been a Dungeons & Dragons novel. I get it. Brains are just like computers, so they can get viruses, binary code, 0's and 1's, blah blah blah. Seriously, I can suspend disbelief, but you can only take a metaphor so far before it starts to look stupid.
Finally, for a book that's supposed to be a belly busting satire, the humor in this book is rather lame and nerdy. I read people talking about how this book made them howl with laughter, but almost everything fell pretty flat for me. The only section that got a half-assed 'heh' from me was the government policy on the use of toilet paper, but by the second page the joke had already become stale.
All in all, I doubt that I will buy another book from this author. Judging from what little I've read in Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age, there is little that has changed for me to warrant another look.
I'm a big fanboy of the cyberpunk genre. I should have liked this book. Instead, I can honestly say that hate this book-- and I also feel bad saying that about someone's work, because it's almost like saying you hate someone's baby.
Maybe it was all the hype I was exposed to before reading it,but I just could not shake a deep feeling of annoyance throughout 90% of this book. I found myself rolling my eyes a lot. And when I wasn't doing that, I was asking myself things like: "Do people really think this is the Cyberpunk cream of the crop? How many pages to go?"
The first obvious problem was the prose. Apparently some people's funny bones get tickled by similes comparing military bases to boils on someone's ass, metaphors about valleys and geological cunnilingus, and clever wordplay like calling refugees "Refus" (Refuse, har har har, get it?). To an elitist douchebag like me it just sounds juvenile and unimaginative. Combine all that with clunky, corny writing, and it's just downright lame. I could have also done without the "Unix In A Nutshell"-like explanations of EVERYTHING that drag down the flow of the book even more.
The other big problem was that I did not care about any of the characters. Hiro was annoying as hell because it's obvious that he's just a nerd's fantasy of what he wishes he could do. Y.T. also got on my nerves. She could have disappeared in the middle of the book and I would not have missed her. There was nothing likeable or interesting about either of them. Ironically, among all the cartoony, shallow characters, the only ones that had some sense of deeper humanity were Ng and Raven.
Another letdown was that the book's ideas were not that great, which did not help the plot. I just did not buy the whole "neurolinguistic hacking" angle as it was used. People becoming brainless zombies from watching some binary code on a screen, or listening to some Sumerian "namshub"? That is so far removed from the fields of NeuroLinguistic Programming and memetics, that this might as well have been a Dungeons & Dragons novel. I get it. Brains are just like computers, so they can get viruses, binary code, 0's and 1's, blah blah blah. Seriously, I can suspend disbelief, but you can only take a metaphor so far before it starts to look stupid.
Finally, for a book that's supposed to be a belly busting satire, the humor in this book is rather lame and nerdy. I read people talking about how this book made them howl with laughter, but almost everything fell pretty flat for me. The only section that got a half-assed 'heh' from me was the government policy on the use of toilet paper, but by the second page the joke had already become stale.
All in all, I doubt that I will buy another book from this author. Judging from what little I've read in Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age, there is little that has changed for me to warrant another look.
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Reading Progress
August 6, 2009
– Shelved
Started Reading
August 22, 2009
– Shelved as:
lame
August 22, 2009
–
Finished Reading
Comments Showing 1-34 of 34 (34 new)
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Yeah. I guess making Hiro multi-ethnic was well-intentioned, but its execution, like almost everything else in the book, was ham handed and unsubtle. The scene with the rednecks made me cringe in embarrassment for the author. That stuff would be OK for a writing class, or for fan-fic, but not for a book that has, IMO, so many undeserved accolades. Paul wrote: "I'm about two-thirds of the through Snow Crash at the moment and this review feels spot on. I'm really not enjoying it all that much.
The character of Hiro in particular feels like a pasty white n..."
I agree. this book was terrible. I don't care about any of the characters, the prose was just simply not written well, and the ending was a disgrace. A truly painful read.
@Thomas, In your nerdrage, you actually took the time to come here and whine about my review, yet I’m obviously the one with an axe to grind…right.
I’m sorry that you apparently feel as though my review impinges on your right to enjoy bad prose and long-winded, juvenile bathroom humor, but I won’t “stuff it”, no matter how impotently you tell me to.
On the subject of humor in books, if I want a genuine laugh, I can always read The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which has humor that is head and shoulders above this book’s.
Every point in your arched and coy review might be answered by the fact that Snow Crash is a satire/deconstruction of cyberpunk as a whole. Hiro Protagonist is an idealized avatar meant to be so archetypal as to be a joke (as if the name was not enough). His hacking-swordplay-Metaverse mastery is meant to be ridiculous, to draw comparison with the other demigods of cyberpunk and science fiction.
I am aware of people calling this a "belly busting" satire, and already addressed that point in my review. Also, as this review says:
"It was not immediately clear that Snow Crash would not be to my taste. The early chapters are written in a confident, hip patter; the suburb-states, franchise prisons, privatised highways and Mafia-controlled pizza promised a sharp satire on an America that might be.
Sadly, satire quickly gives way to preposterousness. We learn that the 'Snow Crash' of the title is a computer virus transmissible to humans, something to do with ancient Sumerian magic spells, the Tower of Babel, speaking in tongues and other mumbo-jumbo. Suspending disbelief about this stuff is a much greater stretch than suspending disbelief about the 'burbclaves'."
http://plover.net/~bonds/snowcrash.html
"Suspending disbelief about this stuff is a much greater stretch than suspending disbelief about the 'burbclaves'."
Satire is pretty much about suspending disbelief.
Satire is pretty much about suspending disbelief.
well at least the part about elitist douchebag is spot on. Seems like your putting your own hang ups on this book rather than seeing it for what it is, its all meant to be taken with a grain of salt.
It's not meant to be hard science fiction (obviously) so the reviewer ends up sounding rather pretentious.
Everything about the review is spot on, Tasteflavored. That's why it gets this kind of rise out of asshats like you.
[someone dirty deleted their comments here so it looks like I'm talking to myself]"Infodumps are a genius way to write exposition and draw the reader into my world!", said no good novelist ever. The way to make a reader feel part of a world is to write evocatively without boring the person holding the book. The infodumps on Snowcrash fail on both criteria.
Also, the fact that Stephenson's "people catch a brain virus from binary code on a screen" looks ridiculous even next to some allegedly "unscientific balderdash" like NLP, does NOT help Snowcrash's case. It's such a ridiculous proposition that it's a non-starter.
Finally, the analogy between human brains and computers may or may not be genius, but if it is, Stephenson can't take credit for it because that analogy pre-dates his novel. Not to mention that snowcrash stretches that simile beyond usefulness into pure ridiculousness.
Yes, expectations do affect things. I expected this work to live up to the praise and the five stars that people such as you heap upon it, and it doesn't-- not by a long shot. It is neither good satire nor a good comic novel.Good satire requires an author with a sharp sense of humor, and the humor in this work is juvenile at best. That Stephenson is no Douglas Adams would be the understatement of the decade.
This work would have perhaps been better off as non-fiction, but then again, if someone were to seriously hypothesize that ridiculous "namshub" idea in a non-fiction work they would be rightly laughed off the figurative stage.
All I know is that you went out of your way to come here and try to tear down my review. That speaks tons on its own. Regarding D.A., the difference between that bit and what I criticized in my review is that the juvenile humor comes from the ridiculous characters-- you're meant to laugh at them. The juvenile "humor" in Snowcrash often comes from the narrator himself. Maybe I'm supposed to laugh at him instead of with him.
Finally, I did not say bill it as non-fiction. I said he should have stuck to communicating his ideas in a non-fiction format, because his fiction is trash.
I'm 60% through and I just can't continue. I feel like I'm reading something an adolescent boy wrote. YT being bad-touched by older men, the humor, the hair-brained info dump theories. Like many of the old sci-fi books, I have a sneaking suspicion that people read this when it was contemporary and loved it and cannot view this from an unbiased rosey juvie perspective.
You can safely stop reading, Heather. I had the same impulse halfway through, but decided to finish it, looking for something to warrant the hype. There was nothing there.
Too bad you didn't enjoy this book. Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors. I read it some time ago, but remember really enjoying it. It may help to remember this was written in 1992. I'm pretty sure Stephenson invented the term avatar to refer to one's persona in an online game.I first encountered Stephenson by reading his 3 volume Baroque Cycle. It was uneven yet still a good read and what an undertaking to explain the inception of a global monetary system. I didn't care for Anethem, but I loved The Diamond Age. It's been a while since I read Cryptonomicon, but things hinted at in that book have come to fruition in the now current day....bitcoins. Readme was an entertaining, but not groundbreaking work.
Seveneves is the best science fiction I've read recently, along with The Martian by Weir. Perhaps try one of his more current works. I love science fiction that is actually based on science as both Seveneves and The Martian are.
Only read in the last few years and I loved it. Perhaps it appeals to those who are part of a specific generation who grew up part of the culture.It has been my observation there are those who "get" camp and those who don't. There's no explaining to those who don't, it's like trying to explain how you can hear a piano is off-key to one who is deaf.
I completely skipped the toilet paper memo - man that went on too long!!! That's the perfect example of this book: some great nuggets, but ... too much. Just get to the plot already!
I was trying to put my feelings about this book into words, but you have beaten me to it
Jocelyn wrote: "Only read in the last few years and I loved it. Perhaps it appeals to those who are part of a specific generation who grew up part of the culture.It has been my observation there are those who "ge..."
It's half camp - half exposition, which is a bizarre combination. Is this a scholarly paper about the history of religion or a campy book about a pizza delivery boy?
I had the same feeling reading this book, although it was the first cyberpunk novel I'd read. That being said, I'd be interested in a couple of recommendations of what is actually good cyberpunk, if you'd be so kind, so as not to be burned again.
Man, you did better than I did. I skipped the TP section. It was like watching an amateur beta testing a comedy routine.
This book is so incredibly terrible. The skateboarding shit made me cringe every single time. I’m still trying to finish this book and it’s torture.
Paste wrote: "I had the same feeling reading this book, although it was the first cyberpunk novel I'd read. That being said, I'd be interested in a couple of recommendations of what is actually good cyberpunk, i..."Unfortunately, this is literally the highest rated cyber punk novel I believe.
Paste wrote: "I had the same feeling reading this book, although it was the first cyberpunk novel I'd read. That being said, I'd be interested in a couple of recommendations of what is actually good cyberpunk, i..."Stephenson is far too wordy for me. Try William Gibson. Maybe Neuromancer. If you don't like that, then maybe you just don't care for this sub-genre.
If you prefer classic sci-fi, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is great. If you like your sci-fi violent and slightly militaristic, with a mystery element, try Altered Carbon.
That's a good recommendation as Neuromancer is also extremely popular (I hated that one too). But I loved the classic stuff, so perhaps it's a time-period problem.
Nadine wrote: "Paste wrote: "I had the same feeling reading this book, although it was the first cyberpunk novel I'd read. That being said, I'd be interested in a couple of recommendations of what is actually goo..."Wait, did you seriously just recommend friggin "Neuromancer" to someone who thought Stephenson was "too wordy?" XDDDD That's like recommending "Boardwalk Empire" to someone who thought "the Godfather" was a little too intense. Or was that the joke?
I didn't say I thought it was too wordy. I've already read Neuromancer anyway though, lol. It was okay. I've read plenty of other sci-fi, too, I was just looking for what was thought of as the best cyberpunk stuff from OP since we seem to have the same opinion of Snow Crash.
It depends on what you consider wordy. I think Snow Crash is wordy as in - author exposition on a topic that should have been a scholarly journal article. It's blocks of soliloquy from a computer.
My copy included an afterword, about the process of writing that specific book; apparently, it was originally supposed to be illustrated, like Watchmen. You don't have to like the author's style, although can at least appreciate how it ended up that way, with the benefit of that info.
Thanks my dude. I can finally put this book down and move on with my life!
Couldn't agree more. I'm on page 45 and I'm calling it. Switching from Camut, Dostoevsky, and Musil to this is a shock to the system.
Totally agree! Four days I won’t get back.
The character of Hiro in particular feels like a pasty white nerd's masturbatory fantasy. Half black, half Japanese, expert sword fighter and "metaverse" royalty? Puh-lease.
I'm going to press on and finish it now, but it feels like a bit of a chore.
edit: never finished this book. It just made me constantly cringe.
Absolutely loved Cryptonomicon though!