Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 5 out of 5
My review:
Snow Crash reminded me of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum at once. It’s simpler than both in the language department (which means it’s readable on first try for me) but much more complex and structured in many other ways. I have so many notes and clipping from it…each second sentence is a gem of potentially real historical information. There probably aren’t many authors who could make a transition form Sumer culture into virtual reality and anarchistic future USA as smoothly as Neil Stephenson. And then there is of course his ability to actually depict hacker culture and mindset. Mentions of BIOS, compiler and several programming languages. And Metaverse! Not to mention a great main protagonist (pun intended): An American/Japanese Hacker/Samurai.
In short: It’s an great book, well worth its cult status.
“He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him”