Stephenson has rapidly become one of my very favorite, if not all time favorite, authors. Snow Crash is so incredible - Stephenson's vision of the future is a rarity in its clarity, depth, and originality. The overpopulated earth has become a trashy wasteland, and the technological/economic elite have essentially moved to a digital existence, most often "goggled in" to the virtual reality of the Metaverse, where your avatar can move around and conduct business in the same way as on earth. Hackers, especially the samurai-sword wielding protagonist (named Hiro Protagonist), have the upper hand in a landscape they can control. However, the intersection between man and machine, embodied particularly in the hackers' binary-acccomodating neural pathways, has led to the dangerous potential for computer viruses to infect the user's mind. This unique vision has even more resonance given Google's recent announcement that they are developing glasses which will project a virtual reality and other information over the real world. This novel's astounding scope encompasses the exploration of memes, Glossolalia, drugs, viruses, and religion, which are depicted as being basically synonymous. A wonderful page-turner!
Glad you liked it! This is Stephenson's first mature work; wouldn't recommend the two before for anything except scholarly purposes. Particularly interest to me is the way that the world conception of Snow Crash shifts registers but remains structurally similar in the Diamond Age... Which illustrates the crucial point that structures and technologies contain potential for both utopian (Diamond Age) and dystopian (Snow Crash) instances. The contemporary discourse is obsessed with the grotesque and parodic dystopian mode, but it's the genius of people like KSR and Stephenson that they consider the whole dialectic.
ReplyDeleteA common instance of the above fallacy is when people talk about how the internet is making us all lazy/isolated/stupid/add etc...
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