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Snow Crash: Deluxe Edition
Now in a gorgeous new hardcover edition featuring never-before-seen material, the "brilliantly realized" (The New York Times Book Review) breakthrough novel from visionary author Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators
Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don't dare leave their mansions.
Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary.
But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state).
Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He'll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.
Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don't dare leave their mansions.
Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary.
But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state).
Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He'll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.
Editorial Reviews
"One of the most popular sci-fi books of all time . . . It stands as a foundational text of the cyberpunk movement."-Wired
"Stephenson's cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks . . . still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today's tech landscape."-Vanity Fair
"Hip, surreal, distressingly funny . . . Neal Stephenson is a crafty plotter and a wry writer."-The Des Moines Register
"[Snow Crash] not only made the name of its author Neal Stephenson, it elevated him to the status of a technological Nostradamus."-Open Culture
"A cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland . . . This is no mere hyperbole."-The San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the twenty-first century."-William Gibson
"Stephenson's cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks . . . still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today's tech landscape."-Vanity Fair
"Hip, surreal, distressingly funny . . . Neal Stephenson is a crafty plotter and a wry writer."-The Des Moines Register
"[Snow Crash] not only made the name of its author Neal Stephenson, it elevated him to the status of a technological Nostradamus."-Open Culture
"A cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland . . . This is no mere hyperbole."-The San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the twenty-first century."-William Gibson
Readers Top Reviews
MallardJane Aland
I was skeptical when I started reading the story. I didn't quite think I would like the main character or follow all the terms used to describe the new corporate America. All I can say is that I am very happy I kept reading because the story was amazing. I loved the YT character - reminds me of old punk days. I was also blown away when I realized how old the book is - based on the tech-talk, I could have sworn it was written in the last decade! It's a must read for sci-fi fans.
David BrookesBobb
I didn't love it. The high octane opening seems to have fooled everybody. The opening feels like a short story that was later built on to make a novel, so irrelevant is it to most of the plot, and even to the protagonist. It's very long and draws a lot of spurious analogies between biological and computer viruses that don't really fly, mixed in with clumsy pages of information about Sumeria or somewhere which turns out later to be relevant, but only as flimsy justification for a fairly boring plot device. There's some good action, but it sure does go on a bit. The whole novel does. It should have been 100 pages shorter at least, and not as accomplished as people seem to make out - I'm really not sure why this didn't sink into the slush of post-Neuromancer 90s sci-fi and disappear forever. Its vision of virtual reality isn't just poor in retrospect, it's poor even for its time, unimaginative and filled with convenient rules that serve the plot but not the world-building. Bizarrely, regular coders employed by corporations to do their jobs are referred to as 'hackers'. That's not what a hacker is, Neal. Points for: Strong female lead, even if there's constant partial-nudity and sex references; fantastic opening chapter or two; consistent writing and plenty of action, if that's what floats your boat; diversity. I can't say I recommend it, unless you mainly read sci-fi, in which case it's definitely not the worst of 90s sci-fi. 6.5/10 David Brookes Author of 'The Gun of Our Maker'
DMGshandieDavid B
I will next read Neuromancer (get ready, Amazon) after I found myself strongly agreeing with Psychlist's review of Jan 3, '15. I felt that Snowcrash had a good theme, which to me was based on an extreme overextended analogy between Computer viruses, memes or mind viruses, and the old fashioned DNA/RNA kind. That is what speculative sci/fi is supposed to trade on anyway. But like most all the successful writers of future history, the author only extends popular and famous trends to their extreme ends. It kinda reminds me of novels about the 21st century, written at the same time as this book (1989-1992), in which the Soviet Union played a prominent role. The tech displayed in Snowcrash is dated now, as other reviewers observed. Action scenes are well-written and engaging. The book starts off like Hollywood, with the reader dropped into a crazy action scene in which some of the basic tenets of the book are laid out. The over-the-top action is self deprecating where it needs to be to maintain suspension of disbelief. The fist half of the book reads like a 'who-is-doing-it' thriller as the funky good guys learn more of what is going on and make contacts with the good honchos whose work they are inadvertently doing. Protagonist (yes, that is the family name of the main character) also gets to know the violent bad guys and their special powers as the first half of the story unfolds. Spoiler Alert The mid section is dominated by discussions between Protagonist and a Watson-like archival program, called the Librarian, who informs Protagonist of the connection, down through history of between various viruses; starting with a space borne "metavirus" that seeds all life; going to an improbable theory that, in the beginning, human language tended to coalesce rather than fragment; turning to Sumerian myths and a putative Enki, who was a neurolinguistic hacker who wrote a mind blowing incantation that literally tore the fabric of his culture to pieces, causing Babel and the break up of humanity into competing tribes (something deemed good because unity was causing stagnation): then on to classical antiquity in which champions of the old unity battled those who liked the competing/warring states state of affairs; finally to the present in which the big bad guy has gotten his mitts on the Ancient Sumerian written viruses and is using them to reestablish a unified world of babbling fools under his power. He infects computers with advanced malware, and infects hackers directly with a bitmap that hits their optic nerves, because they have "bits and bytes wired into their psyche" after lifetimes of coding. The rest of us he can mumble the Sumerian verbal malware to and it goes right to our brain bios and scrambles our internal logic. Where is the Government of the United States of America in all this? It has apparently become a will...
JohnGuadDMGshandi
I recall reading this story back in the late 90's thinking how cool and freaky-futuristic it was ... I re-bought it recently and re-read it and ... wow, the tech in this story has not aged well at all. The biggest problem I have is with timelines ... without ever giving us any explicit dates for the storyline, it's relatively easy to extrapolate once you put the clues together ... the main character is approximately 30 years old (he tells us), there are constant references to his father being in WW2, and by reference to a peer-age character, we can determine he was born in the 1970's ... so the events of this story take place somewhere between the late 90's and the early 2000's. America has deconstructed itself, become a hodgepodge of mini city-states that are actually business franchises, each franchise being a wholly independent and sovereign nation yet non physically contiguous. How a massive nation-state republic could devolve in such a manner is not hard to imagine what with the populist Republican mantra being that only business is good and government is bad, but the speed at which such dis-integration of the nation could occur ... it would take decades for government to unwind, not the paltry 5 to 10 years between when Stephenson wrote the story and the presumed timeline in the story. Some of the tech he imagined in this story is nearly prophetic ... his descriptions of virtual reality are almost dead on with what is currently state of the art today, however much of the tech available in his 'real world' is sadly too futuristic to fit. Supersonic cyborg dogs; armorgel uniforms that are bulletproof, fit like spandex, and have self contained defensive weaponry; 'smart' skateboards with radar/lidar and wheels that change shape and size every millisecond in order to keep the ride smooth even over broken concrete/bodies/other rough terrain; other stuff that is mildly interesting and often unrealistic. We certainly don't have that tech today, let alone 15 or so years ago when this story seems to have taken place. His story goes off the deep end with the main thrust being neuro-linguistic hacking based on ancient Sumerian mythology. I'm sure Stephenson researched a lot of actual info on Sumer, but the way he puts the pieces together is entirely his own creation. And after all is said and done, it basically fails the logic test. Near the end of the story, the main character (I'm trying to avoid saying "protagonist" ... because the character's name in the story is actually "Protagonist" ... Hiro Protagonist ... arg! funny, but still ... ) puts the whole concept together in one big expository scene and while all the little nubs we saw throughout the course of the story could have been reasonably accepted (suspension of disbelief) once the whole concept was explained is was blindingly obvious to me how unrealistic and irrati...
James M Hendricks
This captures the world of the Metaverse that we are headed for nearly 30 years before we get any hints of the world it describes. The early portion of the novel is more interesting to me than the second half. The finale seemed a little contrived and predictable, but the virtual and real world created here are both fascinating.
Short Excerpt Teaser
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway–might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is a tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it in to the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.
The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doo-hickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.
Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstration.
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the f*** they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can f***ing stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it–we're talking trade balances here–once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say; "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved–but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the k...
When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway–might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is a tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it in to the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.
The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doo-hickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.
Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstration.
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the f*** they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can f***ing stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it–we're talking trade balances here–once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say; "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved–but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the k...
