trims
Since: Aug, 2012
03/30/2018 04:12:14
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Literature One of the Cannon Cyberpunk books...
Along with Gibson's Neuromancer, Snow Crash effectively defines Cyper Punk and the whole Hacker concept. Virtually the entire subculture/genre revolves around memes from these two books.
Read it for that reason alone. So influential that it's hard to tell anymore whether those two books were inspired by, or inspired, the hacker culture itself.
Probably Stevenson's best work, too.
And it's hilarious. It doesn't just run on Rule of Cool, it virtually is Rule of Cool
Literature Techno Babel and Confusing Satire
I'm not entirely sure what to make of Snow Crash. Is it a wacky satire about American capitalist culture with cyberpunk action? Or is it a serious cyberpunk mystery with Biblical influences?
Well, it's kinda both. It starts out leaning heavily on the campy satire and continues with that until about the halfway point. Then we get several chapters of infodumping about Sumeria, Babel, neurolinguistics and several other studies. It doesn't come completely out of nowhere, but the way it tries to tie all of this to the plot is through computing metaphors. The metaphors themselves get stretched to the point where it can harm one's suspension of disbelief.
Some of the characters are interesting, but none of them really change at all.
By the end of it, I wasn't sure what point, if any, Stephenson was trying to make.