(8) NEIL STEPHENSON –

SNOW CRASH (1992)

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherf*cker in the world… Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.”

How can you not love a book whose hero protagonist is literally named Hiro Protagonist? As he replies to when it’s mocked as a “stupid name” – “but you’ll never forget it”.

And yes – my feature quotation might well apply to readers of Snow Crash. Until someone has read Snow Crash, they still think that they could read – or perhaps write – the coolest and most badass book in the world. But then you read it and know that position is taken.

You have Hiro Protagonist – “a sword-slinging hacker who teams up with an extreme skateboarder in a post-cyberpunk disincorporated USA to fight Snow Crash – a computer virus for the brain”.

And by disincorporated USA, I mean some of the most blackly comic worldbuilding in SF. A United States whose government has ceased to exist – apart from vestigial organizations like the FBI or “Fedland” which monitor their employees to a ridiculous extent including three-page emails regarding the proper use of toilet paper in an office environment. Other parts of the government have become been privatized to or out as corporations or entrepreneurs – the CIA merging with the Library of Congress as the for-profit CIC, or the Army and Navy as competing private security corporations (General Jim’s Defense System and Admiral Bob’s Global Security).

A United States whose currency has inflated past billion-dollar notes (which some of those aforementioned Fedland employees are tempted to use for toilet paper) to trillion dollar notes – which most people eschew for yen or Kongbucks.

A United States whose economy has receded to only four things Americans do better than anyone else – music, movies, microcode or software, and high speed pizza delivery. The latter the monopoly of the Mafia or Cosa Nostra, who “in an anarcho-capitalist world gone mad” are “just another corporation, no more or less ruthless than anyone else…sure, they have hired killers on their payroll and will whack employees who screw up” – notably pizza delivery drivers who fail to deliver in their pizza in half an hour – “but this isn’t particularly unique in a world where franchised neighborhoods are guarded by killer cyborg dogs.”

A United States whose former territory is “now a patchwork of autonomous corporate franchises and Burbclaves”, the latter essentially neighbourhoods franchised to extraterritorial “nations” run by corporations, such as Mr Lee’s Greater Hong Kong (not affiliated with mainland China or the island of Hong Kong).

Also a United States where you can have the aforementioned Raven – “baddest motherf*cker in the world” – as a literal one-man nuclear power, with a hydrogen bomb in his motorcycle sidecar and rigged to blow to “EEG trodes embedded in his skull”, probably near the tattoo on his forehead POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.

And then you have the Metaverse, “the internet becoming cyberspace for real” – and where Hiro, one of its creators, owns some prime real estate on the Street.

Oh – and you have the Tower of Babel and Sumerian mythology in there as well, complete with Sumerian pictographs.

“Apart from its frenetic action sequences and overt use of the Rule of Cool, the book is surprisingly deep, with a substantial portion of the plot given over to exploring metaphysical interpretations of the Tower of Babel myth. Typical for a Stephenson novel, the plot juxtaposes action sequences, lengthy humorous digressions, and extremely detailed infodumps seemingly at random”.

Where is the film or TV adaptation?! (Short answer – bouncing around in development hell).

RATING: 4 STARS****

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