January 8, 2022
Snow Crash, published in 1992, is a science fiction novel
that is part cyber punk, part satire, and a dystopian depiction of a
near future. I was alternately engrossed and irritated by this
thought-provoking and deeply flawed novel.
Stephenson’s writing style is both breathless and pedantic. The
action was often fun, and the “librarian’s” history lessons could be
interesting, but the alternation between the two storytelling modes
felt forced and stilted. As I also noticed in the other Stepheson
novel I read, Cryptonomicon, his stories build slowly, but then end
in a mad rush – too fast to fully appreciate how all the threads
come together. Stepheson is at his best when describing a future
world that takes today’s societal trends to logically absurd
conclusions. America has given up manufacturing anything physical,
excelling only at music, movies, software, and pizza delivery. It
has become a failed state, with essential government functions
privatized and oligarchs filling the power void. Polarization drives
segregation into like-minded, single-race city-states called
Burbclaves. Communities bond over corporate identities without a
sense of higher purpose and oblivious to the larger world. While I
suspect most readers in the 1990s laughed at the extremes depicted
in Snow Crash, in 2021 I did more cringing than laughing as
the points hit close to home.
The characters in the novel are mostly interesting, sometimes even
fascinating, and definitely flawed from a literary perspective. Our
hero is Hiro Protagonist, a software writing, sword fighting pizza
Deliverator who starts off the novel as an action figure, turns into
a somewhat tiring deliverer of Sumerian history and language theory,
and eventually becomes the man who saves the world by writing
anti-virus software. Hiro, we are told, is half Black, half Asian,
but Stepheson’s writing simply wasn’t good enough to convince me he
wasn’t 100% white. After the initial pizza delivery fiasco (which I
admit was quite fun), Hiro mostly bored me. Which is fine, because
we are quickly introduced to the far more interesting protagonist,
Y.T.
Y.T. is a bad-ass with a great ass, as we are repeatedly told. The
fact that she is 15 is more than a little creepy, so I tried hard to
keep that thought out of my mind. She is bold and snarky, fearless
and determined. She carries the action throughout the book and
almost everything interesting that happens plot-wise involves her.
It is clear that both Hiro and Y.T. were written to appeal to the
fantasies of the science fiction target audience: nerdy adolescent
boys. Still, I definitely liked Y.T. and turned the pages to see
what she might do next – perhaps revealing that a nerdy adolescent
boy continues to lurk within me. The bad guys were even more
hackneyed. L. Bob Rife is an obvious riff on L. Ron Hubbard, the
science fiction author turned inventor of a mind-controlling
religious cult. Anything that makes fun of L. Ron Hubbard is OK with
me. Uncle Enzo is the comically lovable mafia boss, erasing the
already thin distinction between organized crime and much of
corporate America. Raven is the ultimate clich� of a bad-ass
villain, perfect at everything, supposedly working for a dark
overlord but in reality only using him to fulfill his mission of
personal revenge: destroying the world to make up for his father’s
suffering at the hands of a nuclear-testing America.
The core idea explored in the book relates to our ability to
preserve the independence of our thinking. Corporate messaging,
religion, and drug abuse have prepared the masses for mind control
through Sumerian language babble that taps into our primitive minds.
One group of people bright enough to avoid this fate, the elite, are
software developers, the people that understand the power of
information. But their life in the binary world makes them
susceptible to a computer virus called Snow Crash that jumps into
the physical world through the optic nerve via virtual reality
goggles. The blood of an infected hacker can then be used to spread
the virus in the conventional way to non-programmers who are not
mind-controllable through language hacking. That’s a LOT of
suspension of disbelief. Still, it is an interesting premise. Are
today’s internet memes the equivalent of social media viruses?
So why do we read a book like Snow Crash? Obviously not just for the Moby Dick references.
What does science fiction offer the fan of good literature? For me,
science fiction is good when it does at least one of two things.
Some science fiction stories are worth reading because they are just
plain fun, and Snow Crash sometimes
manages to be fun. But the real power of science fiction is their
use of worlds released from the constraints of our own reality to
make us think in new ways. This Stephenson sometimes does as well.
What are the costs of losing control of our most fundamental human
interactions, either through corporatization or though the ultimate
social media platform, the Metaverse? How might our increasing
computer usage, especially at a very young age, be affecting our
brains? What are the people who control the flow of information
doing with that information? These are all not just worthy
questions; they are important ones.
Snow Crash has the added appeal of being a cultural
touchstone. The nerdy adolescent boys of the 1990s who read and
loved Snow Crash are now the billionaire technology titans of the
2020s, turning Stepheson’s vision of the metaverse into reality
without seeming to heed any of its lessons. The future depicted in
Snow Crash is not a
pleasant one, and it is certainly avoidable. I’m just not sure we
will.
Chris Mack is a writer in Austin, Texas.
© Copyright 2022, Chris Mack.
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