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Mix those together and you get a difficult to follow book. I have now given up on the book and think it was a waste of money.I tried this book because I like "The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" by Neal Stephenson. I am on ebook page 293 of 1029 and I am completely bored by this book. Other reviewers described this issue better than I did here.Main plot drags nowhere and I even cannot see main plot. The Diamond Age is a brilliant work and beats Snow Crash without any doubt. In comparision Dune Book 2 is only about 387 pages and it was a lot of fun by the time I was on page 300.Sentenses are complicated. There are too many made up words that in the end don't mean much.
The plot is very exciting from the beginning, but halfway begins to degenerate into unnecessary history recitals that last five to ten pages at a time, repeatedly. Prospective readers should be aware that toward the end of the novel, Stephenson describes in graphic detail a consensual sexual encounter between a fifteen year old girl and a forty-something year old man.
I found it to be distasteful.I would not recommend the book - it was enjoyable in parts, but there are many authors who research a novel, then craft a plot with skill from beginning to end, instead of attempting to cram in every bit of research into the novel. The plot does not benefit from this encounter, but Stephenson's constant focus on the child's rear end every time she stood up made it almost inevitable.
In Snow Crash, Stephenson is very playful with his language, and is often witty. The conclusion is relatively sudden, extremely predictable, and does nothing to reward the reader for trusting Stephenson enough to plow through the pages of Library research.
Then again, he is often hackneyed and silly.
Ignoring these virtually unreadable portions, the story continues to entertain throughout, right up until the end.
This is a fantastic book, with Stephenson's usual thought provoking teaching mixed in.Highly recommended to everyone.
Snow Crash is a subversive, postmodern romp through a world defined by computers, religious fanaticism, commercialism, and near-anarchy. As Hiro and Y.T. Hiro falls back on what he knows best -- hacking and gathering intelligence that he can sell to the former C.I.A., now a private corporation -- with Y.T. When his friend and former business partner Da5id opens a mysterious hypercard/drug called Snow Crash and becomes instantly catatonic, Hiro realizes the danger: all hackers, this new world's most valuable resource, are vulnerable.
His revision of mythology and religion (here, both language and religion are viruses) is rooted in research and then takes off in improbable but intriguing directions. make their way toward the deadly Raven, an Aleut armed with glass knives and a nuclear bomb, and L. Ron Hubbard) at the center of a flotilla of rafts and refugees afloat in the Pacific, they uncover the "truth" about viruses, language, computers, mythology, and the core of the human brain.The most amazing aspect of this novel is Stephenson's ability to imagine in 1992 (really, before that, since that's the year it was published) what today's world has become; the cultural satire and commentary in Snow Crash has become more relevant today with the internet/World Wide Web, privatization, dependence on computers, policy-shaping religious leaders, Second Life, and a global economy. Like Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, this novel connects religion from multiple cultures, from ancient times to the present, to form the heart of a conspiracy.Except for the sections detailing Sumerian mythology and history, this novel moves forward at a brisk pace, with both humor and suspense. Although Stephenson's parallels between computers and the human brain are not new, what he suggests, that our DNA contains an informational/language virus based in our Sumerian roots, is both weirdly original and thought-provoking. Hacker Hiro Protagonist delivers pizzas for a living for the now-respectable Mafia until a mishap unites him with a fifteen-year old, futuristic skateboarder named Y.T.
Bob Rife, a New Age cult leader (a send-up of L. For another cyberpunk novel, the first, see William Gibson's Neuromancer. as his eyes. He sets out to stop the malicious forces that threaten to reduce the population to a babbling, unthinking mass.
Stephenson couldn't think a better way to get his ideas across than to create lengthy (and quite boring) dialogues.To conclude, I'm not sure why this book is so beloved. Just going from the first chapter to the next couple presented such a fundamental change that I have to believe that the first was written years apart from the rest of the book.Later in the book Stephenson can't seem to find a better way to express his largely contrived ideas than to expound upon them in a fashion that I can only relate to a Socratic dialogue (in tone if not in substance). Sure there's room for satire (I'm pretty sure Stephenson was not a fan of the Reagan era), but an author has to at least give a more realistic time line to work with. The writing is immature, and the ideas supporting the plot are untenable. Writing them down in such a poor and inconsistent manner is inexcusable. Something good: This book, written before the Internet was little more than a government and university project with a few commercial interests throw in, presents an almost precognitive look at a world interconnected via the computer.
But to suppose that by 2012 (this is a guess based on evidence in the story since the date isn't listed anywhere I could see) that the entire US government would be minimalized to the point of vestigial worthlessness because of over privatization, and that society would be fractured into competing commercial "franchises", run by agencies such as the Mafia none-the-less, is just silly. First there's the main character, Hiro, talking back and forth with an AI librarian for chapters at a time trying to formulate this Sumerian plot point, then later we get the same type of performance except now we have the heads of a few of these world controlling franchises playing the parts of the librarian. Some of the technology described, even if slightly off-base, rightly predicts what we are using and developing today.Something bad:I won't delve too much on the absurdities described with a supposedly ancient "hacker" algorithm being made to free mens' minds from the entrapment of a hypothetical space "virus". There are times when the characters will completely shift their narrative and their personality. If it wasn't for his view of an interconnected virtual world this book would be worthless. Nor will I go into the rancid historical references used to back up this laughable proposition (there are more intelligent people than me who have detailed this in reviews here already).
This is supposed to be a natural deterioration here, not even post-war, yet, somehow, all democratic society withered away in 20 years.Something awful:Contrived plots and silly ideas are one thing.
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