Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson's
Snow Crash is a cyberpunk novel published in 1992; the book is now 27 years old. It was Stephenson's third novel and his big breakout hit. I read it once in the mid-90s and I haven't read it since, until now. I love Neal Stephen's writing, but now that I'm finished with the book it's going into the trash, but not for the reasons that one might expect.
Trash-binning a book is a big deal for me. I love books. I hoard books. I came very close to crying when I had to donate half of my stash to the library before my move out to Las Vegas. I can count on one hand the number of books that I've thrown away. This might be the third or the fourth one in my lifetime. I can't remember the titles of any the other throwaways. They went down the memory hole when I tossed them out.
You would think that a book from 1992 written about a future that happens roughly around the mid '00s would be more or less laughably passé by now, but Stephenson does a virtuoso job with the futurism in it. It's one of his many strengths. His online Metaverse is very similar to Second Life with PvP enabled as seen through a pair of virtual reality goggles, and he describes in the finest detail a bit of software very similar to Google Earth, along with an AI Librarian reminiscent of Wikipedia. He also popularized (but did not actually invent) using the Sanskrit term 'avatar' to describe an online person's visual icon. Also, there are those 'rat things,' which are essentially cyborg nuclear powered Boston Dynamic robot dogs on hyper-steroids.
Snow Crash would go on to be hugely influential within the cyberpunk genre for decades after its debut. Writer Ernest Cline was one of many who ham-handedly ripped off Stephenson's Metaverse as late as 2011 in his bestselling book,
Ready Player One. To be fair, Stephenson gets plenty of things wrong about our future past in
Snow Crash, but he does so in an engrossing manner.
In the world of
Snow Crash, the US Government has all but collapsed into a penurious bureaucratic black hole, having sold off most of its territory and possessions--including the entire US military--to huge private corporations and interests, which also includes the revamped Mafia, who among many other things has the monopoly on pizzas delivered in 30 minutes or less.
An economic collapse and hyperinflation have made even the US trillion dollar bill worthless, and it's the quadrillion dollar "Gippers" that stand in as the equivalent of fivers or ten-spots. Mostly, Americans in that era use the stabilized Kong Bucks from Hong Kong, which is another of many interests that have franchised themselves out to communities across the patchwork remnants of the former USA.
Stephenson is one of my favorite writers in that he's brilliant across a very wide variety of subjects: futurism, pop culture, semiotics, deep language structure, neuro-linguistic programming, nanotechnology, ancient mythology, biblical legends, Enlightenment Era calculating devices, software development, MMORPGs, time travel and much more. He also writes cracking good action scenes in every book, replete with levels of derring-do rarely seen from writers sharing his sort of esoteric interests. He's sort of a Dan Brown with 40 more points of IQ and a lot more irons in the fire--and I like Dan Brown. For the record, I also liked Cline's
Ready Player One. What can I say? I'm a soft touch when it comes to speculative fiction.
Snow Crash starts with easily the most exciting and heightened pizza delivery action sequence in all of literature. Our heroic protagonist, who goes by the rather on-the-nose moniker of Hiro Protagonist, has--due to a catastrophic kitchen fire--just 10 minutes to drive a pizza across 12 miles of congested dystopian Los Angeles suburban traffic at rush hour, or the head of the Mafia will have to bestir himself to apologize to the customers in person if Hiro is late; that's the Mafia's policy, but it's something that apparently has never happened before due to their incredible efficiency at delivering on time, not to mention the implicit threat to the Mafia's delivery drivers should they ever **** that up.
Things go wrong, both
in the book and
with the book upon the introduction of the other main character: 15-year-old courier Y.T. (short for Yours Truly), when she hitches a ride for her and her decked-out skateboard through snagging a magnetic harpoon onto the body of Hiro's souped-up bulletproof 007-style pizza delivery car.
I'd remembered the character of Y.T. from the last time I'd read the book, back in the 90's, but I'd forgotten about her fate. So let's just cut this short and get this over with, because this isn't a book review in the classic sense.
Y.T. and our Hiro--who's in his 30's--don't end up having sex. Y.T. instead has sex with the villain, who is also in his 30's.
Now, why the early Game Over, when seducing an underage girl is conceivably something within a standard villain's purview? It's the way that Stephenson handles this that sucks, and it kills the book. The statutory rape scene in
Snow Crash is written as a straight love scene, and it goes on and on for like 4 pages. I was going to go back and count them but eww.
Stephenson could have easily made Y.T. 19 or 20 years old and still have had her be in touch with the youth culture. It's true that Y.T. lives with her mother, but plenty of 20 year-olds live at home, especially, I would think, in a dystopian USA that's devoid of a lot of higher education options. But Stephenson made her 15 years old and with a penchant for older men, and I should reiterate that I'm tossing the book because of this and that that's enough on the subject.
But...
Why did I forget about it? Why did I forget about that scene? Was it trauma-induced amnesia? I kind of doubt it. The dirty truth, the nasty truth, is that it didn't really stand out to me at the time, because from around 50 years ago to around 25 years ago, the artistic people from Generation X, the Boomers and the Silent Generation before them took a much more laissez faire approach to child sexual exploitation by adults in their books and their movies. There are a number of popular works from that time which exemplify this and that I could mention, but I'm not going to.
That exploitation is something that we as representatives of those generations would like to sweep under the rug and forget about, but it's something that novels like
Snow Crash can't help but dredge up.
I'm not sure what my point is here, other than sheesh, what a can of worms. Life and art are gross and complicated yo, and actual people can get hurt because human standards aren't up to snuff in places and at times where and when you'd least expect. In any case, this revelation isn't going to turn me into an activist or anything. I'm just going to throw out the book and move on with things. There; it's gone.
Next up: Dostoevsky's
Notes from the Underground, in which a bitter 19th Century nihilist engages a young prostitute...oh FFS. I wanted the next one to be his book
The Gambler but Barnes & Noble didn't have the damn thing. No
The Gambler, in Las Vegas of all places.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 12-05-2019 at 01:08 PM.