Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson has a reach in the world of tech that revealed itself to me after I read it. Snow Crash was, for a time, required reading for the Xbox team at Microsoft. Snow Crash is littered with terms and concepts that have inspired real life applications and technologies such as Metaverse and Avatars. Shephenson himself has worked as a futurist/advisor for several different technology startups and companies. Snow Crash is easy to compare to another giant in cyberpunk, Neuromancer by William Gibson (one of my favourite novels). Both have coined terms and concaved ideas that went on to influence the real development of technology, and both are incredibly stylistic in a way that leaves a grip on the imagination. The settings of these two books are saturated with vivid visuals. The extrapolation of capitalism to such an extreme in both novels leaves an impression on the mind that’s hard to shake in a contemporary political climate. Despite the seemingly much greater reach of Snow Crash in terms of influence, especially in current cyberpunk media (games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Ghostrunner owe a majority of their aesthetic to this book), Snow Crash is an irritatingly clumsy novel that stumbles too much to make it’s good ideas hold weight.

Snow Crash centers around one really cool idea: language acts like instructions for people to carry out like code in a computer, and the collection of those instructions defines our social organization. The franchulate managers follow rigid 3 ring binders full of rules and procedures, the Feds email around documents and measure how long in took employees to read the new regulations, and ancient sumerian cultures used tablets to “code” people into doing the tasks needed to run a civilization. Viruses are not only biological, but also linguistic, and those who know how to take advantage of latent linguistic structures in the brain can mass brainwash everyone into becoming their thralls. This relationship between language and how we act is enforced further in the Metaverse, where being an adept code can make you look prettier, act more realistic, and give you power over the meta-space itself.

However the delivery of this concept is delivered through pages upon pages of expositional dialogue between our hero and protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, with a walking wikipedia program in the metaverse. Swaths of the book read like poorly cited textbooks; luckily the content was at least an interesting discussion about ancient civilizations and the development of language. Most of the rest of the book is either blandly written action sequences, clumsy dialogue, or more expositional dialogue. The sole exception is the first chapter, a hilarious and overdramatic high stakes pizza delivery that manages to establish the setting while providing one of the only unique action sequence in the entire novel (the other being the rest of the pizza delivery as its completed by Y.T.). In reading some discourse online about this book, it seems that some make the argument this novel is attempting to be a parody or satire of cyberpunk. However, I’m not sure that calling something a parody is an excuse for poor writing especially when this novel is trying to make other points about the relationship between language and thought that are drowned in colorless prose. I think William Gibson’s own words speak nicely to this point:

[Science Fiction] has traditionally been a fairly reactionary literary form, a form in which you weren’t encouraged to develop as a stylist or investigate any of the things that were happening in the world of literature. And one of the things the so called cyberpunk writers have done, either consciously or un-consciously, … [is] import whatever they could use into the literary ghetto of science fiction.

Neuromancer succeeds greatly in this aspect when compared to Snow Crash, the stroke of genius in Neuromancer being the blending of the prosaic style of noir crime novels with the speculative computer and data based future Gibson imagined. Gibson’s descriptions of the matrix and of the sprawl are rich with symbolism and metaphor, and this colorful and vivid prose is likely what launched the entire genre of cyberpunk from a single novel. Snow Crash seems to take its stylistic influence from the existing cyberpunk works and import some existing thinking about language and culture into the world in the form of a massive bulk of expositional dialogue in the middle of the novel. The novel itself has no notable stylistic motifs save for the first chapter. Sadly as the book carries on, those interesting elements of humour and over the top cheesy actions become infrequent, and after reading about ancient Sumer and Assyria for several chapters once some element of humour returns in the closing chapters of the novel it comes off as campy in the bad way.

Any semblance of enjoyment I had for this novel was thoroughly ruined by the sex scene between Y.T., a 15 year old girl, and Raven who would have to be at least 30 given some of the history explained in the novel. The sole reason for this sex scene to exist as far as I can guess is to have a mechanism in the plot that prevents Raven, an incredibly dangerous soldier / assassin, from stopping Hiro. The chapters surrounding this sex scene are also loaded with sentences that I would expect to find on “Men Writing Women” subreddits / twitter accounts, which completely undermines the nascent ideas earlier in the novel about the male gaze in the hypercapitalist setting of the novel.

Prose and plot issues aside, this books fails to make any interesting developments in the concept its trying to tackle. Wisps of interesting connections exist in the form of the manager binders and the titular Snow Crash virus that Rife spreads; both are forms of language based indoctrination into systems, one economic and the other religious. These connections are never explored deeply, compared to novels that investigate the same language / thought / action relationship such The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin or even 1984 by George Orwell. The other noteworthy aspect of the book is the metaverse. The influence of this idea is hard to overstate, but living in the contemporary world where VR headsets are actually available as consumer products the conception of the metaverse in Snow Crash comes off as flat compared to Neuromancer’s unthinkably complex and euphoric experience of jacking into the matrix. “Seeking a bodiless exultation in cyberspace” is more poignant expression of trans-human idealism for a contemporary reader than what essentially amounts of Second Life. I have to admit the reason these products and games even exist is because of the influence of Snow Crash, but ultimately from where I sit in the development of technology Snow Crash reads like a bit like bad summer action movie with a anthropology lecture in the middle.