A review by deborahwithanoh
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
From a collection of reviews posted on Substack c. January 2022:
I found this book in an L.A. bookstore and picked it up because a) Neal Stephenson, and b) this is apparently the book that coined the term “Metaverse” and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A few more important things about this book: 1. Its main characters are named Hiro Protagonist and Yours Truly, 2. It’s literally about the intersection of coding and linguistics, which is my entire discipline, and 3. Facebook wishes it was the Metaverse lmao. It seemed to me at first that the book took a long time to get going, and for this reason it is inferior to Anathem in my heart (because in my opinion, Anathem is a paragon of science fiction). Then there are a lot of long explanatory conversations with a librarian daemon. But when it gets going, boy does it get going. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who likes sci-fi or action, smart women, coding, linguistics, or ancient civilizations. The ideas in here about what the 21st century will look like are pretty amusing, though. This book definitely reads like it was written in 1992.
I found this book in an L.A. bookstore and picked it up because a) Neal Stephenson, and b) this is apparently the book that coined the term “Metaverse” and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A few more important things about this book: 1. Its main characters are named Hiro Protagonist and Yours Truly, 2. It’s literally about the intersection of coding and linguistics, which is my entire discipline, and 3. Facebook wishes it was the Metaverse lmao. It seemed to me at first that the book took a long time to get going, and for this reason it is inferior to Anathem in my heart (because in my opinion, Anathem is a paragon of science fiction). Then there are a lot of long explanatory conversations with a librarian daemon. But when it gets going, boy does it get going. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who likes sci-fi or action, smart women, coding, linguistics, or ancient civilizations. The ideas in here about what the 21st century will look like are pretty amusing, though. This book definitely reads like it was written in 1992.