Snow Crash reread

By Brian Clegg

Back in 2016 I belatedly reviewed Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash – it seemed a good time to revisit and dive into it a little more than was possible in a straightforward review. Back then I commented ‘If you like the kind of science fiction that hits you between the eyes and flings you into a high-octane cyber-world, particularly if you have an IT background, this is a masterpiece.’ That certainly holds true of the first half.

Perhaps the closest parallel here is the 2010 Christopher Nolan film, Inception.  Both are scintillatingly delightful, but tail off at the end. The movie, still one of my favourites, loses it somewhat when it turns into a sub-Bond action movie and then ends oddly. By contrast, Snow Crash gets distinctly bogged down by an interminable section where main character Hiro is doing the metaverse equivalent of library work on a convoluted theory that combines the Babel story and some Chariots of the Gods-like uber-speculation, which becomes somewhat tedious. 

As is the case with Inception, the final denouement doesn’t feel a good fit to the rest, with the treatment of the other main character, Y. T. reduced for much of that section to damsel-in-distress mode – jarring when compared with her intelligent and resourceful nature when armed with a skateboard. I was even more struck than I was when first reading the book in 2016 that Y. T.’s brief relationship with a psychotic killer was worryingly paedophilic. 

It’s impossible, though, not to admire the imagination that Stephenson deployed in Snow Crash. First there’s a totally deregulated USA, where the only ‘laws’ are those enforced by corporations – a future that feels worryingly closer now, given recent political changes in the country. And second, there’s the whole concept of the metaverse. There had been many other stories of virtual reality worlds, but Stephenson gives us one that is based not on the purely imaginary technology of something like The Matrix, but where the realities of his understanding coding shine through.

Of course there are limits to that imagination’s ability to probe the future. Where Stephenson’s metaverse is far more sophisticated than anything we have now, his characters still carry calculators alongside their basic phones. But bearing in mind that in 1992 major computing corporations still had very little interest in the internet, and the web had only been opened to the public one year before and was still primarily text-based, this remains extremely impressive.

I’m sure that most tech entrepreneurs have read Snow Crash – and given Meta’s name, its concepts are hard to avoid. But perhaps those with political inclinations should also take note of the less than savoury aspects that come through in Stepehenson’s book when they think of the future.

You can buy Snow Crash from Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.