Snow Crash
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Review
Snow Crash, by , is a satirical cyberpunk novel set in a near-future America where the federal government has collapsed and everything—pizza, religion, neighborhoods, national defense—is run by competing franchises. It follows Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and pizza delivery driver, and Y.T., a teenage skateboard courier, as they uncover a conspiracy to reprogram the human mind.
I first read Snow Crash in college and didn’t get it. It had cool ideas, great writing, some authentic weirdness. The problem was I had no context to place it within the canon. I’d read a lot of science fiction growing up, but it was mostly golden-age authors like , , and . I had completely missed New Wave authors like , and probably hadn’t even heard of cyberpunk. This time I decided to fix that, reading ’s Neuromancer first. I’m glad I did. makes direct references to Neuromancer—the same ‘sarariman’ Rōmaji, a drone decapitation, Rife’s primary-colored cyberspace—but the real connection is thematic. Neuromancer is about what makes us human and how we strip it away for power. This book responds that it’s even simpler: you don’t need to jack in or have your humanity cut away and replaced with chrome to lose yourself. Commodified, homogenized, commercialized culture does it for you already.
Culture Franchised
Snow Crash is about a mind-virus that changes how people behave, makes them unconscious zombies; it’s about the metaverse; it’s about the replacement of government by franchises; it’s about high-speed pizza delivery; it’s about depleted uranium miniguns and smart wheels and katanas. That’s the text, but all of it is defamiliarizing 80s and 90s consumerism, exaggerating it so you notice what is already there.
left room for organic subcultures to survive next to the towering zaibatsu, like the Panther Moderns or the Rastafarians or even the console cowboys. has done away with all that. Culture in Snow Crash comes top-down, packaged in a franchise container and sold the same everywhere. Your ethnicity? Turned into a stereotype-filled franchise like Mr. Lee’s Hong Kong or NarcoColombia. Your neighborhood? A burbclave patterned on apartheid South Africa with a copy/paste HOA constitution. Your religion? Televangelism-cum-conspiracy theory with a subscription plan. Even the pirate gangs have stolen their identity from Western and Kung Fu movie stars. The one thing that almost escaped capture was the Metaverse. It started as a bottom-up culture built by hackers, but even it got taken over and turned into a strip mall with millions of default Brandy and Clint avatars. The last bastion has become a product.
The Writing
What I loved about this book is how weaves Mesopotamian history, neurolinguistics, Pentecostal glossolalia, and fiber-optic cable into a conspiracy that slowly comes together: the implication that culture has always been franchised, always pushed from the top down, with the Sumerian Me as the first example. Unraveling the plot is what kept me hooked. The most similar experience I can think of is—I’m sorry, I’m sorry!—’s Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code.
’s prose fits the book perfectly. uses ’s style of playing obvious absurdities straight to highlight the contradiction; it reinforces the theme and is funny! The first chapter is a wonderful example: the narrator describes in over-the-top prose how fast Hiro’s car is, how powerful his gun is, how he is a master with his katana, at driving, at delivering… pizza. He drives his badass car into a pool. He lives in a storage container. He’s a master sword fighter in video games.
But Snow Crash has plenty of faults, the biggest of which it shares with . I like books where you have to think to piece things together, like Hyperion with all its intertextuality, or Echopraxia where the narrator has no idea what’s actually happening. Snow Crash doesn’t get there. Just when you start piecing things together, Hiro will pause and explain the entire thing to you, or worse, the librarian program will lecture him about it for 10 pages. The exposition drags and slows down the plot. And as is ’s habit, the story ends abruptly, but it didn’t bother me as much this time because I was ready for it.
And then there is the scene where fifteen-year-old Y.T. has enthusiastic sex with Raven, a man in his forties. It creeped me out when I first read it and it creeped me out this time too. It’s a lot of the reason I didn’t like Snow Crash originally.
Other Works
Snow Crash reminded me of some other works. The idea that humans were controllable because they lacked consciousness, and that Enki’s defense was to grant it to them, is the opposite of the idea in ’s Blindsight where consciousness is an evolutionary dead end. Ideas that spread and infect people are explored in both ’s A Fire Upon The Deep, where the Blight is transmitted as infected information, and ’s There Is No Antimemetics Division, where antimemes are ideas that can’t be thought and have power over people. Cops showing advertisements, jails run by big-box stores, countries with subscriptions for citizenship, and a nickel-and-dime religion are right out of ’s Ubik. The pairing of Hiro and Da5id as hackers who started off small together, one hitting it big while the other didn’t, mirrors Bishop and Cosmo from Sneakers. And Y.T., herself a harpooner, makes several references to ’s Moby Dick, including the unintentionally apt observation that Ahab “just didn’t know when to let go”; she means of the harpoon, but she’s describing both Ahab and Raven’s obsession with revenge.
Some smaller references: motorcycles in the Metaverse are out of Tron. The freighters full of refugees appear again in ’s Countdown City. The idea of compartmentalizing information in the brains of your employees was used in Severance. Rife’s private aircraft carrier is out of ’s Stand on Zanzibar. And the boat chase through the raft reminded me of the chase through the floating city in ’s City on Fire.
With a lot more context, I enjoyed Snow Crash much more than my first read-through. There are complicated ideas that come out best when you understand what they’re responding to. It’s something I appreciate now: the best sci-fi rewards a closer read. I look forward to revisiting some of ’s other works. I remember really enjoying Anathem when I read it in grad school, and I’ve never read his more famous Cryptonomicon.