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Snow Crash

A Novel

ebook
0 of 2 copies available
0 of 2 copies available
Now featuring never-before-seen material, the “brilliantly realized” (The New York Times Book Review) breakthrough novel from visionary author Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators
Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions.
Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary.
But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state).
Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He’ll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.
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  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 4, 1992
      In California of the near future, when the U.S. is only a ``Burbclave'' (city-state), the Mafia is just another franchise chain (CosaNostrastet Pizza, Incorporated) and there are no laws to speak of, Hiro Protagonist follows clues from the Bible, ancient Sumer and high technology to help thwart an attempt to take control of civilization--such as it is. When he logs on to Metaverse, an imaginary place entered via computer, Hiro encounters Juanita Marquez, a ``radical'' Catholic and computer whiz. She warns him off Snow Crash (a street drug named for computer failure) and gives him a file labeled Babel (as in Tower of Babel). Another friend, sp ok/pk Da5id, who ignores Juanita's warning, computer crashes out of Metaverse into the real world, where he physically collapses. Hiro, Juanita, Y.T. (a freewheeling, skateboard-riding courier) and sundry other Burbclave and franchise power figures see some action on the way to finding out who is behind this bizarre ``drug'' with ancient roots. Although Stephenson ( Zodiac ) provides more Sumerian culture than the story strictly needs (alternating intense activity with scholarship breaks), his imaginative juxtaposition of ancient and futuristic detail could make this a cult favorite.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 1, 2001
      One of the added pleasures of the success of Stephenson's recent books (Cryptonomicon, etc.) is this better-late-than-never audio version of his third (and arguably best) novel, which continues to be a paperback bestseller. Snow Crash
      (1992), which helped earn the word "cyberpunk" a place in history, is set in the not-too-distant future where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the U.S. is a vast, mall-like patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and young Hiro Protagonist (yes, that's the hero protagonist's name) uses his computer game wizardry and pizza delivering skills to combat a deadly new designer drug (and computer virus) called Snow Crash. Actor/writer Davis is the ideal choice for bringing Stephenson's crackling, poetic language to life, and the author-approved abridgement sacrifices none of his hilariously skewed, eminently believable vision—a stew of concepts from Sumerian myth to Japanese anime—of the commercially sponsored fate that sits waiting in a giant shopping mall, coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Based on the Bantam Doubleday Dell paperback.

    • Library Journal

      April 1, 1992
      Hiro Protagonist, delivery boy for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza and freelance hacker in the virtual reality called the Metaverse, tangles with religious cultists, computer virus/drug dealers, and a human bomb known as the Raven in a freewheeling first novel that picks up where cyberpunk left off. Rapid-fire action scenes interspersed with snippets of Sumerian mythology and vignettes of a franchise-dominated 21st century combine to produce a heady, surrealistic pastiche of the not-so-distant future. Satiric sf at its best, this novel is highly recommended for all libraries.

      Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      April 1, 1992
      This novel depicts a twenty-first-century America that has turned into the classic urban jungle, with most people plugged into "virtual reality" simulations. A computer virus threatens the electronics, and a new drug called Snow Crash threatens human health. A maverick hacker calling himself Hiro Protagonist winds up with the job of fighting both. The book will not seem all that significant to those familiar with the last 10 years or so of cyberpunk and its relatives, but it does come across well as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek exploration of similar territory by a writer new to sf but basically gifted who's assimilated a good many of the developments in virtual-reality technology since the early 1980s. ((Reviewed Apr. 1, 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)

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Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:970
  • Text Difficulty:5-7

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