Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson, 1992
Science fiction FantasyContemporary fictionGraphic novels & humour
A pizza-delivering hacker, a sword-carrying skate courier and a Sumerian virus loose in a balkanised America of franchised enclaves. Fast, funny and unnervingly prophetic.
Feels like unease and wonder. About memory and death.
A page from the book
A delivery man's professional pride, measured out in firepower.
The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doo-hickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator. Neal Stephenson.'Metaverse' was Stephenson's own coinage, invented in this 1992 novel; the word then waited thirty years for the technology to catch up with it.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Snow Crash like?
- Feels like unease and wonder. About memory and death.
- What should I read after Snow Crash?
- If you liked Snow Crash, try Good Omens (Terry Pratchett), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) and American Gods (Neil Gaiman).
A taste of the feed
A demon's professional failing is liking the people he's meant to ruin.
He rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon. Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.
Good Omens · Terry Pratchett
What poverty actually teaches, from someone who sat through the lesson.
Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian · Sherman Alexie
Can a scientist trust the one love story she can’t test?
One day I was thinking about a conversation I’d had with my sister Maggie about why she married her husband, John. She was adamant it was love at first sight, and even though they were only fourteen when they met, they knew they’d end up spending the rest of their lives together. I’m a scientist, so naturally I’m skeptical about that kind of thing, but it did get me thinking—what if she was right? What if love at first sight actually exists?
The One · John Marrs
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