In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
Looking through my bookshelves, I recently realized that I haven’t reviewed any of the works of Neal Stephenson, long one of my favorite authors. And it was immediately clear which book I should re-read: Snow Crash. It wasn’t his first book, but it was the one that put him on the map, and not just within the science fiction community. The book was published in 1992, which means this past year marked its 30th anniversary. And the book was certainly attention-grabbing. With its hero bearing the improbable name of “Hiro Protagonist,” the story is a sprawling journey through a fractured and dis-United States, whose government has retreated into armed compounds, leaving law enforcement in the hands of private companies. The Mafia has optimized pizza delivery, skateboarding couriers latch themselves to cars on highways, people spend more and more time in what is called the metaverse, and robber baron capitalists are not only trying to rule the world by capturing the media, but by capturing the very minds of their audiences.
When Snow Crash first appeared, some wanted to slap the label of “cyberpunk” onto it. This, after all, is the book where the term metaverse was coined. Stephenson also pioneered use of the term “avatar” in the context of a person’s representation in a virtual world. But Stephenson’s work, despite its focus on computer networking and virtual reality, didn’t quite fit the cyberpunk label. The sub-genre of cyberpunk, which gained widespread attention with the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984, was a more serious endeavor, with literary aspirations. Stephenson’s Snow Crash, with its lurid characters, satirical worldbuilding, and frantic energy, was anything but serious literature. It reminded me of a literary version of Jack Kirby’s Captain America comics. Not just the ones Kirby drew, with their exaggerated proportions and perspectives, but the ones he also wrote, where the story doesn’t simply progress—it explodes across the pages. Most of all, Stephenson’s work is fun, with a contagious energy that draws the reader into the story.
About the Author
Neal Stephenson (born in 1959) is an American science fiction writer and futurist, who has had a significant impact on the science fiction community and the world beyond it. Stephenson started by writing techno-thrillers, but Snow Crash was his first book that was unabashedly science fiction, and it was a rousing success. He followed it with The Diamond Age, which imagined a world transformed by nanotechnology. The next book, Cryptonomicon, was set in the present and recent past, and looked at the challenges of protecting data and the field of cryptography.
Intrigued by the history of science and mathematics that he’d delved into during his research for Cryptonomicon, Stephenson then wrote a sprawling historical series, collectively referred to as The Baroque Cycle, first issued as three massive volumes, but later published as an eight-book set. The book contains a delightful mix of fictional and historical characters. This was followed by Anathem, a book about mathematical monks whose work ends up stretching the boundaries of reality itself. And there have been quite a few books since then, each distinctive and unique, and rich in the detail Stephenson has become known for. One of my favorites of his more recent novels is Seveneves, a book that sees humanity scrambling to survive the mysterious destruction of the moon and the disaster that ensues, which ends with an intriguing look at a world transformed by the apocalypse.
Stephenson has been nominated for, and won, a number of awards for his works over the years, with The Diamond Age winning the Hugo for Best Novel.
Beyond his role as a science fiction author, Stephenson has played a role in building the world of the future. He has been an advisor to companies including the Blue Origin space launch organization. He has worked as a game developer. And Stephenson is now in partnership to start a company named Lamina1 (that’s a 1 at the end of the word, not a lower-case L), whose goal is to build the foundation for an open metaverse, not tied to any single company or organization.
Literary Excess?
While Snow Crash is a compelling narrative that hooks the reader in from the first page right to the end, it is not without features that some might consider to be literary sins, including a main character who could be called a Mary Sue, the liberal (some might say excessive) use of exposition, and a tendency of characters to “mansplain” at each other.
We’re probably all encountered arguments over what constitutes a Mary Sue and whether certain characters fit the definition. Whether you agree or not, it isn’t difficult to see how the larger-than-life Hiro Protagonist, sword-wielding Mafia Deliverator, architect of the metaverse, and part-time music producer, has occasionally been saddled with the designation.
And Stephenson himself could be called the king of exposition, pausing frequently to explain things to the reader. In the opening pages of Snow Crash, he spends as much time explaining the backstory of his future America as he does portraying the action. The reader not only learns Hiro is delivering a pizza, they also learn how the pizza is made, about the pizza company itself, about the neighborhood the pizza is being sent to, and about the delivery person’s vehicle and weaponry. And this is all before the reader learns Hiro’s name. Sometimes the exposition is presented by the avatar of a library program, sometimes by characters bringing each other up to speed, and at the end there is a long scene where Hiro briefs his teammates in a virtual meeting. But even though Stephenson uses exposition liberally, the way painters build layers of oils or acrylics, he is also eminently entertaining at the same time. He is one of the few writers that can write long, explanatory passages that keep me eagerly turning pages.
Sometimes Stephenson’s characters get a little carried away with expository excursions themselves, especially Hiro. There are more than a few incidents of “mansplaining” in Snow Crash. While initially the term was used to describe men talking condescendingly to women, in recent years it has been used more widely, describing the general practice of talking down to an audience. And Hiro tends to do just that, explaining various things to the people around him at great lengths. At the same time, though, Hiro remains a likable character (and often portrayed as the smartest person in the room), and his long discursions might be taken as a sign of his enthusiasm, not arrogance (though of course, everyone will have their own take on the character and his behavior).
All in all, despite flirting with all sorts of literary excesses, Stephenson ends up pulling off a remarkable feat. For all its unconventional literary embellishments, Snow Crash is a tour de force, eminently readable and exciting.
Snow Crash
The book opens with a Deliverator (our own Hiro Protagonist) screaming through the city streets with a pizza that he received late, but must still be delivered on time for the Mafia, a company that doesn’t condone failure. His car is hit by the magnetic harpoon of a skateboarding courier nicknamed Y.T. (short for Yours Truly), a 15-year-old girl who hides her dangerous profession from her mother. Hiro is worried he can’t make his required delivery time, and tries to lose her. When he makes a miscalculation, and ends up crashing his car into an empty pool, Y.T. takes pity and makes the delivery for him, which attracts the attention of Uncle Enzo, his boss. Hiro, who is an independent intelligence collector for the privatized Central Intelligence Corporation, enlists Y.T. to help him in his efforts.
Hiro drops by a virtual bar in the metaverse (which he helped create), and is approached by an avatar acting like a drug pusher, who wants to give him a free hit of an executable file called Snow Crash. Hiro wisely refuses, but his friend who owns the bar, arrogantly assuming his antiviral software can handle anything, opens a Snow Crash file, and his avatar disintegrates. Later, Hiro finds out that his friend’s brain has been fried in the real world as well. He also meets an old lover, Juanita, who is investigating a mysterious new religion that is being sponsored by the American tycoon L. Bob Rife. She gives Hiro a huge file to look at, tells him to find an information collector named Lagos, then warns him to avoid Snow Crash, and also to beware of someone named Raven.
Back in the real world, Y.T. and Hiro encounter a Rat Thing, a dog that has been given a cyborg body, which saves them from some ruffians who were pursuing them. Despite warnings from Hiro, Y.T. helps the injured Rat Thing, who reminds her of a dog she had to give up when she was young. Her kindness, unusual in the “fend for yourself” world they live in, will end up being repaid abundantly.
Hiro is hosting a concert for his roommate’s band and finds the mysterious Lagos, only to see him killed by the sinister Raven. He starts looking at the information Juanita gave him. It turns out L. Bob Rife has bought a decommissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, and is using it to collect refugees from around the Pacific Rim and, following the Japanese Current, bring them to the United States. Because of the many vessels that have accreted around the carrier, it has become known as the Raft. Rife also is behind a religious revival movement in the United States, Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates, where people speak in tongues. He is also after ancient Sumerian tablets that seem to hold the key to an ancient event where people began to speak and think differently.
Before long, all these different elements come together, and Hiro finds he is dealing with a massive plot to take over the world. He learns that the human brain is like hardware, and language is like software. And some language is like a computer virus, able to reprogram the way a person thinks and acts. There is no central authority in the U.S., and Hiro finds himself working with an odd coalition of business franchise leaders who oppose Rife and his efforts, including Uncle Enzo from the Mafia, Mister Lee from Mister Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, and Ng from Ng Security Industries. Juanita turns out to be a major player in the efforts to foil Rife and his evil plans, and is far more capable than Hiro ever imagined.
The conflict spills out into open but disorganized warfare as all the various players converge on the Raft, which is making its first stops along the West Coast. Hiro has repeated clashes with the mysterious Raven, and learns that their fathers had encountered each other during World War II. Juanita reappears, having been successful in overcoming the mental programming of Snow Crash, and Hiro develops an antivirus to save the hackers of the world, battling Raven in the metaverse as well. Soon Y.T. and Hiro are on the Raft, with a Sumerian tablet as the MacGuffin that drives the plot to an action-packed conclusion (complete with the intervention of cyborg Rat Things).
The cast of characters in Snow Crash is quite diverse and memorable, although I wish Stephenson had aged Y.T. up a few years—I was uncomfortable reading about an underaged character who was sexually active. When I first read Snow Crash, I couldn’t quite figure out when the book was set. Hiro’s age and his father’s service in World War II, along with Uncle Enzo’s Vietnam service and the attitudes of many of the characters, root the book in the time when it was written, but the world it portrays is an America some years in the future. Surprisingly, the book has aged well over the years.While many things are exaggerated, the setting still feels like many of the elements it contains could happen sometime in the next few years, which often isn’t the case with books written about the near future. In fact, some of Stephenson’s ideas have become even more timely in the years since the novel was written.
Final Thoughts
Snow Crash is an improbable mix of satire, adventure, slapstick comedy, and serious speculation about technology and the nature of human consciousness. With all those disparate elements going on, you might think it shouldn’t work, but it works very well, even upon re-reading decades later. It has enough energy to propel a dozen stories, and still feels engaging, fresh, and fun. If you’ve never read it, I would highly recommend it.
Now it’s your turn to chime in. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Snow Crash or any of Stephenson’s other work. And I’m curious about your thoughts on exposition in fiction. Do you think, as I do, that Stephenson succeeded in using so much exposition? And are there other authors or works that stand out to you as for the way they convey large quantities of background information?
Alan Brown has been a science fiction fan for over five decades, especially fiction that deals with science, military matters, exploration and adventure.
I read Snow Crash when it first came out and now am thinking I’d like to reread, which I can easily do; it’s in my bookcase. I enjoyed it tremendously the first time. Normally I don’t care for infodumps, but these did not bother me. I’ve since read a lot of Stephenson’s work and liked most of it a lot. And I very much doubt if I’m the intended audience, as I am an old, not-very-computer-literate woman. (Heads to O-S bookcase now.)
I think Stephenson is the king of entertaining exposition. For me, the peak comes in Cryptonomicon (Lawrence’s sawtooth wave, the Captain Crunch cereal, the fair distribution of an estate… it just never stops).
I’m also amazed at how well Snow Crash aged, but I think it has the curse of being so influential that new readers find it cliched and hackneyed.
I never remember the plot details of Snow Crash though. I don’t think my brain is big enough to hold it all at the same time. Sometimes Stephenson’s meandering plots are fun, but in this case I think it is the world building that fascinates.
I think that you could say that Stephenson’s first novel, The Big U, counts as SF. Nobody else seems to have read it, however.
Didn’t Vernor Vinge have avatars in “True Names”?
Snow Crash was the first Neal Stephenson work I’d ever read, and one of my first cyberpunk books (although I had already read Neuromancer), and it completely blew me away. I’d never read anything like it, and I’ve been an avid Stephenson read ever since. I’ve liked some books more and some less, but very few, but him or anyone else, have hit me like Snow Crash did.
I remember I was listening to the audiobook in the car with my friend and I had to explain a line that was something like “Y.T. took out her ‘poon”
1992:
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
Connie Willis, Doomsday Book
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
Best year of science fiction ever?
@6 It was a good year, wasn’t it?
Snowcrash has been the only book of Stephenson’s I’ve been able to get through. Maybe because of the dog? I keep picking them up and reading a bit and then getting distracted by something else.
It might also have been the first science fiction book I read, and it’s been a fun journey ever since.
The headmistress of the school in Diamond Age said something that has always made me think she was YT. I can’t remember what it was & I’m too lazy to look it up right now.
I loved “Snow Crash” although my favourite NS book is “The Diamond Age”. As his books have grown in size, I have found that his endings have become a bit scattershot. He is still a fantastic writer, mind you as he is a writer of grand and deep ideas.
I must disagree with the author of this article, though. “Snow Crash” is certainly cyberpunk and yes it has “literary aspirations” as does NS’ other books. Many of his interviews seem to support this contention.
@9 .the answer you are looking for is that Y.T, the character you mentioned in Snow Crash, and the aged neo-Victorian Miss Matheson in The Diamond Age, are probably the same characters, as in The Diamond Age she drops oblique references to her past as a hard-edged skateboarder.
@6: whether or not the best year ever, those are all great books.
While I can’t say I noted the connection between Miss Matheson and Y.T., I’d just assume it’s there! One of the things I love about Stephenson is how I find links between most of the books. If I don’t find any, I assume I missed something!
Snow Crash is definitely cyberpunk. Honestly, I’d have thought most people would consider it more “literary” than Neuromancer (though I hate to call any book “literary”: that’s just a snob term).
One of the few books I love enough to argue about!
I’ll admit to not reading Snow Crash until 2020, but when I did the whole book came off has parody of ’90s action cyberpunk and the entire libertarian strain of American science fiction. Well executed if occasionally exhausting parody, but still parody. The only not comedic part was Stephenson stopping parts of the climax to show his research into languages.
Part of it just be me comparing mainstream churned action cyberpunk-ish novels against Snow Crash and then both against feminist cyberpunk like Trouble and Her Friends.
I read Snow Crash last year, after reading The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. As Snow Crash is mentioned in the first few pages of Kaiju, I was intrigued. It was really fun to read and I enjoyed it immensely.
You have to read Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle of 3 books. The way the characters interact with real historical figures is much better than reading any history text. It took me several months to read all three because the dialogue is complex and thought-provoking and I couldn’t be tired and keep up with it. Isaac Newton, Leibniz, Louis the 14th, Jack, King of the Vagabonds, ahhhh…… what an adventure that goes around the world several times from 1650-1750 CE. I’ve read Crytonomicon and Readme as well, but the Baroques are a masterpiece.
Exposition can be done well. In many ways, I find Stephenson’s expositions, even if they don’t support the plot, to be entertaining. And I read Stephenson because he’s entertaining as hell, even when he’s just adding in stuff that’s fun to talk about.
On television, one of the things that Buffy the Vampire Slayer had to deal with was exposition. And they (luckily) found Anthony Head, who was able to expound on all sorts of subjects without boring the audience. The only other example of world class exposition I can think of right now is in Game of Thrones, which managed to couple exposition and sex.
I’ve always thought that Stephenson is one of the best modern science fiction authors. Snow Crash was excellent and fun. His latest book – ‘Termination Shock’ – is also very good, very timely and fun to read.
Snow Crash is one of my favorite books, and I’d highly recommend the audio book (Audible) for an even better experience. It’s read by the legendary Jonathan Davis and is hilarious.
I read Snowcrash back in the late nineties. Discovered its existence in the back of Gibson’s Virtual Light as an ad. Read it, loved it, hands down my favorite book of all time. I loved the dystopian setting, the characters, the humor, the action, just everything about it. I’ve re-read it at least once since and have also read The Diamond Age and Zodiac.
I remember being impressed when I read Snow Crash not long after it came out; I wonder whether his ideas about memes (turned much darker in John Barnes’s recent works) had even as much basis as Sapir/Whorf (now considered unlikely). I don’t remember being bored by the exposition and have read a few of his other books but am increasingly reluctant to give my time to doorstops — especially after Anathem, which I thought took a long time to go nowhere. De gustibus…
@3/Raskos: I remember The Big U passing through my hands, but the description in Wikipedia does not ring any bells. I also was wondering about avatars in “True Names” — which for a while was cited as the start of cyberpunk even thought there’s very little punk about it.
@6/Dave Slaven: maybe, maybe not; at least 3 of those books could have been slimmed own without losing anything essential. (I recently reread Doomsday Book for a local discussion group; it’s the start of her dump-in-everything bloat that peaked in Blackout/All Clear.)
.the answer you are looking for is that Y.T, the character you mentioned in Snow Crash, and the aged neo-Victorian Miss Matheson in The Diamond Age, are probably the same characters, as in The Diamond Age she drops oblique references to her past as a hard-edged skateboarder.
She quotes the advertising slogan for smartwheels (“Chiseled Spam”) – YT thinks at one point that it was that specific advertising slogan that made her spend the extra to get a skateboard with smartwheels. And she describes herself as a former “thrasher” which is slang that YT uses. So either she is YT or she’s from a very similar background.
When I first read Snow Crash, I couldn’t quite figure out when the book was set.
Published 1992, it talks about “the former Crown Colony of Hong Kong” so it’s set after 1997. Hiro’s over 25 (because of the “baddest mf in the world” aside regarding Raven) and his father was a very young soldier at the very end of WW2, so born no later than 1928. His mother’s old enough to have retired to a golfing community. Raven was born shortly after a nuclear test in 1972. Uncle Enzo fought in Vietnam with Special Forces as a young man, so he can’t have been born after 1953 (20 in 1973), and he is now old enough for YT (age 15) to think of him as her parents’ generation, but young enough to get into razor fights.
I’d say it’s meant to be around 2000 or so. Hiro could be born in 1970 (making him about 30) and Uncle Enzo would be in his 50s. Society fell apart into the enclaves in the early 1990s.
Does that fit with Diamond Age? YT/Miss Matheson is incredibly aged (albeit from a teenage girl’s point of view) so must be at least 70. And Lord Alexander, who has teenage grandchildren, remembers flood relief work as a teenager in a functional US, so that must have been before 1995 or so – making his birthdate about 1980, like YT/Miss Matheson. Being an equity lord, he’s aged more slowly than her due to wealth and better healthcare, and not falling off skateboards in traffic so much. It kind of works.
There are more than a few incidents of “mansplaining” in Snow Crash. While initially the term was used to describe men talking condescendingly to women, in recent years it has been used more widely, describing the general practice of talking down to an audience. And Hiro tends to do just that, explaining various things to the people around him at great lengths.
I disagree with this – Hiro “explains”, he doesn’t “mansplain”. He explains things at length, yes, but he explains things to people who don’t know them already and who really need to know them. And I wouldn’t say he talks down to his various audiences.
@22: I agree that it’s not mansplaining. I do think he tends to talk down to his audiences: he’s a little arrogant, because he is used to being right, and it shows. But to call that mansplaining is to gaslight the whole experience of women who get mansplained.
It’s a long time since my last read, but I think he probably does try to mansplain a few things to YT. Who promptly fixes his worldview.
“Snow Crash” is one of my favorite science fiction books. I reread it periodically (and, have listened to the audible book).
I appreciated all the exposition because Stephenson had a lot of interesting ideas and it’s much easier bringing the reader up to speed about them rather than trying to “show” them. As someone previously said, I thought it was enthusiasm rather than condescension.
Snow Crash is one of my favorite and most reread books. I generally enjoy Stephenson a lot, including his exposition and fun discursions into wisdom tooth removal and Captain Crunch, to cite two examples from Cryptonomicon.
At the other extreme, one of my favorite science-fictional expositions is bit of lampshading by Larry Niven in his novel Protector. At one point, two characters find themselves at an abandoned base on Mars. They decide to commandeer a long-mothballed Mars buggy to continue their exploration and pursuit of an alien visitor on the Martian surface.
After finding a buggy in apparent working order, one character announces he’s going to search for some fuel for the vehicle.
“It’ll be hydrazine, with compressed Martian air for oxidizer,” advises the other character.
Replies the first, “I’ll just look for something labeled FUEL.”
I happen to have read Snow Crash quite recently for a book club, for the first time since 2000 or so. Hiro does scoff at YT’s estimate of the size of the Rife building – and YT puts him in his place immediately (it’s rather surprising how few conversations between YT and Hiro we see – I had remembered them as working together far more than they actually do). Other than that, he’s pretty good about talking with her (though in the past, judging from what Hiro thinks about himself, Hiro probably explained a lot of things to Juanita that Juanita knew far better herself). Most of the explanations in the book come from the Librarian, who is explaining things to Hiro (though Hiro later repeats the Librarian’s explanations to Ng, Lee and Enzo).
Still a very entertaining book, though a modern reader probably doesn’t need virtual reality explained (I guess we did need that to some extent back in the previous century).
I just finished the book. Certainly energetic and fun. It must have been an amazing read 30 years ago. (I was in my 30s, working for a computer company, but not reading much sf at that time.)
I was also a little taken aback by the female lead being 15 years old, with all she gets up to.
a modern reader probably doesn’t need virtual reality explained (I guess we did need that to some extent back in the previous century).
There’s one of William Gibson’s Cayce Pollard books, I think, in which the topic comes up and Cayce thinks to herself “that’s the first time in fifteen years I’ve heard someone say ‘virtual reality’ out loud”.
On the more general point, I’m always fascinated by how people’s memories of books diverge, and are moulded by what we would like to have read, rather than what’s actually written. I remember someone assuring me with great confidence that in Verne “Around the World in 80 Days” the plot hinges on Phileas Fogg having robbed a bank, and he’s using the bet as a trick to launder the proceeds. It was a very satirical story, this person said; Verne kept making sly jokes about how it was utterly unthinkable to the English that a respectable gentleman could also be a bank robber.
Now, of course, that is not what happens in the book. Fogg is pursued around the world by a Scotland Yard detective who thinks he’s robbed a bank, but it’s made very clear that he didn’t, and in fact the real bank robber gets caught. I pointed this out and her response was “oh, they must have changed that in the English translation”.
Similarly, Hiro’s a male techy protagonist and the other protagonist is a young woman, so of course Hiro has to talk down to her and mansplain things all the time. You see a couple of spots of ink on the page, and your brain fills in the rest of the face, because it’s a familiar pattern – regardless of the fact that (as 26 points out) it doesn’t actually exist in reality.
“I’m always fascinated by how people’s memories … diverge“
It’s nothing to do with books — that’s memories for you :-)
It’s not Hiro. It’s just that Stephenson’s Exposition Ball tends to turn whoever’s holding it into a bit of a smug know-it-all for the duration. (At least early Stephenson; I haven’t read his stuff since dragging myself through Cryptonomicon.)
I read The Diamond Age to actual tatters back in the day, though.
@31: True. Through most of Snow Crash a non-sentient computer program gets the job of being Mr. Exposition, which makes a bit more tolerable, but (as I alluded to), when it’s Hiro’s turn to explain to Ng, Lee and Enzo, he gets a bit unbearable, especially since all three of them had worked with Lagos and Juanita before Hiro came along, and probably knew everything that Hiro had learned from the AI.