Snow Crash Revisited: Grokking a Satire of Mimesis

https://hackernoon.com/snow-crash-revisited-grokking-a-satire-of-mimesis-23de3ac05f47?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

by amk_ • 10 years ago

111 101 10 years ago

throwanem6• 10 years ago

I can see that a lot of thought went into this review, but I have to admit I can't see what came out of it. Perhaps someone with a clearer understanding than I might lend a hand?

Animats2• 10 years ago

The book, or the review?

The book outlines a world where franchisers run everything, including jails. It's a cookie-cutter world; instances of each franchise are very standardized, and this is a plot point. The hero delivers pizza for the Mafia run pizza franchise, when he's not hacking code. The heroine is a 15-year old skateboarding courier girl with a really good skateboard.

There's a big virtual world, run partly by the Special Interest Group on Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery. The VR world is a lot like Second Life but with VR and better graphics; you can buy real estate and build. The hero spends a lot of time in there, but that's not where the plot happens.

The Big Bad is a mega-preacher who has a visual data pattern which allows him to take over, or at least crash, human brains. This involves info from ancient gods and such. He's trying to take over the world.

It's a great exercise in literary world-building; the plot isn't much and there's little character development.

A movie was in development, but it didn't happen. It would be great to see it done it today, now that the graphics are good enough. Would definitely have been better than Tron 2.

throwanem6• 10 years ago

The review, sorry - I know the book of old. I've edited my prior comment for greater salience.

qwertyuiop92417• 10 years ago

Heh, yeah. Tron 2 was disapointing to day the least.

Stephenson's novels in general are like this, although Cryptonomicon for one certainly has better character development than Snow Crash: they're a disorderly jumble of whatever ideas Stephenson thought were interesting at the time, wrapped in a skin of plot, and enfleshed in the characters that surround, encounter, and explore them. Stephenson sometimes jumps the rails entirely, writing long monologues, dialogues, and digressions that barely refer to the characters or plot at all, just because he thought the ideas were neat (most of Randy and Pontifex's discussions in prison, The mathematics of Alan's bicycle chain, a good stretch of Hiro's discussions with the Librarian (although nowhere near all of them), and Hiro's adventures in Flatland on the raft (you can just feel the seeds of In The Beginning Was The Command Line, struggling to get out)), or for reasons known only to him (probably because he thought it was funny) (the TP memo, the stockings/Van Eck... thing). To some people this may be seen as a disjointed, overhyped, overcomplicated mess, but to the right sort of mind, it's an almost magical experience.

Curiously, these sorts of people tend to be heavily into computing, which is why Stephenson pervades that culture.

Or that's wrong, and I'm just completely mad. That's also a possibility.

ihuman• 10 years ago

Would definitely have been better than Tron 2

At least we got a good Daft Punk album out of it

kordless2• 10 years ago

Makes me wonder if people with Aphantasia would be immune to the Big Bad's pattern.

n00b101• 10 years ago

I read Snow Crash when I was 13. Then I lost countless hours trying to "live the dream" with Active Worlds [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds

Harelin• 10 years ago

It was Cybertown for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown

ccvannorman• 10 years ago

Oh dear god. I'm working on a virtual math world video game, and so I was obliged to check out Active Worlds which you linked to.

It truly feels lost in the 90s.. I can't say I could appreciate the UX. I probably won't be dabbling there. :/

Still, it's pretty cool that it's the oldest online multiplayer 3D world and still apparently has a friendly user base! (They helped me out when I started spouting wwwwwwawsd in the chat whilst trying to move my avatar)

BatFastard• 10 years ago

Interesting how "new" build your own reality worlds have just started reappearing after an 8 year drought. VR has brought them back, but VR is just a new interface to the same way of creating things.

L_226• 10 years ago

I once toyed around with the idea of making a browser based virtual world for 4chan when I still used it regularly (~2008ish). Heavily inspired by Gibson and Stephenson. Each board would be it's own green wireframe building off a main avenue with shape and size corresponding to the volume of content - and thus would change over time. You would be able to fly around the 'city' and enter buildings to view the threads. I wrote a lot of notes, but no code... Of course, being a teenager I named the browser 4skin :)

Vivtek2• 10 years ago

This has me giggling. I guess one never really grows out of being a 14-year-old, ultimately.

celticninja2• 10 years ago

A bit like the Jurassic Park OS.

AJ007• 10 years ago

Similar story for me. I think I didn't read it until I was 14 and by that point I had experienced quite a few of the "virtual worlds" including Active Worlds, the good old text BBS games, and research-grade virtual reality caves. Despite all of those experiences the book had a profound effect on my expectations of the future.

To me I saw multi-player FPSs as virtual worlds. Second Life was intriguing when it came along but I couldn't figure out how it deserved the title of Metaverse any more than Ultima Online, or others, did.

The author is right about shared virtual reality. When I dropped the DK1 over my eyes for the first time, something clicked that hadn't happened to me since 1996. The true sensory deprivation of the outside world will make virtual reality meaningful. You will know the other person is there and paying attention, at least until Facebook begins streaming live animated alert notifications.

camtarn• 10 years ago

"In the summer of 1994, Ron Britvich created WebWorld, the first 2.5D world where tens of thousands could chat, build and travel. WebWorld operated on the Peregrine Systems Inc. servers as an after hours project until Britvich left the company to join Knowledge Adventure Worlds (KAW) in the fall of that year. In February 1995, KAW spun off their 3D Web division to form the company Worlds Inc."

It's really odd to think that NCSA Mosaic had just been released a year earlier - and if you go back to 2D, rather than 2.5D, the first persistent multiplayer virtual world launched in 1986, several years before even non-graphical web browsing was a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

angersock• 10 years ago

I spent many, many hours building things in Cofmeta and mars. :)

AW was ahead of its time, but internal shenanigans basically stunted and killed it.

guiambros2• 10 years ago

Likewise. I missed Lucasfilm's Habitat, but tried most of the virtual worlds after that, from MUDs via telnet in the early 90's, Worlds Chat in 95-96, Active Worlds right after (my company spent $1,500 buying a server copy), The Palace, Second Life, WoW, and more recently DK2/CC, etc.

We're getting close from the technology perspective, but the storytelling and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there. Visually impressive, but the social interactions are dull and unsophisticated, without emotional depth.

It's funny to look in hindsight. What Habitat has apparently nailed in the 80's [1] is what is missing, 30+ years later.

[1] http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html

PhasmaFelis2• 10 years ago

We're getting close from the technology perspective, but the storytelling and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there. Visually impressive, but the social interactions are dull and unsophisticated, without emotional depth.

However ambitious MMOs and virtual worlds get, I worry that they'll always run into the same barrier restricting their potential past a certain scale: the MMO experience is made out of people, and a whole lot of people are awful.

FrozenVoid• 10 years ago

but the storytelling and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there Thats because of hardware and network limits. MMOs are optimized to reduce latency and expensive computations. Having too many people concentrating on one place creates a huge stream of data that has to be broadcast to everyone in range. A few players in one area/instance don't need that much bandwidth(since most of world is loaded locally, only the changes are needed).

20yrs_no_equity• 10 years ago

What are "DK2/CC"? I've not heard of them.

mapt• 10 years ago

"Massive" does exist in some worlds. Eve Online has been pretty remarkable in shying away from programmatic content in favor of building an architecture for people to compete on their own terms; And it has 50k simultaneous users on one shard.

vertis6• 10 years ago

I read it much later so I think I missed some of the ability to be swept away as an imaginative teenage (sad).

I did spend a month trying to be as efficient and awesome as Seven of Nine though. Sleeping standing up didn't really work though.

Gargoyle• 10 years ago

One of the key things that made Snow Crash so appealing was that participants in the world also contributed the code that made it work. It was sort of semi-open source, I guess. I wonder if there's a way to make that practically work in a real-life metaverse. The book sort of skips over the obvious governance issues.

qwertyuiop92417• 10 years ago

Actually, it was distributed. Your code ran on your system. So long as it spoke the Steet protocol, and you had the real estate, you could run whatever you wanted.

Scarblac• 10 years ago

I read the book when I was a MUD addict in the 90s, and MUDs had a similar mechanism.

If you became high enough level in many MUDs, you became a "wizard". Wizards weren't players anymore, but they could edit code, creating new areas in the game for players to explore. Changing the code of a running game from within it was pretty cool, and so was the programming language (LPC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPC_(programming_language)).

eggy• 10 years ago

I like Stephenson, but I guess Snow Crash was late to the party for me, having already read Neuromancer and a bunch of other cyberpunk books as well as a lot of cyberpunk-themed movies before finding it.

I enjoyed Snow Crash, but I am more a fan of Cryptonomicon and Anathem. I stumbled upon Cryptonomicon in the bookstore, because of the intriguing title. That and the Perl script for Solitaire in the back of the book.

I wish Cryptonomicon had been made into a movie pre-Bitcoin and Snowden; I hope they still make a movie of it.

vertis6• 10 years ago

The reason I love books from Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Charles Stross, is that, for me at least, they're massive catalysts to my own thoughts and imaginations of what might be possible.

If I had to pick one book above others from Neil Stephenson it would be Diamond Age. I just keep going back to it. It's got a lot to say, and I wouldn't mind seeing a similar analysis by the Author of this post.

lowglow• 10 years ago

Yesssss. Diamond Age really is a boss book. We're pulling a lot of inspiration from these same authors to build Asteria. Heck, even Charles Stross retweeted Asteria last night. It was pretty epic. Check it: https://getasteria.com/

sosuke• 10 years ago

I was all in to Diamond Age until the ending. It felt like he ran out of steam, gave up, or had someone else write the ending it was such a departure from the rest of the book in pace and perspective.

I'll have to revisit it to see what I missed.

yoodenvranx• 10 years ago

It felt like he ran out of steam, gave up, or had someone else write the ending it was such a departure from the rest of the book in pace and perspective.

The same happens in "Seveneves". I love the first part of the book but when he switches to the new story line it feels like he ran out of time. That book should have been at least 2 or 3 books but for some reason he crams everything into 1 book.

quantumhobbit• 10 years ago

This is a pretty common complaint with Stephenson. Probably even more obvious in Diamond Age because the first half is so amazing.

InclinedPlane2• 10 years ago

I didn't mind it at all, and I actually kinda liked the ending of Diamond Age in the way it subverted expectations of typical story telling. By the end of Diamond Age a lot of the questions you have in the earlier parts have been answered (what has happened to people, how they've developed, etc.) And a lot of story arcs have also blossomed and/or run their courses. The story itself is about Nell's coming of age and fulfillment of her potential. By the end it's obvious she's achieved both, and I liked that the novel didn't coddle the reader with a typical over the top happy ending where everyone achieves closure, most of the good people live, and every story line is tucked into bed carefully with a glass of warm milk by the bedside. I'm an adult, I don't need that all the time. The real world doesn't work that way, and real stories don't work that way.

One of the dividing lines I have personally for "good" versus "bad" art is whether or not it blooms or withers upon further thought. Diamond Age, I would say, definitely rewards the reader for further thought, because it's a deep and fascinating world with interesting characters and stories. True, the ending of the book doesn't provide complete closure, but to be honest if you want that you can have it just by making up your own ending. That's part of the fun of that book, is that it leaves it open for you to fill in the blanks afterward, and seemingly things looked like they might have worked out alright for Nell.

One of the best books at getting across the concept of not needing complete closure at the end of a book is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, though that book primes the reader for it whereas Diamond Age doesn't.

huhtenberg• 10 years ago

Stross next to Gibson and Stephenson... hmm.

I tried The Atrocity Archives but I couldn't get past the first half. It felt like a pile of nerd paraphernalia force-stuffed into a story line.

I mean... Neuromancer is a true masterpiece from the story to the concepts to the succinct writing, just perfect. Snow Crash is less perfect, but exceptionally enthralling nonetheless. What would be a comparable read from Stross?

melloclello• 10 years ago

Man, Stross has written a whole lot of shitty pulp over his career but some of his short stories are kinda kooky [1] and Accelerando [2] was a ripping yarn

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/to...

[2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

jhbadger3• 10 years ago

I liked his "Missile Gap" -- a novella that combines the Cold War and alternate history in a way that I really liked. I agree with you about the "Atrocity Archives" -- and I love Cthulhu and spy stuff, so you'd think I would have liked it, but I just didn't like the way it didn't take itself seriously -- all this winking at the reader takes away all drama imho.

andyjohnson0• 10 years ago

What would be a comparable read from Stross?

Accelerando [1] isn't in the same league as Neuromancer in terms of style and succinctness, but the idea-density is pretty high and it moves along at a nice pace.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

AndrewDucker• 10 years ago

Accelerando stands up there with Neuromancer, to me.

vertis6• 10 years ago

Accelerando, Glass House, Halting State & Rule 34. His short story collection Wireless also has some great ones. Unwirer (with Cory Doctorow) being one of my favourites.

qwertyuiop92417• 10 years ago

Admittedly, as a fan of The Laundry Files, that's a major problem with the Atrocity Archives, for the first half, anyways. The second half, after Bob and Mo visit the Atrocity Archives themselves, is much better. We meet a variety of Checkov's Guns, several important people, and get a glimpse of the kind of horror that the Laundry Files is all about. The Concrete Jungle, a short story included in the book, is equally absorbing, and sets the scene for all short stories to come, as well as showing us a bit more of Angleton, and giving us introduction to MAGINOT BLUE STARS.

The second novel, The Jennifer Morgue, is very good, and largely free of the problems you mentioned, but is very different from much of the rest of the series, for reasons which will become obvious when you read it. It's in the third book, The Fuller Memorandum, where the series really hits its stride, and gets going.

However, the series doesn't mind an offside wink or two every once in a while, like Persephone's parenthesized Enochian, and the way The Scrum talks about its problems.

zem• 10 years ago

i love lots of bits of snow crash, but i do not like the book as a whole. i did not feel like the (admittedly excellent) ideas and snippets were stitched into a coherent whole in a particularly satisfying way.

on the other hand, "diamond age" is truly a masterpiece, and i strongly recommend that one to any of stephenson's fans. it's the book of his i'd rate the highest, though my favourite is "cryptonomicon" just because that's comfort reading.

menssen• 10 years ago

Downvote me: Infinite Jest is Snow Crash for adults.

(But seriously: similar vision of a corporate-controlled near-future; and IJ is great, read it.)

rfergie• 10 years ago

I've been trying to decide whether to bother with Infinite Jest or not. I've heard very good things about it, but also that it is a pretty tough read.

I think your comparison with Snow Crash has swung it for me; IJ is definitely on my reading list now

nnethercote• 10 years ago

I've heard very good things about it, but also that it is a pretty tough read.

Give it 100 pages. If you don't like it by then -- or at least significant chunks of it -- then you probably won't like the whole thing.

vertis6• 10 years ago

For those that have never heard of Infinite Jest, it's a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace[1].

It's now on my to read list.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest

carlesfe2• 10 years ago

I just finished Snow Crash and found it too pretentious and convoluted, like the turn that Diamond Age does towards the ending. Besides that, it introduces a few interesting concepts, but I feel that similar ideas are developed much better in DA.

For me, Stephenson's masterpiece is Diamond Age, hands down -- minus the ending, if that could be a thing. The last chapters are too obscure just for the sake of obscurity, I've read it three times and I can't get any "deep" meaning to it, just a bunch of wow-cool-but-irrelevant text.

Regarding Cryptonomicon, the first three books, they're straigtforward, interesting, and with a lot of references and trivia but it doesn't try too hard like the "Gods" part of Snow Crash. I really, really enjoyed them.

Unfortunately, I found the Cryptonomicon prequels a nice adventure book in the traditional sense, but the characters were too flat and un-relatable, and it bored me.

Anyway, that's my opinion. Diamond Age introduced me to cyberpunk and, to date, it's my favorite novel of the genre. I've recommended it to many people and they've always liked it. I still dream of the day when we have matter compilators, and victorians look like a bunch of hipsters to me, which is both funny and very realistic. In a world full of technology, rich people will want to go back to a more... simple and comfortable age. It blew my mind.

_98fj• 10 years ago

It's 12 years since I've read Diamond Age, but the way I remember the ending is that it gave me a feeling like a camera zooming out of the world. Everything drifts into distance, goes diffuse and becomes, with all it's importance, unimportant.

jeeva• 10 years ago

Have you tried Daemon and Freedom, a small series by Daniel Suarez?

vertis6• 10 years ago

Amazing books. I was pleasantly surprised by Kill Decision as well, not quite in the same league, but more interesting than I expected.

That, and Ramez Naam's Nexus, Crux, Apex are recent additions to my collection of awesome books.

qwertyuiop92417• 10 years ago

Yeah, those are excellent, and portray their tech fairly accurately, which is uncommon in those novels.

carlesfe2• 10 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation, added to my list!

jhbadger3• 10 years ago

What I find either funny or depressing (can't decide), are the number of younger people (as in too young to be using computers in 1992) who read "Snow Crash" before reading any other cyberpunk and 1) fail to get that it is actually is a satire of Neuromancer, etc. and 2) think that Stephenson was amazingly prophetic, not realizing that a lot of what he was writing about already existed, albeit in simpler forms. 3D avatar environments are really just an aesthetic improvement over MUDs (Multi User Dungeons/Domains), which were multi-user text-based games that were all the rage in 1992.

qwertyuiop92417• 10 years ago

He was pretty prophetic, just not with that. However the reason he was prophetic is that he inspired reality. See Google Earth.

sevensor• 10 years ago

I don't read Snow Crash as a Neuromancer parody. Stephenson has too many of his own ideas for that. When it comes to ideas, Stephenson is unusually playful. (See also the Enlightenment philosophers in the Baroque cycle.) He's not great on plot or characterization, or structuring a novel in general, but Stephenson can write one hell of a sentence, and he often keeps it up for a paragraph at a time.

Gibson, whose books I also adore, has basically nothing at all to do with Stephenson. The only thing connecting them is that some of their books are set in dystopian near-futures. Gibson at his best is bracingly bleak. Cyberpunk was a marketing term for publishers and critics who couldn't get their heads around him. Early Gibson is pure punk. Even more than Neuromancer, read the stories in Burning Chrome for their hard, angry edge.

usrusr3• 10 years ago

It must be even worse when people are reading the Baroque Cycle after having watched Pirates of the Caribbean, as the Jacks are exactly the same person. Surprisingly, both had been in writing before the other was published.

pjc502• 10 years ago

"Taken literally, this backstory might remind one of an arcane thriller written by an over-enthusiastic autodidact."

That's the rest of Stephenson's work.

I'm not sure Snow Crash is really a satire on cyberpunk per se. It's classic SF over-extrapolation of current trends in a funhouse mirror to shed light on things. The first of which is over-privatisation: everything in Snow Crash is a "franchise", including core parts of the government. When YT is arrested she's given a choice of privatised jail providers and justice systems, straight out of the libertarian playbook. The "burbclaves" are what happens when a HOA and gated community upgrades to an armed microstate. And so on.

The other of which is weaponised memes: if these things can be said to be "viral", can you produce a meme or image that's actually an exploit against human wetware?

The review criticises the book for "missing" Google, which I think says more about the reviewer's position in the world. Yes, the world of SC is not dominated by SV companies, but that's not important. The book does contain a souped-up realtime Google Earth, and a "gargoyle" who's a human version of the streetview car.

(Stross takes "weaponised ideas" in a different direction in the Laundry Files, which are essentially Yes Minister/Lovecraft crossover fiction)

qwertyuiop92417• 10 years ago

Although Stross's default stance in the Laundry Files seems to be that everything is a weapon, or could be one. Camera? Weapon. Smartphone? Weapon. Pidgeon's foot? Weapon. Your own brain? Weapon. Violin? At least one of them is a weapon.

Pamar• 10 years ago

Unlike I am mistaken the pidgeon foot is defensive/camouflage but cannot be used to cause damage to a target.

Snow Crash Revisited: Grokking a Satire of Mimesis

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