Book Review: Snow Crash

Book Review: 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson

2 / 5 Stars

'Snow Crash' first was issued in hardback in 1992; this mass market paperback edition (470 pp.) was released in May, 1993 and features cover art by Bruce Jensen.

The novel is set in the early 2000s, and the lead character is a slacker in his thirties named Hiro Protagonist. Hiro is a sometime hacker, pizza deliveryman, and stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation (successor agency to the CIA). In the novel's first chapter we are introduced to secondary character 'Y.T,' a 15 year-old girl who works as a courier, riding a super-sophisticated skateboard that gains momentum from temporarily attaching to cars and trucks via a 'smart' harpoon.

The plot of 'Snow Crash' is rather simple; a telecom magnate named L. Bob Rife is attempting to take control of the world, and one means of doing this involves loosing a virus, the eponymous Snow Crash, on the global hacker community. Snow Crash delivers a sort of digital lobotomy when viewed by unsuspecting hackers. 

When not grinding for low wages, Hiro spends most of his time in an online world called the Metaverse, where he is a personality of some stature. The novel oscillates between events in the 'real' world, and those taking place in the Metaverse. Regardless of locale, Hiro and Y.T. are obliged to ally themselves with all manner of quirky personalities in their efforts to thwart the machinations of L. Bob Rife, and purge Snow Crash from the hacker infastructure.

At nearly 500 pages in length, and with dense prose, 'Snow Crash' can't really be synopsized in a concise manner. It is sufficient to say that author Stephenson uses the novel as a platform to launch into all manner of discourses and digressions, with many of these having little relevance with the main plot. 

For example, he devotes more than 10 pages to describing the numbing office routine that Y. T.'s mother, a federal employee, must follow in her job as a programmer. Four of these 10 pages deal with a memorandum from management about the requirement for employees to furnish toilet paper for the office bathrooms. It's a case of satiric overkill, and could have been excised, along with probably another 100 pages of extraneous exposition, without damaging the novel........ 

The final 150-odd pages of 'Snow Crash' do pick up momentum, as Hiro and Y.T. endure all sorts of perils in their final confrontation with L. Bob Rife aboard his 'fifth world,' a massive armada of dilapidated ships and boats constituting an artificial island in the Pacific. But frequent plot contrivances leech the impact from these climactic sequences. To give an example, at one point, someone falls out of a speeding helicopter, and thus faces certain injury and perhaps death. But - ! Their coverall just happens to have a quasi-miraculous, built-in airbag system that cushions their fall at the moment of impact ! So, what could have been a moment of suspense, is cancelled out by a plot gimmick.

I finished 'Snow Crash' thinking that its more engaging sequences were too few and too far between to reward me for the effort I had to put into reading the novel in the first place. As a first-gen cyberpunk novel it's too unfocused and too messy to stand alongside (say) Gibson's 'Bridge' trilogy, Sterling's 'Heavy Weather,' and Effinger's 'Budayeen' trilogy. 

Only Stephenson fans, and those with a degree of patience, are advised to sit down with 'Snow Crash.'