Review: Snow Crash Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash fills in nicely as a precursor to 90s cyberpunk favorites The Matrix, Hackers, or the Fifth Element.

The novel, published in 1992, is set in that decade’s near distant future and follows the story of a protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, and a Kourier (spelled with a “k”) named Y.T. (not to be confused with whitey).

Hiro is a blaysian hacker and pizza delivery boy living in what is now Southern California. Except that in Snow Crash, the United States government has all but dissolved and its residents are instead grouped by franchises.

Hiro meets Y.T., a kourier of the future who rides a skateboard and uses a harpoon to latch onto cars to make deliveries. Y.T., a 15-year-old girl, saves Hiro from failing to deliver a pizza on time in one of the novel’s many chase scenes. Y.T., with her hypersexuality and oftentimes cheesy dialogue, (“Jack this barrier to commerce, man,” she said in one scene) screams “Girlz Rawk” like a lost Spice Girl.

Stephenson has a somewhat juvenile approach to characterizations. Hiro is a self-described “best swordsman in the world,” which, if he is in his mid-20s, just is a lame thing to say, none the less have on his business card. It's supposed to be clever, but it's not.

Though Stephensen writes paper-thin characters, his central theme is an interesting and worthwhile topic to explore. That theme, in a nutshell: ideas spread like viruses. Expect for in his novel, hackers are the host to a computer virus that is able to spread on a biological level and control the user through radio signals, or something (there's a radio antenna on the back of their brainstem at one point). The central theme is mostly explored in what I like to call “expository hammers” that the reader gets pounded over the head with every couple hundred pages or so. Stephensen uses religion in this case as an example of how ideas are spread like viruses, etc., putting the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel to use.

The fact is, however, that surrounding this central theme is an endless series of chase and fight scenes designed to keep a young male interested. Through the first 70 percent of the book, I read these scenes diligently, keeping my eye out for any possible symbolism to be found. However, I quickly realized that the chase scenes were shallow, boring, and best done in an action movie rather then a novel. By the end of the book, I was “speed reading” through these sections and didn’t miss much.

Bottom line: the book may be a fun summer read, but offers nothing beyond the surface.