THE 30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH NEW, NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED MATERIAL
After the Internet, what came next?
Enter the Metaverse - cyberspace home to avatars and software daemons, where anything and just about everything goes. Newly available on the Street - the Metaverse's main drag - is Snow Crash. A cyberdrug that reduces avatars in the digital world to dust, but also infects users in real life, leaving them in a vegetative state.
This is bad news for Hiro, a freelance hacker and the Metaverse's best swordfighter, and mouthy skateboard courier Y. T.. Together, investigating the Infocalypse, they trace back the roots of language itself to an ancient Sumerian priesthood and find they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.
In this special edition of the remarkably prescient modern classic, Neal Stephenson explores
linguistics, computer science, politics and philosophy in the form of a break-neck adventure into the fast-approaching yet eerily recognizable future.
'Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the twenty-first century' William Gibson
'Brilliantly realized' New York Times Book Review
'Like a Pynchon novel with the brakes removed' Washington Post
'A remarkably prescient vision of today's tech landscape' Vanity Fair
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
October 27, 1994 -
Formats
-
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780141924045
-
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780141924045
- File size: 3159 KB
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Levels
- Lexile® Measure: 970
- Text Difficulty: 5-7
-
Reviews
-
October 1, 2001
One of the added pleasures of the success of Stephenson's recent books (Cryptonomicon, etc.) is this better-late-than-never audio version of his third (and arguably best) novel, which continues to be a paperback bestseller. Snow Crash
(1992), which helped earn the word "cyberpunk" a place in history, is set in the not-too-distant future where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the U.S. is a vast, mall-like patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and young Hiro Protagonist (yes, that's the hero protagonist's name) uses his computer game wizardry and pizza delivering skills to combat a deadly new designer drug (and computer virus) called Snow Crash. Actor/writer Davis is the ideal choice for bringing Stephenson's crackling, poetic language to life, and the author-approved abridgement sacrifices none of his hilariously skewed, eminently believable vision—a stew of concepts from Sumerian myth to Japanese anime—of the commercially sponsored fate that sits waiting in a giant shopping mall, coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Based on the Bantam Doubleday Dell paperback. -
May 4, 1992
In California of the near future, when the U.S. is only a ``Burbclave'' (city-state), the Mafia is just another franchise chain (CosaNostrastet Pizza, Incorporated) and there are no laws to speak of, Hiro Protagonist follows clues from the Bible, ancient Sumer and high technology to help thwart an attempt to take control of civilization--such as it is. When he logs on to Metaverse, an imaginary place entered via computer, Hiro encounters Juanita Marquez, a ``radical'' Catholic and computer whiz. She warns him off Snow Crash (a street drug named for computer failure) and gives him a file labeled Babel (as in Tower of Babel). Another friend, sp ok/pk Da5id, who ignores Juanita's warning, computer crashes out of Metaverse into the real world, where he physically collapses. Hiro, Juanita, Y.T. (a freewheeling, skateboard-riding courier) and sundry other Burbclave and franchise power figures see some action on the way to finding out who is behind this bizarre ``drug'' with ancient roots. Although Stephenson ( Zodiac ) provides more Sumerian culture than the story strictly needs (alternating intense activity with scholarship breaks), his imaginative juxtaposition of ancient and futuristic detail could make this a cult favorite.
-