Snow Crash [Review]
Review
Snow Crash is gripping. Each page built up anticipation for the next, and I found myself wanting to know it all -- to know what happened to Y.T. after getting captured, to know what happened to Hiro after he draws his blade, to know what exactly is happening within "Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates".
And what makes this book shine is that the details themselves are exciting and interesting and expertly weaved; the whole "backstory" (context) given around the Sumerian language and mythology was fascinating, the futuristic dystopian setting made me wonder about the future (and to also see what predictions held true ~35 years after this book was released), and the description of the Metaverse - both the appearance of it to an end user and the programming that underlayed it - were just fascinating to read and think about. Not to mention that a large part of this book is dominated by the concept of a "mind-virus" (a virus that can infect the mind and brainwash the end user) which is just a super fascinating idea that the book plays around with well.
Which is why this book was so gripping. It provided me with rabbit holes to jump into, gave me context to re-examine the world we're currently living in, and fed me epiphanic ideas that I could claim as my own.
And this book is almost 35 years old. It's no wonder then that hacker culture was partially defined by this book. Definitely go read this book if you like learning about new things and falling down rabbit holes.
Favorite Passages / Ideas
While reading this book, these two passages stood out to me. The first is very sweet and highlights the tradeoff between money and family, and the second is an accurate portrayal of snobs from an outsiders' point of view =).
(1) "Since then, they've gone very different ways. In the early years of The Black Sun project, the only way the hackers ever got paid was by issuing stock to themselves. Hiro tended to sell his off almost as quickly as he got it. Juanita didn't. Now she's rich, and he isn't. It would be easy to say that Hiro is a stupid investor and Juanita a smart one, but the facts are a little more complicated than that: Juanita put her eggs in one basket, keeping all her money in Black Sun stock, as it turns out, she made a lot of money that way, but she could have gone broke, too. And Hiro didn't have a lot of choice in some ways. When his father got sick, the Army and the V.A. took care of most of his medical bills, but they ran into a lot of expenses anyway, and Hiro's mother -- who could barely speak English -- wasn't equipped to make or handle money on her own. When Hiro's father died, he cashed in all of his Black Sun stock to put Mom in a nice community in Korea. She loves it there. Goes golfing every day. He could have kept his money in The Black Sun and made ten million dollars about a year later when it went public, but his mother would have been a street person. So when his mother visits him in the Metaverse, looking tan and happy in her golfing duds, Hiro views that as his personal fortune. It won't pay the rent, but that's okay." (pg 63)
(2) "The Feds could run the concession themselves and probably keep more of the gross, but that's not the point. It's a philosophical thing. A back-to-basics thing. Government should govern. It's not in the entertainment industry, is it? Leave entertaining to Industry weirdos -- people who majored in tap dancing. Feds aren't like that. Feds are serious people. Poli-sci majors. Student council presidents. Debate club chairpersons. The kinds of people who have the grit to wear a dark wool suit and a tightly buttoned collar even when the temperature has greenhoused up to a hundred and ten degrees and the humidity is thick enough to stall a jumbo jet. The kinds of people who feel most at home on the dark side of a one-way mirror." (pg 176)
Also, there was an interesting idea (introduced on pg 276) that the human brain can be modeled as both hardware and software ~ that mush in your head that you're born with is the hardware, and the experiences/neural pathways that form from reinforced learning or whatever make up the software that your brain develops over time. Just an interesting model.