Book Review: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Years ago, about 25 of them, Neal Stephenson was a member of the online association of the Mirrorshades Group. I joined that online group around the time he left to write full time, and his novel Snow Crash came out shortly after. Jim Butcher trolled the group, asking about whether mixing magic and a modern setting might be  a good idea. We weren't so sure, but he made it work. Pat Cadigan used to belong to the group, and her novel Synners sparked quite a few novels, including Mona Lisa Overdrive and SYN, which got made into manga and anime in Japan. Bruce Sterling posted to the group from The Well, and his novel Heavy Weather ended up being about 75% of the plot in Twisters, which James Cameron did NOT credit him for. I hope Sterling got paid for that on the quiet, at least.

Stephenson has two distinct periods in his writing. The early tight, hilarious punk period, in which Snow Crash is his best work, with the best prose, and the neurotic boring period that followed it, in which way too many words say not nearly enough for his Baroque Cycle. I am not sure why he did that, and why there's no serious editing to fix that into something readable. Maybe someday that will happen.

The irony of getting worse is that the wonderful prose depicts a place that's more like reality today than anybody ever expected. It was meant to be highly improbable, and thus funny, but its almost how things really are, if this culture had failed in the exact wrong way. It is wonderful prose, very silly and filled with the passion of pizza delivery to burbclaves. Burbclaves almost exist, as a sort of better staffed and guarded gated community. Few people pay for staffing, much less get them armed legally, and get special laws for their territory so those are enforced with bullets rather than mall cop radios. A gated community is pointless if it doesn't have proper enforcement, and the gate is wide open, as they often are. Also, if you let drug dealers in, your security system is screwed. Drug dealers have frequent visitors, only there for about 10 minutes, at all hours of the night, and gone again. That's how you can tell. Several places I've lived had neighborhood drug dealers. Sigh.

I think America has become most of what's in Snow Crash because we've run out of energy trying to live the American dream and instead people fall back into poverty and debt and feudalism, worshipping whores in coordinated pantsuits and voting by racism. We are exactly what the Founding Fathers feared we would become: a mob of competing laziness demanding raises for ourselves though socialism and pandering. And there's not much to do about it but keep your head down and hope that if the shooting starts, they aren't shooting at YOU. Snow Crash was meant to be a comedy, but we do have old ladies coding while listening to punk rock from the 1980s. Their tattoos gone blue and wrinkly. There's no upside to seeing that. The old nasty drug hags from The Ridge are like that. And they think they're superior to the Squares with day jobs because they've spent the last 60 years high. In a way, the world we live in is worse than Snow Crash. We're a very grim and ugly place, but at least the air is pretty clean, and they still put out the fires. I think that Vladimir Putin dreams of putting the USSR back together, recreating the Czarist Russian Empire, with him in charge, but the population there doesn't want it. And they're tired, just like we are, and not interested in patriotism or death. Putin will eventually get sniped or blown up and that will be the end of the Russian Empire.

The audiobook for Snow Crash is good, btw. I am listening to the narration and think the actor is quite good. Reminds me of an older Wil Wheaton.