hen readers first encounter Hiroaki Protagonist in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, he is the Deliverator, a hard-driving, well-armed, take-no-prisoners pizza-delivering machine ... at least, he is until a single bad day on the job. In the space of 12 minutes, Hiro goes from being the Deliverator to finding himself unemployed and in debt to his former bosses—the Mafia—for the price of his demolished delivery car. He's lucky, however, that his situation isn't worse. Failing to deliver a Mafia pizza is a good way to get shot, but thanks to a passing skate courier, Hiro avoids having a contract put out on his life.
A slacker with elite computer programming skills but no great willingness to put them to profitable use, Hiro falls back on his other job—freelance snooping for salable information in the VR world known as the Metaverse. His enthusiasm for this project is less than genuine, even though he has the Mafia debt to worry about and obligations to the skate courier, a teenage girl who calls herself Y.T.
Hiro has barely begun his search for work when a scary-looking stranger named Raven offers him a hit of something called Snow Crash. At first, Hiro assumes the offer is a joke. Raven makes Snow Crash sound like a drug, but they are in the Metaverse—how can a drug work in virtual reality? He refuses, but one of his hacker friends tries it out ... and soon that friend is in a coma. Clearly something nasty is loose both in VR and in reality. Hiro, his ex-girlfriend Juanita and the wisecracking Y.T. must face off against Raven and his shadowy backers in order to save what's left of the United States from a frightening new form of subjugation.
An America gone to pieces
Snow Crash is an unforgettable book, one that drags readers on a high-speed chase through a United States that has completely fallen apart. What remains in America's place is a weird collection of franchised alliances—Mafia-Pizza empires, an oddly mutated CIA, semi-independent nations called Burbclaves that sell citizenship and security to qualifying individuals and a justice system made of chain-store jail outlets. The only vestige of the U.S. government is a cadre of computer programmers whose work is, as often as not, contracted out to private interests.
Stephenson has the cyberpunk voice—an ironic, dark and always stylishly cool narrative tone—down to a science, and it pilots his tale effortlessly through both the real and virtual worlds. He also has a great flair for characterization: Everyone in the book is fully realized and utterly intriguing. With sword fights, chase scenes and a deadly conspiracy added to the mix, Snow Crash offers plenty of suspense and escapism. At the same time, it has satisfying depths.
As Stephenson's breakout novel, Snow Crash is a showcase of his writing strengths. Whether he is tackling neurolinguistics, as in this novel, nanotechnology (in The Diamond Age) or cryptography and mathematics (Cryptonomicon), he makes the minute details of the novel's underlying science profoundly interesting. The complicated exposition that good SF demands is sometimes deadly dull—but in this writer's hands even the most mundane hacking tasks are intriguing. What's more, the author's combination of ancient Sumerian linguistics with the idea
of neurological hacking in this book is deranged brilliance.
Snow Crash is one of those books that is even better on the second or third read-through, so fans who haven't browsed through it in a while may want to take it off the shelf and give it another look.
