. .
Snow Crash . . . into their dog-eared bible." Nadine Kolowrat, also of
Entertainment Weekly, observed that "
Snow Crash proved to be the pass-along favorite of sci-fi heads, hackers, and regular joes alike. . . ."
Snow Crash takes place partly in the Metaverse, a complex virtual-reality creation, and partly in the world that spawned it, a high-tech future dominated by corporations that are, in turn, opposed by renegade computer hackers. A similar setting was first made popular in William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel
Neuromancer (1984) and has become the
sine qua non of the genre.
Sharp Take on Hacker Culture
However, many reviewers agree that Stephenson manages his own original and compelling take on what has become a cliche in the science fiction field. John Leonard of The Nation felt that no other cyberpunk writer has depicted virtual reality "so lyrically" as Stephenson, while Levy believed that "[w]hen it comes to depicting the nerd mind-set, no one tops Stephenson." The hacker heroes in his books, Levy noted, seem to be "awkward, chatty mensches whose insistence on logic makes them borderline nut cases." The snow crash of the book's title refers to a street drug/computer virus that has invaded the Metaverse, causing not only computer crashes in the virtual world but the physical collapse in the real world of those who encounter it.
This is a free page. This page contains 189 words. This
biography contains 1,957 words (approx. 7 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Neal Stephenson Access Pass.
