Snow Crash

The science fiction novel Snow Crash (1992), the third novel by Neal Stephenson, follows in the footsteps of cyberpunk novels by such authors as William Gibson and Rudy Rucker, though Stephenson breaks away from this tradition by embellishing this story with a heavy dose of satire and black humor.

Snow Crash rocketed to the top of the fiction best-seller charts upon its publication and established Stephenson as a major science fiction writer of the 1990s. The book appeared on Time magazine's list of 100 all-time best English-language novels written since 1923.

Like many postmodern novels, Snow Crash has a unique style and a chaotic structure which many readers find difficult to follow. It contains many arcane references to geography, politics, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, history, and computer science, which may inspire readers to explore these topics further, or at least consult relevant reference works. The novel explores themes of reality, imagination, thought, perception, and the violent and physical nature of humanity, in the context of a socially-constructed (virtual) reality imposed on a political-economic system in the throes of radical transition.

Significance of the title

The meaning of the title "snow crash" is explained in Stephenson's essay In the Beginning...was the Command Line, as the term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer:

When everything went to hell and the CPU began spewing out random bits, the result, on a CLI machine, was lines and lines of perfectly formed but random characters on the screen—known to cognoscenti as "going Cyrillic." But to the MacOS, the screen was not a teletype, but a place to put graphics; the image on the screen was a bitmap, a literal rendering of the contents of a particular portion of the computer's memory. When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a "snow crash."

Background

The story takes place in a fractured America around the end of the 20th century, in which corporatization, franchising, and the economy in general have spun wildly out of control. Snow Crash depicts the absence of a central powerful state; in its place, corporations have taken over the traditional roles of government, including dispute resolution and national defense. The United States has lost most of its territory in the wake of an economic collapse; the residual remains of the federal government are weak and inefficient and are often used by Stephenson for comic relief.

Much of the territory lost by the government has been carved up into a huge number of sovereign enclaves, each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" or the various residential burbclaves (suburb enclaves)). This arrangement bears a similarity to anarcho-capitalism, a theme Stephenson carries over to his next novel The Diamond Age. Hyperinflation has devalued the dollar to the extent that trillion dollar bills, Ed Meeses, are little regarded and the quadrillion dollar note, a Gipper, is the standard 'small' bill. For large transactions, people resort to alternative, non-hyperinflated currencies like yen or "Kongbucks" (the official currency of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong).

The Metaverse, Stephenson's successor to the Internet, permeates ruling-class activities and constitutes Stephenson's vision of how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future. Although there are public-access Metaverse terminals in Reality, using them carries a social stigma among Metaverse denizens, in part because of the low visual quality of their avatars (the Metaverse representation of a user). In the Metaverse, status is a function of two things: access to restricted environments (such as the Black Sun, an exclusive Metaverse club) and technical acumen (often demonstrated by the sophistication of one's avatar).

Examples of Metaverse-like "worlds" in reality are There, Second Life, The Palace, Uru, and Active Worlds, the last of which is based entirely on Snow Crash. Some also consider massively multiplayer online RPGs to be similar to the Metaverse as well.

File:Snowcrash-book-cover-uk.jpg

Snow Crash, UK version cover shot

Plot and central ideas

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The story centers on Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and swordsman, and a streetwise young girl nicknamed Y.T. (short for Yours Truly), who works as a skateboard Kourier for a company called RadiKS. The pair meet when Hiro loses his job as a pizza delivery driver for the Mafia, and they decide to become partners in the intelligence business. The setting is a near-future dystopian version of Los Angeles, where franchising, individual sovereignty and automobiles reign supreme (along with drug trafficking, violent crime, and traffic congestion).

The pair soon learn of a dangerous new drug, called "Snow Crash"—both a computer virus, capable of infecting the brains of unwary hackers in the Metaverse, and a drug in Reality, being marketed through a nearly-untraceable chain of sources. As Hiro and Y.T. dig deeper (or are drawn in), they discover more about Snow Crash and its connection to ancient Sumerian culture, the fiber-optics monopolist L. Bob Rife and his enormous Raft of refugee boat people, and an Aleut harpooner named Raven, whose motorcycle packs a nuke triggered by a literal dead man's switch. The Snow Crash metavirus may be characterized as an extremely aggressive meme.

Stephenson spends much of the novel taking the reader on an extensive tour of the mythology of ancient Sumeria, while theorizing upon the origin of languages and their relationship to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Asherah is portrayed as a deadly biological and verbal virus which was stopped in Ancient Sumer by the God Enki. In order to do that, Enki deployed a countermeasure which was later described as the Tower of Babel. The book also reflects ideas from Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976).

Stephenson speculates in Snow Crash that early Sumerian culture used a primordial language which could be interpreted by human beings through the deep structures of the brain, rendering the learning of what he refers to as "acquired languages" needless. Stephenson relates this theoretical language to glossolalia—also known as the phenomenon of "speaking in tongues"—stating that the babbling of glossolalia is in truth the primordial language. A comparison is made to computers and their binary machine code, which exists on a much more basic level than, for example, the human-readable, high-level programming languages, and as such gives those with the ability to speak the language great power.

In Sumer mythology, the masses were controlled by means of verbal rules called me. Stephenson compares the me to small pieces of software which could be interpreted by humans, and which contained information for specific tasks such as baking bread. Me was stored in a temple and its distribution was handled by a high priest, referred to as the en. Within this context, Enki was an en who had the ability of writing new me, and is described by Stephenson as the primordial hacker.

Me were erased from people's minds by a meta-virus (see the definition of meta-), a fact theoretically explained by the Tower of Babel myth. Enki then wrote a me called "The nam-shub of Enki", which had the effect of blocking the meta-virus from acting by preventing direct access to the primordial language, making the use of "acquired languages" necessary. The meta-virus did not disappear entirely, though, as the "Cult of Asherah" continued to spread it by means of cult prostitutes and infected women breast-feeding infants. Stephenson compares this form of infection to that of the herpes simplex virus.

The author speculates that deuteronomists had an en of their own, and that kabbalistic sorcerers known as the ba'al shem could control the primordial tongue.

Important characters

Hiroaki "Hiro" Protagonist — As the name flippantly suggests, the hero of the novel, a hacker, swordsman, former Mafia-employed pizza delivery man.
Y.T. (Yours Truly) — A teenage skateboard-riding car-harpooning courier who helps Hiro investigate the mysterious metavirus. She is Hiro's "partner," and may be viewed as a sort of secondary protagonist.
Juanita Marquez — Hiro's old girlfriend from the days when they both worked for Da5id and were developing the software that supports the Metaverse. Both men were in love with Juanita; she married and later divorced Da5id.
Da5id Meier — Co-creator (with friend Hiro) of the elite Metaverse club The Black Sun. First to fall victim to the Snow Crash virus. He is possibly based on game programmer Sid Meier (in leet speak, Da is The and 5id is Sid - alternatively, v is 5 in Roman numerals, so Da5id could be read as David).
L. Bob Rife — All-around magnate, plies the seas in an aircraft carrier with a city's worth of people living in boats lashed to it—the Raft. He may be based on L. Ron Hubbard and/or Ted Turner. Given that Rife was a cable magnate, known for his prudish views (Turner is not known as particularly prudish), the character also bears a marked resemblance to cable mogul John Malone (see Forbes Story at http://www.forbes.com/2001/07/11/0711malone.html). At the time Snow Crash was written, Malone controlled TCI, then the largest cable company. Malone vigorously and succesfully resisted government regulation of cable until consumer anger against rising cable rates forced Congress to pass the 1992 Cable Act. (In 1999, Malone sold TCI to AT&T Broadband, which was subsequently acquired in 2002 by Comcast).
Dmitri "Raven" Ravinoff — Rife's spear-throwing, "molecularly sharp" glass knife-making, motorcycle-riding, Aleut henchman. He carries a nuclear warhead with him that is wired to his heartbeat for protection. His goal in life is to "nuke America."
Dr. Emanuel Lagos — Researcher who discovered the metavirus and told Rife about it.
Uncle Enzo — Head of the American Mafia, which also runs legitimate enterprises like Nova Sicilia Inn, CosaNostra Pizza, and Our Thing Foundation.
Mr. Lee — Head of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong; a franchise that Hiro belongs to and gets helped out by numerous times.
Mr. Ng — Head of Ng Security Industries, severely handicapped after a helicopter accident in Vietnam, maker of the security pitbull cyborgs commonly called Rat Things.
The Librarian — A complex but non-sentient software application designed by Lagos. It was passed on to Hiro by Juanita. It helps him understand what's happening in the story and learn more about the Snow Crash metavirus and its possible roots in Sumerian myth/proto-history.
Vitaly Chernobyl — Hiro's roommate, shares his 20x30 foot space at the U-Stor-It. He is the singer for the nuclear fuzz-grunge band Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns.
Sushi K — A Japanese rapper.
Fido — A semiautonomous security drone (Rat Thing) partially composed of a stray dog once adopted by Y.T.
Fisheye — Member of the American Mafia who joins Hiro on the life raft. He has a glass eye and makes people listen to Reason.
Bruce Lee — Leader of a pirate gang on the Raft.

Trivia

"Hiro Protagonist" is the gamertag of Microsoft Corporate VP James Allard.
An anti-rape female condom, very similar to the "dentata" used by Y.T. in the novel, was unveiled in South Africa in 2005 [1].
Hiro Protagonist and Sushi-K are mentioned in Cory Doctorow's book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

External links

Snow Crash title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Neal Stephenson's web site
Science Fiction Inventions From Snow Crash