Snow Crash

I think it was clear from the post where I announced my selection that I love this book. It's hard to pinpoint exactly why, but I think it really comes down to how well he understands hackers and hacker culture. Little peeks into Hiro's life, such as his reflections on his relationship with Juanita and his struggles to be happy and motivated as a corporate employee, are astonishingly spot on. But I'll be honest: Most of the reason I love Snow Crash is for passages like this:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug delaers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach.

Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.

I have a feeling, however, that regardless of my feelings about this particular novel, in a lot of ways, it was more of a challenge for our group than Gilead was. I decided to go with fewer structured discussion topics to see if it doesn't help foster a little more concentrated discussion. I'm very interested to hear your discussions!

Babel

"The cult of Asherah lifes. The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates is the cult of Asherah."

Science fiction is a difficult genre to define, but I'll give it a shot. Science fiction is the exploration of what would happen if a specific technology or concept were developed. If anti-gravity existed, the world would look like this. If interstellar space travel were possible, the universe would look like this. The real root technology of this novel, however, is rooted in the past.

Much of Snow Crash is dominated by conversations between Hiro and Librarian about Babel, the Sumerians, and the propagation of religion as a virus. This is characteristic of Stephenson's work - his most recent book, Anathem, which I read shortly after finishing Snow Crash for the book club, is dominated by old school dialogs like you'll find in classic philosophical texts. The main plot - that L. Bob Rife is using a metavirus and a Pentecostal religion to promote glossolalia so he can control them with a master tongue - encompasses a lot of big topics that require a lot of background knowledge, but Stephenson's dialogs attempt to get that data across to the reader without getting too dry by using his characters' conversational style.

Use this post to discuss the topics of the Tower of Babel, linguistics, viruses, and religion. What did you think of Snow Crash's central science in this work of science fiction?

Et cetera

          Hiro did not attend Juanita and Da5id's wedding; he was languishing in jail, into which he had been thrown a few hours before the rehearsal. He had been found in Golden Gate Park, lovesick, wearing nothing but a thong, taking long pulls from a jumbo bottle of Courvoisier and practicing kendo attacks with a genuine samurai sword, floating across the grass on powerfully muscled thighs to slice other picnickers' hurtling Frisbees and baseballs in twain. Catching a long fly ball with the edge of your blade, neatly halving it like a grapefruit, is not an insignificant feat. The only drawback is that the owners of the baseball may misinterpret your intentions and summon the police.

          He got out of it by paying for all the baseballs and Frisbees, but since that episode, he has never even bothered to ask Juanita whether or not she thinks he's an asshole. Even Hiro knows the answer now.

Use this post for random topics you want to discuss that don't necessarily warrant an entire post. Some suggestions:

-Feminism in Snow Crash
-Uncle Enzo
-L. Bob Rife
-What nationality would you be? What Burbclave would you live in?

The Future in Snow Crash

          “She has to find someplace to pull into. If she could find a Nova Sicilia franchulate, that would do it – the Mafia owes her one. Or a New South Africa, which she hates. But the New South Africans hate jeeks even more.

          Scratch that; Hiro is black, or at least part black. Can’t take him into New South Africa. And because Y.T. is a Cauc, they can’t go to Metazania.

          “Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong,” Hiro says. “Half mile ahead on the right.”

          “Nice thinking – but they won’t let you in with your swords, will they?”

          “Yes,” he says, “because I’m a citizen.”

Stephenson has a satirical, wry, cynical, but still plausible vision of the future. If anything, seems MORE plausible now than it did 17 years ago when the book was first published. With over half our state governments struggling to even pay their workers and our national debt in the trillions, a future where the federal government has shrunk down to “Fedland” and everything from housing to transportation to law enforcement is handled by capitalism run amok seems closer every day.

His vision of technological progress is also approaching reality. Snow Crash was written in 1992, when most of us were getting our first email accounts and most people hadn't even heard of the Internet. While his technological "predictions" are a bit less astonishing since the precursors of most of his inventions were already in place, his descriptions of them have shaped their development. Apparently Stephenson is revered like a prophet in Second Life, and Snow Crash is the bible.

What was your take on Stephenson's vision of the near future?