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?
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I love that you brought up feminism in "Snow Crash," Paul, because I thought that the two female characters in this novel totally kicked ass. Although in 2009 the concept of a smart-ass, skateboarding, independent teenage girl is not very shocking, I think that Neal Stephenson writing in 1992 was quite a bit ahead of his time. In 1992, there was no WNBA; the US women had not won the World Cup; gymnastics and figure skating were still the most widely viewed women's athletic events; and skateboarding was almost solely the sport of teenage boys. So Stephenson's projection of a young woman like Y.T. was perhaps just as radical as the idea that everybody one day would carry around computer hard drives on keychains.
ReplyDeleteIt's great that Snow Crash was not a love story. Yeah, okay, Hiro is jonesing for Juanita throughout the whole thing, but that isn't central to the story. Y.T. has a teenage boyfriend named Roadkill, but does he help her at all? No, she relies on herself. She has casual sex with Raven but it's because she wants to, and then she doesn't get all hung about it afterward (how very Sex and the City of her). And the girl jumps out of a helicopter for crying out loud! Love it. In fact, reading Snow Crash, I kind of wanted to be Y.T. for a little while.
The best part about having such strong female characters is that it was a relatively risky decision. This is a book steeped in hacker culture, for people really into hacker culture... which is incredibly male dominated. There's an off-hand comment early on about geeks who "think they're too smart to be sexist"... one of the most spot on observations in the book, IMO. So Stepheson's average reader is quite apt to be put off by having Juanita be the smartest, most capable character in the book. I mean, Hiro went to the raft needing a Mafia escort, tech support from Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, and a small boy to guide him around, and he STILL almost died like 15 times, until Juanita saved him. Juanita went to the raft alone, saved the world from L. Bob Rife's plot to become King of Kings, and became a neuro-linguistic hacker.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, Hiro did make 12.5M Kongbucks and got Juanita to be his girl. So he's got that going for him.
As for Y.T., there's really not much to be said. She's a total badass. She may not have the nuclear umbrella going for her, but other than that she's pretty high up there in badmotherfuckerdom.
I too loved Y.T. It didn't really occur to me while I was reading Snow Crash that it was probably quite the radical idea to have such a total bad-ass female character in a book written in 1992, but Courtney is pretty much spot-on to point out how ahead of her time she was.
ReplyDeleteI think that was another issue for me with Snow Crash - to fully appreciate the accuracy of Stephenson's future projects, one has to put oneself back in 1992. I struggled with that a bit - remembering what technology was like when I was thirteen.
Is there really a lot of risk in centrally featuring female characters in science fiction? I took a Utopian Lit class in undergrad (which is a progenitor to sci-fi, no?), I remember we read Ursula K. LeGuin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Though neither of those ladies wrote much on dentata. :)
ReplyDeleteI guess I don't think central female characters in Sci Fi is risky as much as it is rare. In my (admittedly limited) experience with the genre, it's by men, for men. The female characters - what few there are - are often secondary players with big boobs stuffed into tight jumpsuits. (I'm picturing old school Star Trek ladies and Princess Leia in a golden bikini here - classic nerd wet dream material.) And while it's true that the two names Steve mentioned are authors in a subsection of this genre, they're also primarily feminist writers - Gilman especially. Having a sorta butch skateboard chick with no curves and a whole lotta kick-ass play a major role in book written by a man and mostly read by men is, well, unexpected and awesome. High five, Stephenson.
ReplyDelete