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Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash

arnuld

arnuld

Member
I just read first 98 pages of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Honestly I did not like it all. Though it was better than The Difference Engine but still not my kind of thing. I sold the book for half of the price I purchased. I am not saying author is bad. Author is very intelligent, he even knows about UNIX Daemons :innocent: . Half of the Computers Programmers in my company, specifically working on Linux , do not even know about daemons and I am sure they they can't even write the correct spellings :D but Neal Stephenson knows. Most of the things are purely fictional but some are real like he has described the creation of Metaverse which is almost exactly similar to the creation of a successful start-up like Paul Graham's Viaweb .

I am not afraid of telling the things I did not like :). The things Iike, "name is Y.T." do not fit into my thinking style. After reading The Difference Engine , Burning Chrome and Snow Crash, I think I can conclude that Cyberpunk is not my cup of tea and my be during some last 3 months my taste and my thinking has changed. May be because I have started a job and start living as an independent adult now and can feel the reality, complexity, happiness, mass-behavior and helplessness of many situations that have changed the view I have about the my life, the living of human species and this Earth. May be my stint with SF is over. I don't know. I am reading A Scanner Darkly now and will post here any more thoughts of mine. Till then I will like to have your thoughts about me :flowers:
 
If you didn't like Snow Crash or The Difference Engine, then my advice is abandon all cyberpunk which you have decided to do. Good.

Neal Stephenson is a hard core tech head so of course he'd know about Daemons. He wrote In the Beginning was the Command Line which looks at the past, present, and future of computing.

Excerpts from that book can be found here: In the Beginning was the Command Line
 
He just got A Canticle for Leibowitz so we'll have to see what he thinks of that.

Also, I just realized that he didn't review the book. He just said he didn't like it and named some other cyberpunk books he didn't like.
 
I don't read much SciFi but I have enjoyed the relatively few works that I have read. And Snow Crash, in particular, stands out as a novel that I enjoyed immensely, probably the best of any SciFi that I have read. And I can't even say it is because of the techno aspects that have I read about here. Instead I have simply loved Stephenson's wildly imaginative scenes, from the motorcycle chase at the beginning, through to the huge group event at the end.
Someday I'll finish Cryptonomicon, which I have also enjoyed as far as I have read. And oddly that may be the end of Stephenson for me. I started Quicksilver but it did not appeal to me. So it may be that, after all, it is the far out techno/futuristic stories of his that I like.
 
sparkchaser said:
Peder, you should read The Diamond Age. It's my favorite Stephenson novel.
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Many thanks for the suggestion! I'm glad to hear of another Stephenson book I might like. :)

And it looks like it is on the shelf at my local Borders, Yippees!
 
sparkchaser said:
I've never heard that and I'm inclined to disagree.
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Actually, IIRC, I read that on some amazon reviews, claiming that this book teaches how to raise kids properly and it is the responsibility of parents in real world. So they need to learn that from this book and they will do learn many things they are not aware about raising kids.
 
arnuld said:
Actually, IIRC, I read that on some amazon reviews, claiming that this book teaches how to raise kids properly and it is the responsibility of parents in real world. So they need to learn that from this book and they will do learn many things they are not aware about raising kids.
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Out of 330 reviews, I only found 4 reviews that mentioned 'parent' and 3 mentioned 'raise'. In fact, one of them was a caution:

As complex as the machine may be, it is still not a valid substitute for a living breathing person acting as a parent and mentor.
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Don't get me wrong. The Diamond Age is a great book but it is certainly not a how to for raising kids.
 
I got this from a friend that tried to convince me that cyberpunk didnt have to be crap. Its starts out pretty good, its funny and more interesting than other cyberpunk books i have read, but towards the end it becomes a bit too much over the top silly. Worth a read but i didnt think it was that special.
 
Snow Crash is supposed to be over the top. That's what makes it such a great read. The Diamond Age is Stephenson's foray into more serious cyberpunk.
 
I have hardly ever read a book of such manic energy like Snow Crash. It's chock-a-block with over the top ideas, from the Pizza Deliverator to the Vagina Dentata (don't ask - just read it). I quite agree with Sparky: if you don't like Snow Crash, you better give up on Cyberpunk altogether.

The Diamond Age felt great until almost the very end - where I feel it sort of just fizzled out.

I wonder has anybody ever managed to read The Baroque Cycle in its entirety? Stephenson is a very gifted writer - but he might actually want to start working with a stricter editor.
 
sparkchaser said:
Out of 330 reviews, I only found 4 reviews that mentioned 'parent' and 3 mentioned 'raise'. In fact, one of them was a caution:

Don't get me wrong. The Diamond Age is a great book but it is certainly not a how to for raising kids.
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Eh.. I said IIRC, I did not say I am sure. Anyway, I read that somewhere but I think I should believe you instead out of pure reasoning :flowers:
 
Well, after arnuld's glowing review, I just had to read this.

And I kind of loved it. Yes, it's completely over the top; sword-wielding pizza delivery boy/hacker and a 15-year-old skater girl save the world from a cyberthreat that has roots all the way back to ancient Sumer... and I haven't even mentioned the kayaks, and the rail guns, and the vagina dentata, and the privatized version of the US where the Mafia has become legitimate, etc etc etc. But it really is a lot smarter than it sounds, even if Stephenson can't quite pull off the massive info dumps required; it's got echoes of both Eco and Burroughs, and the way he mixes together computer logic and real world history - religion and language as viruses, the way the very patterns of what we can know and what we can say form what we know and say, etc - is occasionally pretty profound, even if it's putting the cart before the horse. And it is mostly extremely entertaining.

Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
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:star4:
 
BG, if you liked this, you'd love Diamond Age. In a lot of ways I thought Snow Crash was a little cartoony, all these crazy ideas simply bouncing off the walls. Very nice ideas (influenced a lot of techies who resolved to build game worlds to mirror the Metaverse), and in the time Snow Crash was written the Internet was just starting to gain traction with the public, so it did seem cutting edge, and *felt* oh so right and forward thinking with the emergence of virtual worlds (anyone remember VRML?)

So anyway, it was a great read, but to me Diamond Age was miles better. Same cornucopia of ideas, but in a more disciplined manner, I suppose. I loved the concept of the Illustrated Primer in the book. I glanced at some of the earlier posts in this thread (sorry!) and I saw some mention about child-raising. Uhm, maybe, but that's like saying (to borrow a phrase from somewhere) Moby Dick was about fishing.

But as a learning tool an Illustrated Primer is simply fantastic, imaginative, audacious even.

ds

Edit: Sparky, another Diamond Age fan! Diamond Age rocks (diamonds, rocks, geddit?)! Groan! :D
 
You're right direstraits. Snowcrash is over the top and that's what makes it so great. Stephenson took the social, political, and economic trends of the time and took them to their extreme conclusions.

What captivated me about The Diamond Age was the detail of the little things like the 'toner wars'.

Wait until you read Cryptonomicon ;)
 
Alright guys, I love SF but have never read a cyberpunk book before so I decided to start with Snow Crash. I am just over 1/3 of the way into it and it is a real chore to continue. Yeah, it has some interesting scenes but it just seems too randomly put together and I can't get into the characters. I have seen it mentioned in the horrible endings thread here so right now I am not leaning toward finishing the book. Should I give up on cyberpunk altogether? Should I try a different Neal Stephenson book?
 
Personally, I prefer The Diamond Age over Snow Crash. As far as the bad ending goes, it's really only the last paragraph.
 
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