I don't like this book's plot, but the world it creates is ridiculously fun.
It's like if you asked a lonely nerd in their twenties to imagine a really cool future and then they magically managed to overcome all the interior self-censorship stuff like no, pizza delivery guys are not cool and nobody actually likes ninja swords that much and transparent nicknames like Raven and Uncle Enzo aren't as awesome as you think they are.
But the world of Snow Crash is even cooler than that because Stephenson does his research. He doesn't just give us a post-law world of anarchy, he gives us a post-law world where franchises and chains provide what little law and order there is.
Look, he says, I'm sorry for reminding you of this, but if we still had laws, the Mafia would be a criminal organization.
But we don't have laws, she says, so it's just another chain.
And not only do people have cool gadgets like handheld cameras that record everything, Stephenson gives us a world where everyone has capitulated to the idea of omnipresent surveillance and there's a thriving market for any information you happen to collect.
You never know when something will be useful, so you might as well videotape it.
And of course, the government has also become just another franchise, one with particularly rigid rules and an emphasis on loyalty.
But then, that's how the government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't bother with, which means that there's probably no reason for it; you never know what they're doing or why.
Also, he coins the word Metaverse, which is pretty impressive. I tried to do some digging to see if Meta nee Facebook paid him anything for it, but it doesn't look like they did.
In this fabulous world he dreams up for us, Stephenson whips around every once in a while and nails the shadowy corners of our mind where our daydreaming adolescent self has holed up:
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 Columbian drug dealers 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.
If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire.
As for the plot? It's just some stupid shit about hacking people's minds with ancient Sumerian info-viruses. Give it a read, the thing's practically canonical.
This was my first Stephenson novel. Diamond Age is the only other book of his I've read which I recall liking even more. I keep picking up Cryptonomicon but find the opening to difficult to get through (lots of new pronouns and an unrelatable setting ... can a gurl get a little foreplay for goodness sake).
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180 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 19 Mar
Required reading for linux users is his classic essay: In The Beginning Was The Command-line.
It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without going into mind-smashing technical detail. Perhaps the gist of it can be explained by telling a story about drills.
The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be in a homeowner's drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to the local plumbing supply store and buy another chunk of pipe.
During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we were putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the Hole Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained lodged in the wall, and he simply dangled from it and shouted for help until someone came along and reinstated the ladder.
I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.
But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it. ... It is not hard to imagine what the world would look like to someone who had been raised by contractors and who had never used any drill other than a Hole Hawg. Such a person, presented with the best and most expensive hardware-store drill, would not even recognize it as such. He might instead misidentify it as a child's toy, or some kind of motorized screwdriver. If a salesperson or a deluded homeowner referred to it as a drill, he would laugh and tell them that they were mistaken--they simply had their terminology wrong. His interlocutor would go away irritated, and probably feeling rather defensive about his basement full of cheap, dangerous, flashy, colorful tools.
Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously.
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I got launched off a ladder once when my stupid household drill seized up with a 6" hole saw on it. Broke my ass when I landed. Probably wouldn't have seized up if I used a hole hawg...or it would have thrown me clear out the window.
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Yeah, Cryptonomicon was the start of a six-book run where shit got weird, and then really weird. I loved it, but they weren't quite the breezy reads his earlier books were.
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I do enjoy his writing. I'm going to have to look up his other stuff as Snow Crash is the only one I've read.
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He's shifted genres a few times (historical, techno-thrillers, apocalyptic sci-fi), and definitely doesn't coast or write the same book over and over. But yeah, his writing remains consistently good.
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I enjoy writers who are able to shift around genres. Kazuo ishiguro is like that.
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Oh yeah, Ishiguro is fantastic.
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I have tried Cryyptonimicon once before, but had to return it to the library before I finished it. Keep meaning to buy a copy since it's so big. Not as fun feeling as Snow Crash for sure. I was toying with reviewing Cryptonomicon next...
Several folks have recommended Diamond Age.
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34 sats \ 0 replies \ @td 19 Mar
I am sure the inspiration for the Rat Things was taken from the Mechanical Hounds in Fahrenheit 451.
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If you like this genre (or are feeling nostalgic) also check out William Gibson's Neuromancer. It basically started the whole "cyberpunk" genre:
Drug addict code cowboys living in Japan, hired to retrieve the consciousness ROM of another code-cowboy, working for a reclusive mega-wealthy family - who exist offworld in a Las Vegas style colony - and using their secret AI entity to navigate cyberspace in order to get the ROM.
NOTE: Like Stephenson coined "metaverse", Gibson termed "the matrix".
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Love this review! Thank you!
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On my to-read list
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Moving through The Confusion presently. Heading to the System of the World.
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Damn, I think I might need to re-read it -- this hit my nostalgia for it.
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