Snow Crash
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Snow Crash is a novel by Neal Stephenson first published in 1992. It falls under the genres of Postmodernism and Cyberpunk, although some claim it is better labeled Postcyberpunk as it transitions from some of the conventions of earlier Cyberpunk works.
The novel was nominated for the 1992 British Science Fiction Award, the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the 1993 Hugo Award, and 10th place in the 1993 Locus Poll Award for Best Science Fiction novel.
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Author: Neal Stephenson
Born in Fort Meade, Maryland in 1959, Stephenson has written nine novels and numerous short stories. He is mostly known for his science fiction and postcyberpunk stories, however some of his novels incorporate postmodern and steampunk influences. Stephenson's novels include varied discussions on anthropology, history, technology, mathematics, the history of science, and currency. He also uses black humor, pop culture references, and deeply cyclical histories to weave complex stories in his novels. A typical Stephenson-ian novel contains an elaborate exposition that breaks down into chaos and revelations about three-quarters of the way into the novel, resulting in an acceleration in the plot, and finally spiraling into an abrupt ending. He does not typically tie up any of the loose ends by the end of the novel, leaving one to think about the larger events that have shaped the novel.
His most recent works, a trilogy called the Baroque Cycle, serves as a prequel to 1999's Cryptonomicon and is set against the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and around the world. Stephenson writes non-fiction articles about technology for various magazines, including [Wired Magazine] and works as an advisor to Jeff Bezos's sub-orbital launch technology company, Blue Origin.
Background & Synopsis
Snow Crash takes place in a world closer to our own than many science fiction novels, yet the America presented in the novel has been extrapolated ten or maybe twenty years into the future. It is a world where the national government has essentially folded, to be replaced by chains of corporations which themselves form micro-nationstates. Each franchise of these corporations has its own customs office (the front gate), police force and army (other corporations that offer security services), laws (dictated by an ever-present three-ring binder that management carries), and passports. It is a satirical look at a corporate, globalized world gone mad with all of the Mom and Pop establishments replaced by the cold efficiency of corporate bureaucracies. The federal government has been reduced to small territories where they xenophobically try to maintain the appearance of the 'good old days' of the USA, including forcing their employees to wear wool suits, submit to frequent loyalty polygraphs, and reject all un-American activities. The Library of Congress and the CIA have been sold off to form a corporation known as The Library and the CIC, or Central Intelligence Corporation, whose job is to buy and store all of the world's information, so that it can be sold back to buyers looking for any and all information on any given subject. Even the US Army has been sold off, to form private armies for the likes of corporations like General Jim's Defense System and Admiral Bob's National Security.
Title Significance
Stephenson has written in an essay, In the Beginning...Was the Command Line, that the name Snow Crash comes from a specific error that occurred on the Apple Macintosh computer. The pattern of white and black 'snow' appeared, Stephenson writes, "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.'" The novel interchanges the concepts of computer processor and human mind throughout, including the capacity to be crashed by a virus. Early on in the novel, Da5id is attacked by a computer virus called Snow Crash in the metaverse that displays a bitmap image capable of speaking directly to the deep structures in his brain, and in doing so, crashes his actual brain.
Plot Summary
The novel opens with The Deliverator, a pizza delivery driver working for the Mafia. He is tasked with delivering pizzas to locations in So-Cal in 30 minutes or less, with advanced technology tracking the time to deliver each pizza and a fast, blacked-out electric car. His life, and the reputations of the entire Mafia and its leader, Uncle Enzo, are on the line with each pizza delivery. After leaving the on-fire pizza shop with a twenty-minute old pizza, The Deliverator gets pooned -- as in electromagnetically harpooned -- by a skateboarding courier. When he tries to shake the parasitic skater by driving through a gated community, The Deliverator takes a wrong turn and ends up crashing into an empty pool. The courier, calling herself simply YT, offers to deliver the pizza. The Deliverator identifies himself as Hiro Protagonist, and as his business card reads "Last of the freelance hackers, greatest sword fighter in the world" and stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation. So begins a partnership between Hiro and YT, mainly in information-gathering for the CIC.
Fast-forward to Hiro Protagonist in his U-Store-It apartment, logging into the Metaverse through his computer. Hiro is one of the original hackers that created the Metaverse, a virtual world like Second Life. He goes to the Black Sun, the most exclusive club in the Metaverse, which is owned by his friend Da5id. On his way in, Hiro is offered a drug called Snow Crash, but turns it down. Inside, Hiro runs into Da5id and Juanita, an old girlfriend of Hiro's and former wife of Da5id. Juanita gives Hiro a large file containing information on something called the Infocalypse before she leaves. Later, Da5id summons him over and runs a notecard containing the Snow Crash virus/drug. Da5id's avatar gets infected, as well as his brain, and he is unceremoniously booted from the Black Sun by his own watchdog daemons.
Hiro, with help from the Librarian, begins to unravel the history of the Snow Crash virus and its connection to the modern day. Sumerian myth is explained and tied to the ancient Sumerian language. Apparently Sumerian language operates on 'deep structures' in the brain, in a way that no modern language can. Priests in ancient Sumerian culture essentially could write programs, or me, that could be run to teach people to bake bread, or plow a field, perform a religious ceremony, or any other task that was required to operate an early civilization. The origin of different "acquired languages" is connected to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel and is generally viewed as a good thing; the Sumerian God-priest Enki wrote a counter-virus that created the Tower of Babel event and protected people from infection by the Asherah virus. However, L. Bob Rife has also rediscovered all this knowledge, and is reverse engineering Enki's me and Asherah's virus to use to control the world's populations. Rife's Raft is essentially a big disease vector, to bring refugees from Asia to North America and in the process infect everyone with the virus so that he can control them.
The modern-day virus is also spread through a chain of Pentecostal church franchises that Rife backs called Reverand Wayne's Pearly Gates, and is linked to the Pentecostal phenomena of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, which is caused by the deep structures in the brain and the ancient Sumerian language capable of running me. Connections between Sumerian myth of creation and the Torah's story of the Garden of Eden link the original meta-virus to Asherah and her cult, which is comparable to the apple that Eve gives to Adam and the Fall from Paradise.
YT is tricked into delivering a package to Fedland, the ultra-secure US Government facility where her mother works, and is then kidnapped and brainwashed. She is taken to The Raft and tasked with serving fish head soup. Hiro investigates the virus further in the real world, going up the west coast to meet the current location of The Raft in Port Sherman, Oregon. He tries to infiltrate a hotel where the leaders of Russian thugs that act as the army of The Raft are staying, but is unsuccessful. Instead, he attempts to rent a boat from the local Mr. Lee's Great Hong Kong, and discovers that the yacht is already rented by the Mafia, but they bring Hiro along while the Mafia captures the Russian leaders on a floating section of pier and tugs the pier out into the ocean. The Russians escape when a former Soviet nuclear submarine surfaces and Raven rescues the Russian, only to sink Mr. Lee's yacht and force Hiro and company to abandon ship.
Stuck in a small rescue raft somewhere in the Pacific, Hiro, the two Mafia hitmen, and the skipper of the yacht idle their time away, as it is apparent no one will come to rescue them. At some point, they drift close enough to the raft to attract the attention of pirates. In particular, the pirate leader Bruce Lee's ship pulls up alongside their inflatable raft and begins to barter for the right to sodomize Hiro and the skipper. The Mafia goons open up on the ship with Reason a prototype gatling gun, while the pirates are distracted. Reason tears the ship apart, and it begins to sink. A smaller luxury yacht that was part of Bruce Lee's fleet was not damaged heavily in the fight, and it is commandeered to take the Mafia, Hiro, and the skipper to The Raft. The pirate's yacht gets tangled up in the webbing of The Raft, cables and ropes and nets set into the way to snare passing boats. They are attacked again, this time by swimmers and hungry refugees. Raven shows up briefly in a kayak, harpoons the remaining Mafia goon on the yacht, then leaves. Everyone except for Hiro and the yacht's cabin boy are killed. Hiro drops the Yacht's zodiac into the water and brings the boy as a guide as he ventures deeper into the maze of The Raft. He also brings also the Mafia's gatling gun, Reason.
At roughly the same time, Raven finds YT serving fish heads in one of the soup lines, and basically frees her and takes her on a date on The Raft. Here Raven gets to explain some of his background as an Aleutian whose father was nuked twice by American nuclear weapons, and his former life of crime and alcoholism, that he has since reformed through the help of the Russian Orthodox church and the Russians on The Raft. Raven gets called away once by L. Bob Rife, leaving YT alone in a dingy bar on the Raft, but as Raven explains to her, "No one will fuck with you," as she's under his protection. This is where he goes out and kills the Mafia goon in the previous paragraph. When he returns, they head for the Core of the Raft. He explains that his long-term goal is to "nuke America" and that for now, his interests are basically in line with those of the people running The Raft, but he himself is not infected with the meta-virus. After a brief moment of getting intimate in a container-ship hotel in the Core, YT realizes she's knocked out Raven with her forgotten dentata, a device fitted with a drug-laden hypodermic needle intended to prevent or stop rape.
Hiro attacks the Core of the Raft with the Reason gatling-gun, shooting holes into the side of the Enterprise. Then, he sneaks inside the ship. On the flight deck of the decomissioned aircraft carrier, there's a tense standoff between Rife (who has kidnapped YT) and Hiro. Rife takes off in his helicopter and Raven manages to escape in another helicopter, leaving Hiro to find Juanita and clean things up on the Raft.
The ending is rather anticlimatic, with Raven facing off against Vietnam-vet Uncle Enzo on the tarmac of an airport. Rife's private jet is taken out by by one Ng's Rat Things flying directly into the jet's engine, causing a massive explosion that takes out "L. Bob Rife and his virus all together in its fine, sterilizing flame" (Stephenson). YT returns home, and we are left to assume that Hiro and Juanita save the world and are a couple again.
Themes in Snow Crash
Languages as programs for the human brain.
Technology making us more unifed versus splitting us up.
Information as power.
Corporate 3-ring binder mentality and the cure for it.
Religion as a virus versus religion as a cure.
Thematic Elements of Cyberpunk in Snow Crash
Elements of chaos versus order.
Fear of the other.
Struggle against corporate power / established power.
Asian influence.
Globalization and a world without borders.
Technology and Software in the world of Snow Crash
The Metaverse
Electronic Customs and the Barcode Passport
The Rat Thing and Automated Security Systems
Influences on modern technology
Main Characters
The Modern World
Hiro Protagonist
The sword-swinging, computer-hacking main character of the novel. Half Korean and half African American, Hiro was an Army brat that grew up to be the warrior prince of the Metaverse, and virtually penniless at the beginning of the novel. He works as a pizza delivery driver, Central Intelligence Corporation stringer, and later for various interests in investigating the Snow Crash virus. While Hiro worked at the firm that created the early Metaverse, he cashed out early and quit rather than invest, and so is well-known in the hacker community but relatively poor compared to the success of his friend Da5id.
YT (Yours Truly)
A 15-year-old girl who works for a skateboarding-courier service called RadiKS Kouriers. Rides a very high tech skateboard and wears a sophisticated padded jumpsuit. YT provides witty comebacks and giving authority attitude throughout the book. The Mafia owes her a favor for delivering a nearly-late pizza on time, and the Mafia leader Uncle Enzo takes a special interest in her well-being. Later, the Mafia uses YT to do their own investigation of the Snow Crash virus. Her mom works in Fedland as some sort of computer programmer, and YT has to use lies to get out of the house to work as a courier every night. Ends up kidnapped by a religious-fanatic group headed for The Raft, where YT is brainwashed and set to work in a soup line on one of the sections of The Raft. Raven becomes her 'boyfriend' and bails her out of the drudgery, but it is Hiro's attack on the Enterprise allows her to escape from Raven at the end of the novel.
Dmitri "Raven" Ravinoff
A huge Aleutian harpooner from Alaska, Raven's father was captured during WWII and put in the same Japanese prison camp as Hiro's father. Raven has "POOR IMPULSE CONTROL" tattooed across his forehead and carries glass knives as weapons, or alternatively, Raven cuts bamboo poles into long glass-knife-tipped spears that he uses to harpoon his victims. He makes the knives himself, which are capable of slipping through metal detectors and radar, and they are extremely sharp because the glass is only one molecule thick at the edge. Raven rides a large motorcycle whose sidecar is actually a hydrogen bomb set to detonate if Raven's brain stops functioning. Since Raven is his own sovereign nation (a special concept in Snow Crash discussed earlier), he basically has free run wherever he goes because he is one of the few nuclear-capable nations left, to the point that the security forces protect him and other nations do everything they can to keep him happy while he visits. He has most assuredly earned the title of "the baddest motherfucker in the world" as Stephenson calls him.
L. Bob Rife (Lawrence Robert Rife)
A telecommunications executive who owns most of the world's fibre optic networks, L. Bob Rife is an eccentric man who attempts to spread the Asherah virus by way of his Raft, a giant floating island of refugees and old ships lashed to his personal yacht, the decommissioned USS Enterprise nuclear aircraft carrier. Rife seems to be a mixture of Ted Turner and L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. Backing Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates and founding his own Bible College, Rife uses the rediscovered me, or programs, of Enki to begin his takeover of the world and all free thought.
Uncle Enzo
Head of the Mafia, Uncle Enzo is the loveable character that is the face of his CostaNostra and Nova Sicilia franchises, as well as a Vietnam veteran. Enzo takes a special interest in YT after she delivers an almost-late pizza for the Mafia, and tries to look out for her and provide a little fatherly advice along the way. In the end, he has a face off against Raven that leaves him bleeding on the tarmac of an airport.
Juanita Marquez
One of the original hackers of the Metaverse, along with Hiro and Da5id, who worked at Black Sun Inc. Juanita was responsible for accurately conveying emotion through the faces of the avatars in the Metaverse. She is also a sort of agnostic Christian that Hiro can't quite seem to understand, and has researched the Sumerian origins of the Asherah meta-virus and Enki's nam-shub with Lagos before setting off to try and stop it herself on The Raft.
Da5id Meier
Powerful and successful Metaverse entrepreneur who is attacked by the Snow Crash virus early in the book. And old friend of Hiro and former husband of Juanita, Da5id manages the Black Sun club in the Metaverse. The virus leaves him with cardiac arrhythmia and essentially braindead.
Dr. Emanuel Lagos
A gargoyle -- an information-gatherer for the CIC that is constantly wired into the Metaverse and wears a suit full of sensors that records everything -- that provides the initial research into the Babylonian Infocalypse, Sumerian mythology, the Asherah virus, and Enki. Murdered by Raven at a Vitaly Chernobyl concert early in the novel.
- The Librarian - a piece of non-sentient software that was written by Lagos to assist him in his research. Juanita gives Hiro a copy of the Librarian, which resides in Hiro's Metaverse house as well as in Hiro's computer. The Librarian is designed to sort through the vast amounts of information in the Library of Congress and help organize research, but is bad at generalizations, metaphors, and assumptions. The Librarian is a mechanism Stephenson uses to explain to Hiro, and therefore the reader, all of the information and background that Hiro needs throughout the story. In this way, our main character does not have to be an expert on everything and the author can convincingly write explanations for the reader to understand.
Mr. Lee
Owner of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, a franchulate that is known for being very high-tech, including their automated security systems. Part of the group assembled by Lagos to back an investigation of the Snow Crash virus, along with Uncle Enzo and Mr. Ng. Hiro is a citizen of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong and Mr. Lee assists Hiro and YT in small ways throughout the story.
Mr. Ng
A security consultant and head of Ng Security Industries, Mr. Ng rides around in a heavily modified airport fire engine that serves as his motorized wheelchair. He was heavily injured and handicapped in a helicopter crash fleeing Vietnam, and lives most of his life in the Metaverse, while his body is simply a lump of a black spandex bag of tubes and wires in meatspace. Apparently the creator of the Rat Things and carrying a whole arsenal of weaponry and sensors on his tank-slash-wheelchair, Ng depends heavily on technology for his survival.
Vitaly Chernobyl
Hiro's room mate and frontman for a Ukranian heavy metal band.
Sushi K
A Japanese rapper who wants to break in the United States. Hiro sets up a concert where Sushi K can rap after Vitaly's band plays for the local Kouriers. Has a giant orange afro, basically the Japanese symbol of the Rising Sun, that lights up with lasers and apparently holograms when he is on stage and requires a whole team of 'imagineering programmers' to control.
Historical & Mythological Characters in Snow Crash
Enki
A Sumerian priest of the ancient city Eridu who was especially adept at creating 'me,' or programs stored on clay tablets. Hiro calls him a "proto-hacker" because of this skill. Since real figures in Sumerian myth are intertwined with the mythology of early Sumerian religion, he is also the god-king of the city of Eridu, the god of irrigation, and the creator of humankind. He orchestrated the Tower of Babel event as a means of creating variety in language and therefore protecting against one form of the Asherah virus, though he did not completely eradicate the virus spreading this way. He is studied by both Lagos and L. Bob Rife, and the clay tablets left in the modern world that Enki wrote are powerful tools that Rife has been using to engineer his takeover of society. The Raft is somewhat of a reverse of the Tower of Babel event, until Hiro and Juanita stop it.
Asherah
The female figure said to be present in most early culture's creation stories in one form or another. She is linked to both Eve in the Torah/Old Testament and said to be the consort of various creator gods in other mythologies, including the Sumerian creation myths. In the modern world, her legacy is actually a virus named after her, perhaps the original DNA metavirus, that can infect the brainstem and works on deep structures.
Inanna
A priestess of ancient Sumerian myth who traveled to the city of Eridu to steal 'me' from Enki. Also the goddess of the city of Uruk, since these figures are both historical and mythological. In Sumerian myth, she is the goddess of warfare and fertility.
The Deuteronomists
Snow Crash charges this group with selectively rewriting pieces of the Torah, the first written Jewish holy book & history. Their rewriting is said to serve as both a metaphor for the downfall of the northern Judaic kingdom, and as a defense against the Asherah virus. By writing down their beliefs and then requiring literal transcription, they were practicing 'information purity' and protecting against the Asherah virus's disease vector by oral communication (speech).
Christ
According to the Librarian in Snow Crash, "[t]he ministry of Jesus Chris was an effort to break Judiasm out of this" stifling of religion and individuality due to religious law, "sort of an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new nam-shub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone" (Stephenson 401). However, his religious revolution was hijacked 40 days after his death, when a viral Asherah outbreak began to make all the different ethnic groups speak in tongues. Christianity was also hijacked in the sense that the story of the Resurrection was added as a basis to return to idolatry and to support the power of the oppressive early Christian church of the Roman Empire, according to Snow Crash.
Locations in Snow Crash
The Metaverse
The Street
The Black Sun
Franchulates
Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong
Nova Sicilia
White Columns
The Clink
Other So-Cal Locations
Fedland
The Raft
A huge free-floating island started by telecommunications mogul L. Bob Rife. The Core of the Raft is the decommissioned USS Enterprise nuclear aircraft carrier and several large oil tankers & container ships. Surrounding these ships are thousands of smaller ships and other floating debris, lashed together with a spiderweb of cables, ropes, nets, and anything else. The million or so inhabitants of the Raft are refugees from various disasters in Asia who have all latched onto the Raft as it passed them in the South Asian Pacific Ocean. The Raft then floated north and across the Pacific towards North America, where Rife hopes to cut loose most of the Raft. unload refugees carrying the Asherah virus. Then, he will swing back around the Pacific and start the process over again. This is all part of Rife's plot to takeover the actual people of North America, as he already controls all the communications networks.
The book shows that there are both dangerous and safe areas on the Raft. The neighborhoods, seperated by ethnic groups, are all connected in multiple ways to one-another because "[t]he worst thing that can happen on the Raft is for your neighborhood to get cut loose" in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (Stephenson 387). These are ultimatley dangerous areas to be in, as Hiro discovers as he is chased by various gangs and AK-47-toting thugs. YT is taken to a container-ship hotel (reminiscent of Neuromancer's description of "coffin hotels") by Raven in the Core of the Raft. The hotel even has bellhops to assist the businessmen coming and going, and it actually appears civil, clean, and safe compared to the other areas YT has been in on the Raft. The Core, and mainly the Enterprise, is isolated from most of the Raft so that random refugees cannot get onboard, and it is defended by large railgun turrets that help to maintain relative peace aboard the Raft and assert Rife's control via "wrath-of-god" violence.
Adaptations
A film of the novel was planned after Snow Crash's initial success. Two drafts of scripts were written, and director Marco Brambilla was set to create it for Touchstone Pictures. However, the movie never became a reality due to the high special effects budget required, and the fact that studio execs never gave it a greenlight.
The virtual world Second Life was inspired by the Metaverse described in Snow Crash. Many of the rules, social customs, and objects in Second Life are taken directly from the Metaverse. Players interact with the world in Second Life through avatars (an old Sanskrit word for the physical bodies inhabited by gods when they visited Earth) and information is passed through notecards, just as in Snow Crash. There is a functioning, real economy in Second Life that allows a virtual currency -- Lindens -- to be used and transferred easily. Various locations from Snow Crash have been built in Second Life, including the Black Sun nightclub.
A new virtual world platform, Multiverse, also appears to be influenced by Snow Crash. It has not been widely released yet, so the influence of Snow Crash's Metaverse is not apparent. However, Multiverse will not be one unified world, like the fictional Metaverse or Second Life, but instead will allow content creators to create their own MMORPG games easily and cheaply. The developer provides the architecture (servers & database software) and the client application which collectively runs the Multiverse game engine, but contains no content. The engine for an MMORPG is traditionally the most challenging part of designing an massively-multiplayer online game.
The Earth software in Hiro's office in Snow Crash is also credited with partly inspiring the original version of Google Earth, which was called Keyhole.
Criticism and Praise
Snow Crash made it onto the best seller list quickly after being published, and its popularity went so far that it was named as part of Time Magazine's Top 100 Novels written since 1923. However, it did not win any major awards and Stephenson's success was unfortunately short lived. His later works also drew much praise, but were not necessarily as successful as Snow Crash.
Comments on Snow Crash Theology by Professor Russell M. Taylor of the University of North Carolina. (THIS IS JUST A PLACEHOLDER WITH THE LINK)
Links
- Snow Crash record at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
- TIME Magazine All-Time 100 Novels
- Neal Stephenson's official website
- Snow Crash article on Wikipedia
- Comments on Snow Crash Theology by Professor Russell M. Taylor of the University of North Carolina.
- Jeni's Snow Crash Page - warning, background will probably cause seizures and make all text unreadable!
