1992 novel by Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, its themes include history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy.
In his 1999 essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh "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'". Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" was one of the main influences on "Snow Crash".
"Snow Crash" was nominated for both the British Science Fiction Award in 1993 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994.
Plot.
Plot background.
In the 21st century, an unspecified number of years after a worldwide economic collapse, Los Angeles is no longer part of the United States since the federal government has ceded most of its power and territory to private organizations and entrepreneurs. Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign supreme. Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts, while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign gated housing developments.45 Highway companies compete to attract drivers to their roads,7 and all mail delivery is by hired courier.306 The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds, where they do tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the society around them.176 Much of the world's territory has been carved up into sovereign enclaves known as Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities (FOQNEs),14 each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong", or the corporatized American Mafia), or various residential "burbclaves" (quasi-sovereign gated communities). In this future, American institutions are far different from those in the actual United States at the time the book was published; for example, a for-profit organization, the CIC, has evolved from the CIA's merger with the Library of Congress.22
Summary.
Hiro Protagonist is a freelance hacker, and pizza delivery driver for the Mafia. He meets Y.T. (short for Yours Truly), a young skateboard Kourier (courier), who refers to herself in the third person, during a failed attempt to make a delivery on time. Y.T. completes the delivery on his behalf, and they strike up a partnership, gathering intel and selling it to the CIC.
Within the "Metaverse", Hiro is offered a datafile named Snow Crash by a man named Raven, who hints that it is a form of narcotic. Hiro's friend and fellow hacker Da5id views a bitmap image contained in the file, which causes his computer to crash and Da5id to suffer brain damage in the real world. Hiro meets his ex-girlfriend Juanita Marquez, who gives him a database containing a large amount of research compiled by her associate, Lagos. This research posits connections between the virus, ancient Sumerian culture, and the legend of the Tower of Babel. Juanita advises him to be careful and disappears.
The Mafia boss Uncle Enzo begins to take a paternal interest in Y.T. Impressed by her attitude and initiative, he arranges to meet her and offers her freelance jobs. Hiro's investigations and Y.T.'s intelligence gathering begin to coincide, with links between the neuro-linguistic viruses, a religious organization known as Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates and a media magnate named L. Bob Rife beginning to emerge. Lagos's research showed that the ancient Sumerian ur-language allowed brain function to be "programmed" using audio stimuli in conjunction with a DNA-altering virus. Sumerian culture was organized around these programs (known as "me"), which priests administered to the populace. Enki, a figure of legend, developed a counter-virus (known as "the nam-shub of Enki"), which, when delivered, stopped the Sumerian language from being processed by the brain and led to the development of other, less literal languages, giving birth to the Babel myth. L. Bob Rife had been collecting Sumerian artifacts and developed the drug Snow Crash to make the public vulnerable to new forms of "me", which he would control. The physical form of the virus is distributed in the form of an addictive drug and within Reverend Wayne's church via infected blood. There is also a digital version, to which hackers are especially vulnerable, as they are accustomed to processing information in binary form.
Hiro heads north to the Oregon Coast, where the Raft, a huge collection of boats containing Eurasian refugees, is approaching the West Coast of the United States. The center of the Raft is L. Bob Rife's yacht, formerly the USS "Enterprise" nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Rife has been using the Raft as a mechanism to indoctrinate and infect thousands with the virus and to import it to America. Y.T. is captured and brought to Rife on the Raft, who intends to use her as a hostage, knowing her connection to Uncle Enzo. With help from the Mafia, Hiro fights his way onto the Raft and recovers the "nam-shub" of Enki, which Rife had been concealing. With help from Juanita, who had previously infiltrated the Raft, the "nam-shub" is read out, and Rife's control over the Raft is broken. Rife flees the Raft, taking Y.T., and his mercenary, Raven, attempts to activate the digital form of Snow Crash at a virtual concert within the Metaverse. Hiro is able to neutralize the virus, and Y.T. escapes. At Los Angeles International Airport, Raven ambushes the Mafia and fights Uncle Enzo to a stalemate (though both men are severely injured in the process), while Rife is killed as he attempts to flee the airport on his private jet. Y.T. is reunited with her mother, and Hiro and Juanita reconcile and agree to rekindle their relationship.
Background.
Stephenson originally planned "Snow Crash" as a computer-generated graphic novel in collaboration with artist Tony Sheeder. In the author's acknowledgments Stephenson recalls:
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Ideas and ideologies.
The books themes include history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy.
"Snow Crash" takes place under anarcho-capitalism, a theme Stephenson carries over to his next novel "The Diamond Age". As described in both novels and the short story "The Great Simoleon Caper" (1995), hyperinflation has sapped the value of the US dollar to the extent that trillion-dollar bills are nearly disregarded, and the quadrillion-dollar note is the standard "small" bill.241 This hyperinflation was created by the government overprinting money due to loss of tax revenue, as people increasingly began to use electronic currency, which they exchanged in untaxable encrypted online transactions. For physical transactions, most people resort to alternative currencies such as the yen or "Kongbucks" (the official currency of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong). Hyperinflation has also negatively affected much of the world, resulting in waves of desperate refugees from Asia who cross the Pacific in rickety ships hoping to arrive in North America.
The "Metaverse", a phrase coined by Stephenson as a successor to the Internet, constitutes Stephenson's early 1990s vision of how a virtual reality–based Internet might evolve shortly. Resembling a massively multiplayer online game (MMO). The Metaverse is populated by user-controlled avatars, as well as system daemons. Although there are public-access Metaverse terminals in "Reality", using them carries a social stigma among Metaverse denizens, in part because of the poor visual representations of themselves as low-quality avatars. Status in the Metaverse is a function of two things: access to restricted areas such as the Black Sun, an exclusive Metaverse club, and the sophistication of one's avatar.
Characteristic technologies.
Various fictional technologies are employed in this world and help define it, including skateboards and motorcycles with adaptive "Smartwheels",28 cybernetic guard dogs known as "Rat Things",248 and a prototype portable railgun weapon named "Reason".361
Metaverse.
Stephenson's "Metaverse" appears to its users as an urban environment, developed along a single hundred-meter-wide road, the Street, that runs around the entire 65,536 km (216 km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet. The virtual real estate is owned by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, a fictional part of the real life Association for Computing Machinery, and is available to be bought and buildings developed thereupon.24 Access to the metaverse is through L. Bob Rife's global fiber-optic network, which grew from a collection of small cable television franchises into a global telecommunications monopoly and superseded the traditional telephone system.115
Users of the Metaverse gain access to it through personal terminals that project a high-quality virtual reality display onto goggles worn by the user,23 or from low-quality public terminals in booths (with the penalty of presenting a grainy black-and-white appearance).41 Stephenson also describes a subculture of people choosing to remain continuously connected to the Metaverse by wearing portable terminals, goggles and other equipment; they are nicknamed "gargoyles" due to their grotesque appearance.123 The users of the Metaverse experience it from a first-person perspective.
Within the Metaverse, individual users appear as avatars of any form, with the sole restriction of height, "to prevent people from walking around a mile high".41 Transport within the Metaverse is limited to analogs of reality by foot or vehicle, such as the monorail that runs the entire length of the Street, stopping at 256 "Express Ports", located evenly at 256 km intervals, and "Local Ports", one kilometer apart.37
Distributed republics.
Distributed republics are loosely connected state-like entities dispersed across the world. The concept was reused by Stephenson in "The Diamond Age".
Literary significance and criticism.
"Snow Crash" established Stephenson as a major science fiction writer of the 1990s. The book appeared on "Time" magazine's list of 100 all-time best English-language novels written since 1923. Some critics have considered it a parody of cyberpunk and mentioned its satiric or absurdist humor.
In his book "The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History", Walter Benn Michaels targets Stephenson's view that "languages are codes" rather than a grouping of letters and sounds to be interpreted. Michaels contends that this basic idea of language as code is central to the construct of "Snow Crash" ("... a good deal of "Snow Crash"'s plot depends upon eliding the distinction between hackers and their computers, as if—indeed, in the novel, just because—looking at code will do to the hacker what receiving it will do to the computer"), but at the same time, trivializes the role of meaning in linguistic works.The body that is infected by a virus does not become infected because it understands the virus any more than the body that does not become infected misunderstands the virus. So a world in which everything—from bitmaps to blood—can be understood as a "form of speech" is also a world in which nothing actually is "understood", a world in which what a speech act does is disconnected from what it means.
Rorty's "Achieving Our Country" summarizes the content of "Snow Crash", using it as an example of modern culture that "express the loss of what he [Rorty] calls 'national hope'... the problem with "Snow Crash" is not that it isn't true—after all, it's a story—but that it isn't inspirational". This lack of inspiration is offset by something else "Snow Crash" and other works like it offer:These books produce in their readers the 'state of soul' that Rorty calls 'knowingness', which he glosses as a 'preference for knowledge over hope' (37)"; this preference for knowledge "contribute[s] to a more fundamental failure to appreciate the value of inspiration—and hence of literature—itself".
Influence on the World Wide Web and computing.
"Habitat", the 1986 virtual environment, applied the Sanskrit term "avatar" to online virtual bodies before Stephenson. However, the success of "Snow Crash" popularized the term to the extent that "avatar" is now the accepted term for this concept in computer games and on the World Wide Web.
The novel's Central Intelligence Corporation—the result of a merger between the Library of Congress and Central Intelligence Agency—operates a wiki-like private knowledge base known as the Library. However, unlike Wikimedia, contributors to the Library (stringers) are paid if their contributions are used, making the Library more of an information marketplace than a public knowledge repository.
Many virtual globe programs, including NASA World Wind and Google Earth, bear a resemblance to the "Earth" software developed by the CIC in "Snow Crash". One Google Earth co-founder claimed that Google Earth was modeled after "Snow Crash", while another co-founder said that it was inspired by "Powers of Ten". Stephenson later referenced this in another of his novels, "Reamde".
Stephenson's concept of the Metaverse has enjoyed continued popularity and influence in