Snow Crash

Snow Crash, ©MMXI

“Snow Crash” is not only one of my favorite stories of all time, it also continues to inspire me to look at the world with fresh eyes. In 1992, Neil Stephenson created the Metaverse, Avatars, MMORPG elements and the constant threat of world altering cyber-terrorism. 19 years later, the novel shifts from speculative fiction to just another day of our lives:

We are all cyberpunks.

Hiro Protagonist and his accomplice Y.T. fight to save a world on the brink of implosion. Information is the currency and coding is the weapon of choice… when a katana, mini-gun or skateboard are not available.

The first page of the novel will force you to finish it, and the last paragraph hits the replay-switch in your brain so hard that I recommend some cranial protection and a sake-bomb. Welcome to the future, care of 1992:

“Why is [Hiro] the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it – we’re talking trade balances here – once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here – once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel – once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity – y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else:

music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”

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Amen

I need a Hiro

Aleutian at Babylon

End of Days

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