Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Snow Crash

The action scenes were good but the overall story was confusing. I definitely liked Y.T. more than Hiro. Some of the chapters with the librarian felt very long. Y.T's scenes were exciting and I often just wanted to go back to Y.T and not have to learn all about the languages with Hiro which felt a lot like info-dumping. The opening chapters did feel like technical jargon being thrown at you and giving things names that weren't necessary. I did enjoy all the scenes on the raft.

I think you can tell that it was first published in 1992 with the general sexism and misogyny. It is interesting how Neal Stephenson thinks the internet and virtual reality will develop and comparing it with the internet nowadays.

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tahnok's review against another edition

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3.5

This was an important book to me as a kid but boy did it not stand up to closer scrutiny.

It's a Gen X vision of the future, and it's kind of fun for most of it, but there's some big flaws

The ending felt super rushed, and chaotic, and hard to follow as it moves all over the place. This explains why I literally never remember how it ends despite reading it three times

But the biggest flaw is with how YT is treated on the raft.

there's no way to say that she slept with Raven consensualy. She's 15. She's trapped and can't leave and Raven is clearly capable and willing to be extremely violent. And her being underage seems unimportant to the plot. She could easily have been 18, which would help a little bit make the scene less gross

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saturniidae's review against another edition

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dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

this book is uh. Wow.
I'm still not sure if I'm supposed to see Hiro as the incompetent nerd way out of his depth he clearly is or if I'm somehow supposed to think he's actually cool.
The first half of the book does a good job of building the anarcho captialist hellscape that the characters inhabit, but the second half quickly spirals into an incomprehensible mess with muddled themes.
Really exemplifies why silicon valley techbros are how they are, if this book inspired them.

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