A review by posatahchips
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

adventurous funny fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
what can i even say about this book. reading it for the first time as an adult in 2024 was an absurd experience. i've never left so many notes that are just "[NAME OF AUTHOR IN ALL CAPS]?????". a lot of the concepts & even a lot of the writing is pretty great, in a way where i immediately understand its outsized influence on the genre, & it's also like... cartoonishly, jaw-droppingly racist. my brain kept trying to automatically tell me it was written ten or twenty years earlier, which still wouldn't excuse it, but would be less baffling. not even going to touch on everything going on with the sexualisation of a fifteen-year-old girl (who could have easily been a few years older with essentially no change).

the further i got into the book, the more the scales tipped, too. a lot of the strength of concept & writing is very front-loaded, & the more the wheels fall off, the more it's like, "why am i reading this???" somehow, it has the oddly distinct feeling of being, like, serially written-- like fanfiction that gets written & posted chapter by chapter, without a lot of structural editing to pull the whole thing together.

the part of me that loves pulp-y sci-fi trash can totally ride with the tonal whiplash & dissolving plot, but between the bigotry & the MULTIPLE CHAPTERS that are just dialogued christian atheist conspiracy loredumps & the bigotry (naming it again because oh my god), my patience definitely... waned. but, you know, i was warned multiple times by more than a handful of people who said they were glad they read it before they knew better, sooo can't say i shouldn't have seen it coming, lmao
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