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crowfood 's review for:
Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
An at times whimsical story set in a bleak but always cool, dystopian, cyberpunk future.
While the comparisons between ancient religions/language and modern computers/viruses was a bit forced, the book deserves more credit for some of its other big ideas. I didn't realize it was first published back in 1992(!) whilst reading it, so a lot of things describing virtual reality etc that are now commonplace, were to some degree first established by this novel. Such as describing one's online presence as an avatar. Neat!
"Other people? Store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America? Other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.
What a fucking rat race that is."
While the comparisons between ancient religions/language and modern computers/viruses was a bit forced, the book deserves more credit for some of its other big ideas. I didn't realize it was first published back in 1992(!) whilst reading it, so a lot of things describing virtual reality etc that are now commonplace, were to some degree first established by this novel. Such as describing one's online presence as an avatar. Neat!
"Other people? Store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America? Other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.
What a fucking rat race that is."