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A review by outcolder
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
2.0
All the thriller parts bored me, the car chases, the sword and knife fights, even worse when these action movie tropes are happening in the VR metaverse. Also the libertarian dystopia franchulates are mostly ethnic stereotypes. Would it have been so difficult for someone with Stephenson’s imagination to come up with something more original than the Mafia or Mr. Lee’s? We hit rock bottom with some mild antivaxx lore and some fairly hateful discourse around refugees. There’s also a huge exposition-dump in the form of a multi-chapter Q&A between Hiro Protagonist (groan) and a chatbot called the Librarian. Apparently, the book is notorious among Assyriologists and it led me to borrow a more up-to-date introduction to Sumer and Akkad.
There’s a lot of cool stuff, like BIPOC main characters, skateboarder solidarity and humor, but I found it on a whole a terrific slog. I only stuck It out to the end because so many people list this in their top 5 SF recommendations. That’s fine, I am not offended, just didn’t like it.
There’s a lot of cool stuff, like BIPOC main characters, skateboarder solidarity and humor, but I found it on a whole a terrific slog. I only stuck It out to the end because so many people list this in their top 5 SF recommendations. That’s fine, I am not offended, just didn’t like it.