A review by missdragon
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

medium-paced

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

2.0

I want to start this review by saying that I wanted to like this book, in fact I greatly enjoy the cyberpunk genre for the most part. What this book does have going for it is exaggeratory humour in a very 90s style, was very enjoyable to me. I liked the opening sequence of having to deliver pizzas in thirty minutes or getting in trouble with the mafia, the main character being called “Hiro Protagonist” was amusing, things like that. I also thought YT was a fairly interesting character, and I kept wishing the book would cut back to her perspective. It was cool to have a mixed race protagonist. Unfortunately, my praise for the book ends here. 

 

The women in this book were sexualised a lot for no reason. The sexism is very much of an early 2000s flavour - acknowledging that women have it harder while at the same time demeaning conventionally attractive women for the sake of their “not like other girls, smart and don’t wear makeup peers”. It is extremely degrading to these characters (calling them bimbos, only having large boob sizes in the metaverse etc). The same thing happens with regards to race, where Hiro nearly getting jumped is a terrible thing, yet there is a Japanese character called “Sushi-san”.  The humour in here is sometimes very outdated. 

 

Almost all of Hiro’s perspective through the book is info dumping about lore that honestly we’re not shown why it matters until 420 pages into the book (total page count is 440). What exactly these characters are supposed to be doing is unclear, they don’t have their own goals for the majority of the plot which leaves all of them being incredibly passive and reactionary. This kind of writing needs major structural edits. Hiro himself is incredibly one note, being your average Mary Sue best-in-the-world-at-sword-fighting kind of guy, who doesn’t do a lot throughout the plot. Towards the end I was skim reading his sections, especially because the “logic” of the novel was being presented as profound when it really wasn’t, and could have been greatly summarised. 

 

These lore dumps are followed with YT getting up to something high stakes and interesting, but because the everything she does is supposed to be relatively high stakes, nothing feels high stakes in this book. Due to the fact that this book pulls a dystopian comedy kind of vibe, I’m not entirely sure the more harrowing elements of the plot (racism and sexual cohesion) feel a bit jarring. Especially when there is both sexism and racism baked into the narrative voice. 

 

There were some pet peeves of mine with regards to some of the details in the world building. For some reason the protagonist is a “hacker” and the term “hacker” is used every single time they refer to him creating his own software. THE TERM IS SOFTWARE DEVELOPER. This does stop part of the way through the book, but some of the discussions and explanations kind of made me think that this was a man who was not well versed in computers and had tried to do a lot of research. 

 

For something considered seminal in the cyberpunk genre, this book often felt like a kid trying to sound like they knew what they were talking about. Oh, and the ending sucked.