Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

Oct 1994 · Penguin UK

About this ebook

THE 30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH NEW, NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED MATERIAL

After the Internet, what came next?

Enter the Metaverse - cyberspace home to avatars and software daemons, where anything and just about everything goes. Newly available on the Street - the Metaverse's main drag - is Snow Crash. A cyberdrug that reduces avatars in the digital world to dust, but also infects users in real life, leaving them in a vegetative state.

This is bad news for Hiro, a freelance hacker and the Metaverse's best swordfighter, and mouthy skateboard courier Y. T.. Together, investigating the Infocalypse, they trace back the roots of language itself to an ancient Sumerian priesthood and find they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.

In this special edition of the remarkably prescient modern classic, Neal Stephenson explores
linguistics, computer science, politics and philosophy in the form of a break-neck adventure into the fast-approaching yet eerily recognizable future.

'Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the twenty-first century' William Gibson

'Brilliantly realized' New York Times Book Review

'Like a Pynchon novel with the brakes removed' Washington Post

'A remarkably prescient vision of today's tech landscape' Vanity Fair

Ratings and reviews

This is the second time I've read this book and, probably because I understood it better, I enjoyed it even more than the first time. There's a density to Stephenson's world-building that feels solid and tangible, and for writing which crams in so much technical information it's also amazingly kinetic, propelling you through the story like shrapnel. Fantastic book, probably the best of the Cyberpunk genre. Hope it gets made into a TV series.

Nam shubs, memetic theory, the story of babel... Just a few of the core concepts of a challenging but enjoyable read. There will be times during this book that you'll want to pause, set your tablet down and spend a few moments thinking over the brilliant concept Stephenson has just presented you with. A good balance of action, discovery and historical analysis straddle the worlds of the Metaverse and reality in one of the finest sci-fi reads available on the Play Store. Some characters you may struggle to connect with as deeply as others, and sometimes you'll be willing a more consistent plot pace during the 'downtimes'. Well worth a download however, and one you'll not regret sinking the time in to.

Bloody brilliant! Will still be relevant in 50 years. I know Stephenson's characters may be a little flacid and one-dimensional but HOT DAM there is a treasure chest of original ideas in here.

About the author

Neal Stephenson is the author of New York Times bestsellers including The Diamond Age, Zodiac, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World, REAMDE, Anathem, Seveneves, Fall: or Dodge in Hell, and Termination Shock, as well as nonfiction works such as In The Beginning . . . Was the Command Line. He has worked for Blue Origin and Magic Leap, and more recently co-founded Lamina1, a startup creating an open Metaverse platform.