Subject: Review of SNOW CRASH

From: [email-masked] ("Alan (Gesture Man) Wexelblat")
Date: 27 Jun 93 00:25:06 GMT

Snow Crash
			by Neal Stephenson
			Review Copyright (c) 1993 Alan Wexelblat

[Warning!  Contains major spoilers.  If you haven't read the book, go read
it.  If you have, this review tells you what I thought of it.  --AW]

Sigh.  I wonder if I'm turning into an old curmudgeon, or if I just like
committing heresy.  Back in the Bad Old Days (tm) I ranted and raved in
praise of a bunch of writers almost no one had heard of: Gibson, Sterling,
Cadigan.  These days that stuff is old hat.  It's bloody everywhere, from
the cover of TIME magazine to the latest Billy Idol album (inspired by
reading and talking with Gibson).  Of course, the pop-cyberpunk wave is
about 8 years behind the times, but hey, that's not so bad.

These days, the Really Cool d00dz (also tm) have a different totem on which
to fetishize: Neal Stephenson and his dissection of post-Reagan techno-
culture, SNOW CRASH.  Everyone I talk to is raving about this book, even
some of the people who can't stomach Gibson.  "Cyberpunk with a sense of
humor" is the oft-repeated phrase.  Yeah, the book is funny in places.  In a
way it's like Tom Robbins meets John Shirley.  Stephenson takes the
mini-mall, techno-freak, MTV generation and grows it like a culture in a
Petri dish until it encompasses his world.  His alternate-present America
is franchise city from coast to coast.

Into it he throws an aging hacker/ronin, Hiro Protagonist, and a young
skateboarding Kourier, Y.T.  These two, backed by the forces of Good (the
Mafia, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, etc) battle the forces of Evil
(primarily L. Bob Rife and his church, but aided by a seemingly-invincible
Inuit assassin whose sole goal in life is to nuke America).

For the first couple hundred pages of the book, Stephenson rocks along,
describing how Hiro gets in trouble with the Mafia and YT bails him out,
describing the Metaverse (Stephenson's version of cyberspace), and generally
setting the plot up.  I liked this part of the book; it seems to be the part
that most people talk about when they rave about how cool SNOW CRASH is.

And it is pretty cool.  Stephenson has enough techie background that he
makes his Metaverse pretty real (although he glosses over "minor" problems
like, what is the form of input used by people who have only goggles for an
interface?).  And I do like the way Stephenson makes "hypercard" into a
generic noun for any hypermedia stack-like object.  He does make some big
errors, though, like the point of black-and-white avatars.  The quality of
how you look to me in the Metaverse won't depend on your input hardware
nearly as much as it will on my output hardware.  I can create on a crappy
VGA PC code for some images which will look phenomenal on a top-of-the-line
SGI.

But then there's the last 200 or so pages of the book.  The part where the
plot is actually supposed to be developed.  This is where the book just
falls down and dies.  It becomes a lesson in Sumerian-era history, complete
with page after page of stultifying info dump given by a Librarian which is
supposed to be able to do historical research but can't even understand
simple analogies (yeah, right).

Now, I have to admit that the parallels Stephenson draws between the plots
of the legends of Enki and SNOW CRASH's plot are very clever.  But he
totally undercuts his work by not allowing the reader to figure out any of
this for herself.  Instead, Hiro explains it all by talking back to the
Librarian, showing point-for-point how it's supposed to work.  It feels to
me like Stephenson doesn't have enough confidence either in himself or in
his readers.

The ending is also a big letdown.  Stephenson doesn't seem to have the guts
to kill off any of the major characters.  The confrontation between Raven
and Hiro -- which is supposedly set up to be a grand payback for what
happened to their fathers -- fizzles to an anticlimax and Raven vs. Uncle
Enzo also ends in a draw.  The problem is that Raven is working for the bad
guys (and really is one in some ways).  So if he wins (as he should, given
how invincible Stephenson made him), what does that say?  It looks like the
author didn't have the courage of his characters, when it came down to it.

So what does that mean?  That I think this is a bad book?  No, I don't think
that.  I think it's part of a literature grounded in the reality of the 90s,
the way cyberpunk was grounded in the 80s reality.  It's a book with flaws,
and I just wish people would stop raving about it like it was the greatest
thing since... well, since NEUROMANCER.

%T Snow Crash
%A Neal Stephenson
%I Bantam/Spectra SF Paperback
%G ISBN 0-553-56261-4
%D 1992
%O $5.99
%P 468 pp