Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Author: Neal Stephenson

Blog Post: 2019-02-20 - Snow Crash

Summary

Set in a dystopian, corporatized future where Los Angeles has splintered into private city-states, Snow Crash follows Hiro Protagonist, a pizza delivery driver and elite hacker who discovers a dangerous new digital drug called “Snow Crash.” This metavirus has the ability to affect both computer systems in the virtual Metaverse and human minds in the physical world by exploiting ancient Sumerian linguistic programming.

Hiro teams up with Y.T., a fearless teenage courier, to uncover a conspiracy led by a powerful media mogul aiming to distribute the virus globally to achieve total control over human consciousness. As they navigate the dangerous intersections of the physical and virtual worlds, they work with various factions, including the Mafia, to dismantle the threat and prevent the total subjugation of humanity through linguistic manipulation. The novel is a seminal work of cyberpunk, blending high-speed action with deep philosophical inquiries into language, religion, and the future of information technology.

Notes

Chapter 1

• In a near distant future, the world is run by corporations.
• Deliverator delivers pizzas to home. He has a fancy car. When he is about to pickup the next pizza, the franchise is on fire due to being operated by a new immigrant. So when he gets the pizza to deliver, the timer says 20 minutes. Chapter 2
• While he is driving in a hurry to deliver, his car is harpooned by a courier. The courier is on a skateboard and uses an extensible string to attach to a car to carry them to places.
• In his rush to get rid of the courier, the deliverator crashes on to an empty swimming pool.
• The courier happens to be a girl. She introduces herself as YT and offers to deliver the pizza on time. The deliverator thanks her and gives his card which says ‘Hiro Protagonist’ Chapter 3
• Hiro and his friend Vitaly live in a rented storage container. Theirs is 20x30 and has a door and is more luxurious than others who live in bunk beds. Though their living condition is minimal, Hiro visits a virtual world named Metaverse where he has a big house in a prime place since he and his friend bought the space when it was being built.
• He was a coder in the past and had helped write some portions of the metaverse. He now owes the mafia a car (since it crashed and got totalled) and he now makes money by providing intel to the large digital library. Chapter 4
• YT maneuvers herself through the burbs expertly and delivers the pizza almost in the nick of time, much to the disappointment of the family who was expecting to celebrate by getting a free pizza. Chapter 5
• Hiro walks around the Metaverse and sees people walking around. He gets into a pyramid shaped building named The Black Sun that others are not able to enter. He is able to since he knows the owner Da5id and he was one of the people who designed it. He is met by a stranger who tries to sell him a drug named Snow Crash which is a hypercard. A hypercard is a digital card that if his avatar takes it in the metaverse, data gets transferred from the card to his system. He ignores and moves on. Chapter 6

Quotes

• The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. (Location 166)
• This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. (Location 171)
• There’s only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery (Location 177)
• Because there’s something about having your life on the line. It’s like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. (Location 220)
• You don’t work harder because you’re competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. (Location 225)
• A new immigrant from Abkhazia trying to operate a microwave was like a deep-sea tube worm doing brain surgery. (Location 304)
• When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins. (Location 458)
• This boulevard does not really exist; it is a computer-rendered view of an imaginary place. (Location 471)
• And even the word “library” is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, (Location 490)
• As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color that Hiro’s eye is capable of seeing. (Location 515)
• earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. (Location 524)
• it is always nighttime in the Metaverse, and the Street is always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance. (Location 555)
• we are in the Burbs, where it is better to take a thousand clicks off the lifespan of your Goodyears by invariably grinding them up against curbs than to risk social ostracism and outbreaks of mass hysteria by parking several inches away, out in the middle of the street (That’s okay, Mom, I can walk to the curb from here), a menace to traffic, a deadly obstacle to uncertain young bicyclists. (Location 608)
• The van takes off like a hormone-pumped bull who has just been nailed in the ass by the barbed probe of a picador. (Location 623)
• Fire hydrants that tasteful people are proud to have on their front lawns. Fire hydrants that the real estate people don’t feel the need to airbrush out of pictures. (Location 639)
• The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it. (Location 669)
• Videotape is cheap. You never know when something will be useful, so you might as well videotape it. (Location 705)
• He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. (Location 716)
• The user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous. Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. (Location 745)
• But it’s also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings. (Location 769)
• Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves. (Location 772)
• since this is all imaginary, there are no regulations dictating the number of emergency exits. (Location 779)
• When things get this jammed together, the computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you can see where you’re going. (Location 790)
• But “snow crash” is computer lingo. It means a system crash—a bug—at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. (Location 825)
• If Hiro reaches out and takes the hypercard, then the data it represents will be transferred from this guy’s system into Hiro’s computer. Hiro, naturally, wouldn’t touch it under any circumstances, any more than you would take a free syringe from a stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck. (Location 847)