Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
I’d always wanted to read a novel by Neal Stephenson. Back in 2005, NC had mentioned him as a great author who wrote cyber thrillers and I should definitely read. Time passed by, I forgot about this and when someone recently mentioned Stephenson in a chat about books, I thought I must get hold of a copy. Reading a paperback after a long time was fun. I felt it didn’t live up to the hype and it took me a bit of time to get into the book. But if you read the backcover, you’d surely be intrigued enough to give it a try. Here it is, verbatim -
“Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison—a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.”
The main takeaway for me was that you could literally die if you read a string of characters in a particular order even if you don’t understand it. I’ve heard of people saying similar things about words that you hear. When you hear words spoken in a specifc sequence, you could get affected. For e.g., magical incantations in Sanskrit or Latin. Since words that you hear and words that you see are processed by the brain, it is theoretically possible that the brain’s wirings could get impacted mysteriously by some sequence that we don’t yet understand.