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Pricing, delivery and product integrity were all satisfactory. This item was given as a gift to a friend, who specifically requested it, and expressed great satisfaction on receiving it. My rating it a 4 out of a possible 5 reflects only the fact that I lack first hand experience with the purchased item, and can only reflect the limited information conveyed to me by its recipient.
the technology feels like it was written by someone from the 1950's envisioning their future.I'm an avid sci fi/fantasy reader and can count the number of unfinished books on two hands. I have to agree with other reviewers that the torturous sentences, simple plot, shallow characters, and just plain boring storyline killed it for me. I wish I could get my money back, it was THAT bad. I tried to like it, I really did (I was hoping to have this be the first leap into discovering Stephenson's other works), but I ended up doing something quite rare for me: I put the book down halfway through it. Should I just stay away from Neil Stephenson. I also found it funny that for futuristic cyberpunk sci fi, it wasn't very futuristic or cyberpunky.
Are all his books written like this. Like many other one-star reviewers, I heard about this being a classic in the Neuromancer sense. I really tried, but I found it simply unreadable. Snow Crash has joined that list.
My only complaint is that the man on the cover of this version is clearly Caucasian while Hiro is supposed to be black and Asian. Stephenson's vision of the present/future is remarkable, especially for a book published in 1992 (his only misstep I saw was stating that people carry CD players). Really, that's my only complaint.
Nonetheless, quite a bit of it is still remarkably fresh. Anyone with a liberal arts education is sure to be annoyed by Stephenson's treatment of linguistics and Sumerian myth, and the DA VINCI CODE-esque sensationalism on ancient religions. Stephenson's hope that hackers would be the heroes of the future has gone unrealized when the people who keep the web's most popular sites running are still considered socially inept geeks. Still, as this book does have the potential to keep you entertained, I'd recommend it as light reading.
Nowadays, however, I see the book as incredibly flawed. The independent hacker and swordsman Hiro Protagonist pays his bills by working as a "deliverator", conveying pizzas from a Mafia-owned pizzeria franchise to LA suburbs designed to the same general plans. When Stephenson has to introduce the Sumerian element, he has no better way to do this than a long droning monologue from a librarian character. Parts of SNOW CRASH are dated indeed. Published in 1991, the book suggests a near-future America where the privization and libertarian fantasies of the Reagan years have led to America breaking up into innumerable little city states, each part of a franchise chain. When not making deliveries, Hiro is a luminary of the Metaverse, a 3D virtual environment accessed by people all over the globe. The Metaverse concept seems silly now that the 1990s interest in virtual reality has faded. Consider this early observation of globalization:"Once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave overs in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken all these historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity--y'know what.
The whole hacker and super-privatized America portions of the book are great fun, but the Sumerian virus element just seems lame. Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH has won itself near-classic status in the cyberpunk genre by combining the worship of technology and hacker skills made popular by earlier writers like Gibson with a humorous tone and farcical view of the future. In this technological fantasy world, someone is spreaking a virus that kills hackers, and Hiro has to take down the culprit with an understanding of Sumerian myth. There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery."I really enjoyed this book the first time I read it in my early teens.
What is somewhat of a letdown is how everything is somewhat tied up at the end, where the reader is forced to make quite a few assumptions as to what may have actually happened to various characters.In short, a great book with a less than spectacular finish. The government is pretty much abolished. I wasn't quite sure of what to expect when I started reading 'Snow Crash,' as I hadn't really heard anything about it (other than a bit here and there that it might be "good"). So I wouldn't say that I was surprised per se when the story really started to reel me in - but it wasn't an unpleasant feeling, to be sure.The plot of the book is pretty straightforward - in the near future, America has fragmented and now there are isolated pockets of like-minded folk that live together in protected suburbs. There also exists a souped-up version of the internet - imagine being able to jack into a sort-of 'Matrix' style reality by using goggles.And someone is trying to mess things up by introducing a vicious virus called Snow Crash.The.main character (who goes by the name of "Hiro Protagonist," possibly one of the funniest things I have read in years) is both a master hacker and real-life swordsman who starts to unravel the machinations of the "bad guys" - and this is where the book really takes a huge turn.Most of the actual plot of the book is very well paced from an action perspective, but when we start to get to the portions where Hiro is deciphering the plans of the Big Bads, things get very metaphysical with descriptions of Sumerian history/mythology which builds to a very compelling (if pseudo-science-y) interpretation on the nature of both communication and transmission of information.This deciphering does slow down the story, but it is interesting enough that I'm willing to give that portion a pass.
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