I just finished reading Snow Crash in full and feel I've wasted significant hours of my life in doing so - would not recommend this book to anyone for the following reasons (in no particular order):
-It appears to be ghost-written, there are 2-3 distinct writing styles, all of them right around the 6th grade reading level (with multiple phonetic typos, grammatical errors and misplaced words/punctuation marks throughout, there are entire chapters that read like "see spot run" with technical jargon tossed around haphazardly to make it sound more intelligent than it is).
-It has more liberal subtext than all of Ann Rand's works have conservative/libertarian combined (The book is set in the recent past [based on the ages of characters relative to fixed dates] to an apocalyptic theme that could be drawn from the liberal scare-tactics of the early 90's).
-The underlying theme throughout (best highlighted in the conversation between the main good hero [Hiro] and the main bad hero [Raven] on their bike-race through the meta-verse) is that no matter how closely you can relate to someone, you cannot alter their actions - they will do what they will do without any form of reason or rational thought applied.
-The mythological basis is often misrepresented when citing actual mythos, completely ignoring mythical stories that could actually be used to represent the underlying concepts of the book.
-The book ends with a scene akin to the Futurama episode "Jurassic Bark".
-All the sci-fi type themes are lifted directly from previous stories (there is no visionary sci-fi in the book whatsoever).
-The multiple forms of ghetto-speak are more cumbersome to read through than the description of the para-people in "The Gods Themselves" (if this was done to illustrate the diversion of languages over time, it could have been done much better just by citing the multiple languages already in existence without becoming become nearly as tedious to interpret as "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations").
-The character names are unimaginative placeholders that never seem to have been replaced (Hiro Protagonist, Y.T., etc) or names resembling mythical figures changed in such a manner as to suggest the original intent of the book (or perhaps just that of one of the ghost-writers) was that the mythical figures were coming back in the more modern characters of the book.
-About 50% of the book, when taken from the whole, is repetitive, adding nothing but filler (no additional descriptions of scenes, plot or personality type - just repetition).
-The author has likely never seen a thesaurus in his/their life/lives.
-The incredibly narrow perspective outlined in the book can be seen a good deal in the interaction with the "Librarian" program, who only cites 3-4 equally biased authors over the course of much (again, tedious and repetitive) dialog.
Again, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone - not worth the $10, or even the time it takes to commute to the library, let alone read. I definitely should have gone with my first instinct: title=Apple Jargon=Bad.
On Sunday, April 22, 2012 3:00:18 PM UTC-4, Dan wrote:
On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Cory Geesaman <cory@geesaman.com> wrote:
> The guy hasn't really made any good sci-fi and seems to be making an attempt
> to hype up whatever his upcoming works are by getting his name out.I think you're making the mistake of assuming that, because you
haven't heard of him, he's not a good author or not significant in his
field. He happens to be one of my favorite authors; I had to take a
few minutes to calm down before responding ;-)
Snow Crash was a pretty significant work when it came out - Time has
it on its list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923
(when TIME Magazine started) along with Slaughterhouse Five, Animal
Farm, Gone With the Wind, Lolita, and others:
http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/#snow-crash-1992-by-neal-stephenson
The Diamond Age is sci-fi, and won Hugo and Locus awards and was
shortlisted for the Nebula award. Anathem is another sci-fi work
which got somewhat mixed reviews, but was #1 on the NYT bestseller
list (in the Hardcover Fiction category) and won the Locus Award for
best sci-fi novel in 2009, was nominated for the Hugo and other
awards, and is one of the few books to have been reviewed in Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7221/pdf/456446a.pdf
He also wrote Cryptonomicon, which isn't (exactly) sci-fi but is one
of my favorite novels. Also, when he spoke at MIT the other day (I
couldn't attend because I had prior obligations) the room was filled
to capacity. So while you may not like his work personally (which I
would certainly respect - different strokes and all that) I think it's
hard to support your statement that he hasn't made any good sci-fi.
-Dan
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