Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson 📝📚

This book was recommended to me by a friend around the time the fourth Matrix movie came out. I tried to rent it from the library, but the hold queue was extremely long… turns out that this novel is where the word ‘Metaverse’ was coined, so it’s having a renaissance thanks to Facebook’s rebranding.

But then I heard the name of the book again when it was mentioned by Jaron Lanier in Dawn of the New Everything, and so I bought the ebook - I was very disappointed to find that it was not very good.

There are some awesome parts of the book - the dystopia that Stephenson creates is hilarious and creative, there are some sweet inventions, and the action scenes are riveting. The part I like the best, though, is how the dystopian reality is super kooky and surreal, while the metaverse “virtual reality” is pretty buttoned down and business-focused. That was a great script-flipping that I thought was clever and really enjoyed.

But… there’s a lot of the book that’s dedicated to a mythology and backstory around the evil character that I think is basically unnecessary. It doesn’t add to the commentary, or the narrative, or really to anything. It just a lot of pages to get through. The nemeses were well-constructed characters, but there’s so much unnecessary color — which is so unnecessarily complicated — around their motivations and histories, that it obscures the good parts of the book.

I probably won’t jump at an opportunity to read anything else by this author.