In which I present the Wikipedia page for Snow Crash in audio, and the stock art fever dream version that “AI” selected for each sentence:
Snow Crash is the not the last Stephenson book you should encounter. For one thing, if you’re new to absurdist humor, you could rightly feel put off a bit. I shall hand-wave this away by reminding you to read the book’s acknowledgments, wherein you will learn that the story was meant to be a computer-drawn interactive graphic novel.
I was a stupid child when I first read Snow Crash, though I owned a passport at the time. I had the experience—as you likely did—of finding the book tautologically derivative; it spawned words and ideas into the public consciousness that have never left, ideas that are flatly boring to us now.
If ‘avatar’ is a boring word to your ears, then shut up swiftly and listen:
Snow Crash drops us unceremoniously into an alternate America, perverted by semi-satire. Quadrillion dollar bills are pocket change. Digital currencies had ravaged the federal government’s ability to levy taxes. They printed money and still remained the shining light on the hill.
Our primary characters have strange, loud names like Hiro Protagonist and Y.T. (Yours Truly). They do business with the fully legitimate Mafia. Kongbucks, franchising, religion, and profit-motivated government define our setting, but Hiro takes us swiftly beyond all that, into… the Metaverse.
If ‘Metaverse’ is a boring word to your ears, then shut up swiftly and listen, because the Metaverse you know and hate (Or love? You poor soul.) came from this moment in literature.
Hiro takes us to a few of the exclusive locales in the Metaverse, which won’t blow your mind today. He gets offered digital drugs, as one does. His friend crashes hard when trying to study the payload, suffering physical brain damage just from looking at the files.
The book isn’t that long, all told, and a good chunk of it exposits Sumerian lore, teaching us about the components of language, and the proto-language that had the power to ruin minds. The skeleton key language was a superlative danger in its raw form, until new languages were spawned with less literal commands embedded in it.
We understand eventually that the danger of the old tongue is somewhat like the danger of assuming a raw binary file has no bad intentions, when it well might. Binary is only ‘dangerous’ insofar that it is not being greatly interpreted. Binary payloads in computers can be read by your processor without indirection or meaningful translation. The binary is direct, and thus efficient.
Stephenson gives us an origin story for the Tower of Babel mythology, explaining enfin that languages as we know them today are less capable than the Sumerian proto-language, and this by design. Language of today is correctly indirect, forcing people to deserialize meaning from sound, each on their own.
In my view, the setting of Snow Crash could have been almost anything and still carry the Sumerian cuneiform plot fine. The book has an idea to explain, and a flavor to enjoy, and they are all but separate. The setting is absurdist at times, yet the proto-language is stunningly interesting and straight-faced.
To say too much about this book is to spoil its texture, and I can’t do that to you. Pick it up and blink confusedly about Rat Things, Babel, and Louis XIV. Feel its pace spin out in a weird direction, before turning towards something almost modern, before climaxing on characters who have no arcs.
My feeling about the plot is that Stephenson saw in the advent of the internet hackers consuming binary files at a new and frightening rate. The metaphor doesn’t hold on for all that long, but there is something striking about the idea of raw vs interpreted instruction, and the idea that hackers were playing like princes in digital realms, only to be topped by the forgotten king of direct instruction.
Come for the Mafia, stay for boat fight. You’ll find a Reason somewhere along, I’m sure.
The Wikipedia text lyrics follow:
Hiro Protagonist is a freelance hacker, and pizza delivery driver for the Mafia. He meets Y.T. (short for Yours Truly), a young skateboard Kourier (courier), who refers to herself in the third person, during a failed attempt to make a delivery on time. Y.T. completes the delivery on his behalf, and they strike up a partnership, gathering intel and selling it to the CIC.
Within the Metaverse, Hiro is offered a datafile named Snow Crash by a man named Raven, who hints that it is a form of narcotic. Hiro's friend and fellow hacker Da5id views a bitmap image contained in the file, which causes his computer to crash and Da5id to suffer brain damage in the real world. Hiro meets his ex-girlfriend Juanita Marquez, who gives him a database containing a large amount of research compiled by her associate, Lagos. This research posits connections between the virus, ancient Sumerian culture, and the legend of the Tower of Babel. Juanita advises him to be careful and disappears.
The Mafia boss Uncle Enzo begins to take a paternal interest in Y.T. Impressed by her attitude and initiative, he arranges to meet her and offers her freelance jobs. Hiro's investigations and Y.T.'s intelligence gathering begin to coincide, with links between the neuro-linguistic viruses, a religious organization known as Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates and a media magnate named L. Bob Rife beginning to emerge. Lagos's research showed that the ancient Sumerian ur-language allowed brain function to be "programmed" using audio stimuli in conjunction with a DNA-altering virus. Sumerian culture was organized around these programs (known as me), which priests administered to the populace. Enki, a figure of legend, developed a counter-virus (known as the nam-shub of Enki), which, when delivered, stopped the Sumerian language from being processed by the brain and led to the development of other, less literal languages, giving birth to the Babel myth. L. Bob Rife had been collecting Sumerian artifacts and developed the drug Snow Crash to make the public vulnerable to new forms of me, which he would control. The physical form of the virus is distributed in the form of an addictive drug and within Reverend Wayne's church via infected blood. There is also a digital version, to which hackers are especially vulnerable, as they are accustomed to processing information in binary form.
Hiro heads north to the Oregon Coast, where the Raft, a huge collection of boats containing Eurasian refugees, is approaching the West Coast of the United States. The center of the Raft is L. Bob Rife's yacht, formerly the USS Enterprise nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Rife has been using the Raft as a mechanism to indoctrinate and infect thousands with the virus and to import it to America. Y.T. is captured and brought to Rife on the Raft, who intends to use her as a hostage, knowing her connection to Uncle Enzo. With help from the Mafia, Hiro fights his way onto the Raft and recovers the nam-shub of Enki, which Rife had been concealing. With help from Juanita, who had previously infiltrated the Raft, the nam-shub is read out, and Rife's control over the Raft is broken. Rife flees the Raft, taking Y.T., and his mercenary, Raven, attempts to activate the digital form of Snow Crash at a virtual concert within the Metaverse. Hiro is able to neutralize the virus, and Y.T. escapes. At Los Angeles International Airport, Raven ambushes the Mafia and fights Uncle Enzo to a stalemate (though both men are severely injured in the process), while Rife is killed as he attempts to flee the airport on his private jet. Y.T. is reunited with her mother, and Hiro and Juanita reconcile and agree to rekindle their relationship.
