Snowcrash Reviewed
I finished Snowcrash a while ago but haven’t had the sort of pause required to describe the journey until now. The book is indescribable as well as big but the point here is reaction and response rather than synopsis.
I read a good book some months ago called The Chosen. It’s about a couple of Jewish boys growing up in New York. One of the boys is brilliant – a genius by all rights and yet his father never speaks to him. This design, as it is revealed in the end, is to give the boy, Danny, a heart before his intellectual faculties steal his soul.
Neal Stephenson, the author of Snowcrash might be a version of this brilliant Jewish boy except his parents weren’t cold enough to isolate him and allow him to feel the pain of the world. This was more humane for him but less so for the stories he conceives.
Neal is brilliant enough to concoct ideas on the fly – ideas that stimulate your intellectual faculties and make you giddy with the pleasure of novelty. He can, for example, come up with Raven, an Alaskan Islander (Aleutian if you must… ) who rides an enormous motorcycle and keeps a nuclear bomb in the sidecar. Raven has a penchant for splitting people in half with glass knives that are no wider than a molecule. Stephenson produces Hiro Protagonist, the pizza delivery driver who carries Samurai swords and duels people in the virtual reality of the metaverse. The sarcastic implication of the name is true – Snowcrash is about how Hiro and some helpful sidekicks save the world.
In the midst of his group of characters, Stephenson manages to explore linguistic theory, basing the book on the well oddity of human language, building a patchwork of connections to Sumeria and Babel. The mythology introduced is complex enough to slow a reader down but because it is always pertinent it makes a good foundation for the plot.
For all this brilliance, thought bludgeoning and techno-stylistic writing, Stephenson’s story and characters become cartoonish1 – none has a soul. They aren’t human anymore, they are avatars of Neal Stephenson’s video game; they don’t really die and even if they did, it’s distanced or impersonal or exaggerated.
Video games are fun – one can sit for hours punching buttons and exploring the virtual reality they present – but the thing about video games is that they don’t ever move a person. They appeal to the part of the mind that is instantaneously stimulated by lights, action and noise but they have no soul and it is for this reason that when it comes time for real inspiration and ideas the gamer puts his controller down and looks elsewhere.
Note: Incidentally the ever-recluse Stephenson has created a website for his fans.
1Snowcrash did start as a project between Stephenson and an artist to create a graphic novel
8:45:23 AM 
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