(Spoilers)
Okay so I anticipate a lot of fans are going to look at the title and say "Well yeah, the main character's name is literally Hiro Protagonist, and he's a pizza delivery driver who is also the world's best hacker and sword-fighter, what else are you expecting?" and yeah I get that because things are so steeped in parody and exaggerated caricature it's not meant to be taken seriously, but still. Overall I found the beginning and the ending very strong in their respective clarity of focus and chase scene pacing ("We need to get a thing to a thing" and "We need to stop a thing from getting to a thing," both very very fast, respectively) and Stephenson demonstrates a knack for coming up with fun and thrilling action set pieces (that frustratingly he doesn't seem quite as interested in), but I just can't help rolling my eyes and letting out an exasperated sigh when Snow Crash stops being cyberpunk and instead decides to become an Ancient Aliens and Bible Study mashup. The smug "Bet you didn't know that huh?" tone of the Librarian, Lagos, and Juanita make their pseudophilosophy, pseudoscience, and pseudoreligion all the more annoying to have to parse, especially when the content boils down to the equivalent of one dude opening up a bunch of Wikipedia tabs and pasting in paragraphs from them seemingly at random.
The structure and pacing suffers for it too; our two main protagonists basically bumble along in their day to day lives, not really understanding the tasks given to them, with little in the way of concrete goals or personal objectives with associated plans of action, until the very end. For the majority of Snow Crash what you end up reading is pages upon pages of flavor text describing some strange new location or subculture or individual (which loses its appeal when they are shuffled through so frequently, often never to appear again), one of the protagonists doing a thing without really understanding why they are doing what they are doing or how it relates to the (very) tentative underlying mystery of "What is Snow Crash?" all the while diverting the attention of the reader and the story to connecting dots between Bicammeral Mind theory, Memes, Monomyth, Pentecostalism, extraterrestrial life/intelligence, and the formation of language, without ever going deeper than surface level to justify said connections. A character will claim that a mythical deity was actually a real person and the equivalent to modern "hackers" in that they could use language to "program" early minds, or how a virus from space is what makes humans speak in tongues, which is actually just ancient Sumerian which is the language Adam and Eve spoke, and no one is skeptical and everyone just goes along with it at face value. It especially doesn't help that the book grinds to a halt near the end to spend two goddamn chapters reexplaining how everything connects and how it's all a conspiracy and how all the puzzle pieces fit together and I just can't give a shit about any of it because it's all so bogus. It's so dry and didactic that the only way it reads as entertaining or worthwhile is if one assumes that this is all somehow actually revelatory or mindblowing, instead of, well, dumb.
Throw on top of it the relentlessly gross and uncomfortable sexualizing of the other main protagonist (she's 15!) that the book either decides to ignore in a "no big deal" sort of way or, worse, portray in a "that's hot/kinda kinky" sort of way, and all in all I came away disappointed in a book I was ready to love. I guess I just wanted to vent after finishing it, and granted it did give me a lot I wanted to comment on, but yeah I guess I'm curious what other people think about it all.
Okay so I anticipate a lot of fans are going to look at the title and say "Well yeah, the main character's name is literally Hiro Protagonist, and he's a pizza delivery driver who is also the world's best hacker and sword-fighter, what else are you expecting?" and yeah I get that because things are so steeped in parody and exaggerated caricature it's not meant to be taken seriously, but still. Overall I found the beginning and the ending very strong in their respective clarity of focus and chase scene pacing ("We need to get a thing to a thing" and "We need to stop a thing from getting to a thing," both very very fast, respectively) and Stephenson demonstrates a knack for coming up with fun and thrilling action set pieces (that frustratingly he doesn't seem quite as interested in), but I just can't help rolling my eyes and letting out an exasperated sigh when Snow Crash stops being cyberpunk and instead decides to become an Ancient Aliens and Bible Study mashup. The smug "Bet you didn't know that huh?" tone of the Librarian, Lagos, and Juanita make their pseudophilosophy, pseudoscience, and pseudoreligion all the more annoying to have to parse, especially when the content boils down to the equivalent of one dude opening up a bunch of Wikipedia tabs and pasting in paragraphs from them seemingly at random.
The structure and pacing suffers for it too; our two main protagonists basically bumble along in their day to day lives, not really understanding the tasks given to them, with little in the way of concrete goals or personal objectives with associated plans of action, until the very end. For the majority of Snow Crash what you end up reading is pages upon pages of flavor text describing some strange new location or subculture or individual (which loses its appeal when they are shuffled through so frequently, often never to appear again), one of the protagonists doing a thing without really understanding why they are doing what they are doing or how it relates to the (very) tentative underlying mystery of "What is Snow Crash?" all the while diverting the attention of the reader and the story to connecting dots between Bicammeral Mind theory, Memes, Monomyth, Pentecostalism, extraterrestrial life/intelligence, and the formation of language, without ever going deeper than surface level to justify said connections. A character will claim that a mythical deity was actually a real person and the equivalent to modern "hackers" in that they could use language to "program" early minds, or how a virus from space is what makes humans speak in tongues, which is actually just ancient Sumerian which is the language Adam and Eve spoke, and no one is skeptical and everyone just goes along with it at face value. It especially doesn't help that the book grinds to a halt near the end to spend two goddamn chapters reexplaining how everything connects and how it's all a conspiracy and how all the puzzle pieces fit together and I just can't give a shit about any of it because it's all so bogus. It's so dry and didactic that the only way it reads as entertaining or worthwhile is if one assumes that this is all somehow actually revelatory or mindblowing, instead of, well, dumb.
Throw on top of it the relentlessly gross and uncomfortable sexualizing of the other main protagonist (she's 15!) that the book either decides to ignore in a "no big deal" sort of way or, worse, portray in a "that's hot/kinda kinky" sort of way, and all in all I came away disappointed in a book I was ready to love. I guess I just wanted to vent after finishing it, and granted it did give me a lot I wanted to comment on, but yeah I guess I'm curious what other people think about it all.
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