Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

 

Around when Wired magazine was founded to appeal to fans of Cyberpunk, in the early 90s, two people used novels to satirize the genre and attempt to reform it or tear it down. Right time, right place. One was the man who invented the term cyberpunk, Bruce Bethke, who wrote Headcrash after Stephenson published Snowcrash. I am very thankful for what Stephenson did. I am stoked that somebody took the piss out of these self-centered, egotistical anti-heroes. And he did it in a way that uses some humor.

Unfortunately, what he wrote and published is crap. Instead of clever ideas, Stephenson cackles at the sheer number of ideas that he half-cocks into the novel. Some indict Cyberpunk, like Raven and Gargoyles. But others follow the genre tropes as unquestioningly and blindly as the bad stuff getting called Cyberpunk before it. If you write a bad novel and then tell everybody you did it on purpose, it’s still a bad novel.

I love satire. The Divine Comedy is what sealed my love of lit in the 10th grade. I should love this even more: it’s both Satire and Cyberpunk, combined. But no, this is a mess. I was bored halfway through and disappointed by every single element simply thrown against the wall to drip down to the pitch black alley below.

Language: China Mieville said more about language in a single chapter of Embassytown than this mess said in the whole book.

Heroes: Instead of writing an anti-anti-hero, Stephenson just wrote another shallow cyberpunk anti-hero.

Myth: Come on. Mentioning myth is not the same thing as discussing it.

I’ll stop here, something Stephenson did not know how to do. This is the novel of a person obsessed with their own cleverness, with no knowledge of how to tie up a narrative thread or say no to his impulses. This is the novel of a person who attempts to make us sympathetic to the rape and sexual assault of a 15 year old child. This is the novel of a person who wants simply to tear down, and not offer any ideas to build back up. As such, I have no time for this novel. After reading it once, I was unable to bring myself to read it again.

As a pulp adventure, I enjoyed my first read of it. Upon reflection, it was unfocused, discursive crap. Is he saying yay objective truth (Namshubs) or yay subjectivity (them chosing their reality [for now] at the end?).