• Full Title: Snow Crash
• Authors: Neal Stephenson
• Year: 1992
• Genre: Science Fiction, Pizza
• Publisher: Penguin
• ISBN 978-0-241-95318-1 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia Page

 

Promoted as “a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous... you’ll recognize it immediately”, Snow Crash may very well be that. But not in the first two chapters, which was as far as I got. Eighteen pages of comic book-style descriptions of “the Deliverator”, who anarchistically delivers pizza in a near future libertarian/capitalist fever dream of America where private corporations own even the roads and every housing development is its own constitutional nation. Including three paragraphs of description about a gun he doesn’t even carry anymore.

All the verbs are present tense, which is unsettling, but not in an enjoyable way.

For a book written in 1992, I also expected fewer sexist or xenophobic tropes. Both the Deliverator and the author seem startled to learn that a skilled courier is a woman, by Jove, which was a pleasant break from weird phrases like “knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand” and endless strings of unimaginative acronyms (“TMAWH”, for example).

I finally decided to stop at the revelation that the hero/protagonist’s name is... seriously: “Hiro Protagonist”.

According to very good ratings and reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads, this book is going to get really, incredibly interesting. Any minute now. You might almost be to the interesting part. But not yet. Right now we’re still on the 18th page about how exciting it is to deliver pizza.

 

 

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