To summarize this story would probably take pages, so here is a cliff-notes story: in a futuristic/parallel America in which corporate entities have redrawn national boundaries and in which much business is done in the virtual reality Internet world known as the Metaverse, a new drug known as--delivered digitally directly to the brain stem and affecting both the online avatar and the physical user--has begun to appear. In investigating the narcotic/virus's roots, its creator, and its purpose, pizza deliveryman, hacker, and self-proclaimed "greatest swordfighter in the world" Hiro Protagonist teams up with fearless skate-boarding deliverygirl Y.T. on an adventure that crosses time, space, and virtual worlds. It's a roller-coaster ride filled with comedy, action, and philosophical musings, and it's a lot of fun to read.
The plot, as it stands, is so insane that you can't help just go along for the ride. But where Snow Crash really worked for me was in how well, 21 years ago, it seemed to predict today's world. OK, the United States hasn't completely dissolved into corporate nations, but the power of the corporation continues to grow unabated. We now have corporations fighting our wars, deciding our political stances, even enforcing our laws. Are we really that far from a world in which franchise-states separate themselves more completely so as to create their own laws and policies--in which even the mafia can incorporate and go "legit"? I'm not so sure. And what of Stephenson's Metaverse, which though not the current direction of the Internet, can be seen in the gaming worlds of PlayStation Home, Second Life, even World of Warcraft and other MMOs--worlds in which information is interfaced with on a digital level, served up in bite-sized pieces through fiber-optic and wireless connections. Perhaps skateboarding isn't as popular now as it was when the novel was written, but Stephenson gets so much else "right" (as in, it feels like it could still be just around the corner) that I don't even care. Hiro's penchant for sword-fighting even pre-Matrixes The Matrix. And don't even get me started on the ways religion, race, and fears of immigration seem to play into the mix.
My one disappointment is that after a while the plot gets so silly that the bigger issues the book wants to explore (language and the brain, religion as a virus, the blending of the cyber and the physical) get drowned out in the rollicking action set-pieces. It's fun, but it does dampen the more thought-provoking ideas that seem to drive the book forward. L. Bob Rife, for example, never gets fleshed out as completely as he could and should have been, and so for me some of the driving force of the novel petered out.
Still, whatever else this book may be, and despite being long-winded at times, I couldn't help but enjoy myself and got lost in Stephenson's world of anarchy and chaos, anchored by some really cool cats. Hiro and Y.T. are fun, and so the novel is propelled forward with energy, even when it gets lost in itself.
Grade: B+
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