“Snow Crash”

Wound up discussing my recent reread of The Diamond Age at book club, and that turned into deciding our next book club book should be Snow Crash. I was honestly surprised at how many of my coworkers hadn’t read it yet — I really think of this as one of The Canonical Computer Nerd Books.

When I first read it, my thought of this book was that it really wanted to be adapted to film. I’m not sure how well that would actually work, but these days, we have a better option: forget a movie, this should be one of those big-budget HBO one-season series treatments. The pacing would work a lot better; there’s just too much going on, and a few too many “let’s just talk about backstory for a while” chapters to really fit into a reasonable runtime for a movie. But either way, this is a book that wants to be visual. So many of the scenes remind me of reading the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey — one of the best film novelizations I’ve ever read, and it’s because it was written in tandem with the film, in collaboration with the film crew, rather than as an afterthought. Partway through, there’s a swordfight in VR that ends with the victor pulling off their VR helmet, and you see that they’ve wound up outside their home, holding their actual katana, with an audience watching from a safe distance. And I, despite not being a very visual thinker at all, can see that; I can’t recall if the book says it’s happening at sunset, but I know for certain that my mental image of that is at sunset, near LAX, those late-afternoon heat shimmers in the air, the roar of a jumbo jet coming in for a landing…

I absolutely love this book. Unlike The Diamond Age, it’s not really a hopeful future; this is, through and through, an extrapolation of the cyberpunk, the dystopian corporate grunge of the 1980s. It feels like neon lights and the graphics in Tron. If you haven’t read it, please do.1

This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩