From: Robert Slade Subject: Review of "Snow Crash" Date: Fri, 11 Mar 1994 13:04:21 -0800 (PST) BKSNCRSH.RVW 940215 Bantam Books 666 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10103 or 1540 Broadway New York, NY 10036 "Snow Crash", Stephenson, 1992, 0-553-56261-4, U$5.99, C$6.99 "Snow Crash" has been lauded for its accurate portrayal of technology and its contribution to the expanding cyberpunk genre. What most reviewers have neglected to mention, or perhaps didn't notice, is that Stephenson can be very funny when he wants to be. We first meet our hero--or protagonist--Hiro Protagonist in, as the cover blurb has it, "a future America so bizarre, so outrageous ... you'll recognize it immediately." That future is of ever- expanding strip malls crowded with international franchises and franchise nations, where pizza "deliverators" spent four years at Cosa Nostra Pizza University learning the trade and were then assigned the fastest cars on the road, a bullet proof black uniform and a sidearm that plugs into the cigarette lighter and can take down a telephone pole with one round. This is not an addition to cyberpunk, this is a parody of it. Well, perhaps not entirely. The punk side gets a good working over, but Stephenson seems to play the technical side pretty straight. In fact, this often seems like two books running in parallel; the lighthearted look at an absurd future and a computer thriller which takes itself very seriously, indeed. Stephenson tells us in the acknowledgements that he is a programmer--but that is obvious from fairly early on. He understands what computers can, and can't do. He understands bandwidth. He understands protocols. He understands that graphics are pretty--but words get the work done. You may not necessarily agree with where he goes from there, but the technically literate will at least not have to suspend disbelief regarding the base technologies. The Snow Crash of the title is, in different forms, drug, virus and information virus. It is a universal virus, similar to the postulated universal computer virus, which spreads through minds rather than computer systems. As proposed by Stephenson, this uses a means of universal communications based upon the underlying structures of the brain. Thus, it can be spread either by a biological vector or an informational one. According to the story, this universality of communication was once a part of the human race, but a factor of it allowed a program to be written to destroy itself (giving rise to a new form of consciousness). The villain of the piece now wishes to return humanity to the former status, after which he will have total control. Hackers are a particular threat to this plan because of their mental discipline, but are also at risk since their familiarity with machine coding makes them susceptible to a particular graphical display. Stated baldly like that it sounds extremely implausible. Stephenson, however, brings in a mass of research into Sumerian civilization, linguistics, higher Biblical (particularly redaction) criticism, and so forth. (He also brings in a modified form of the "cosmic seeding" theory of the origin of life.) Given the extensive research and Stephenson's familiarity with computers, it is odd that when we start getting the explanatory version of Snow Crash, down around chapter fifty-six, he doesn't draw the obvious analogies to computer viral programs. The "linguistic infrastructure" of our brains could be likened to the processor: the "higher languages" are operating systems. Thus the Stoned virus can infect the hard disk of any Intel/BIOS machine regardless of whether it is running OS/2, UNIX or Windows NT. (The transmission of the virus, though, requires the "higher language" of MS-DOS.) Of course, if you do point this out, you have to defend against the criticism that the *real* underlying structure is digital electronics, that digital electronics do not respond to processing and that not all processors are the same. Still: a good read, interesting ideas, amusing bits. Some inconsistency in style, and some definite inconsistencies in slang and dialogue. Overall a worthwhile diversion. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKSNCRSH.RVW 940215 ============= Vancouver p1@arkham.wimsey.bc.ca | "Metabolically Institute for Robert_Slade@sfu.ca | challenged" Research into rslade@cue.bc.ca | User p1@CyberStore.ca | politically correct Security Canada V7K 2G6 | term for "dead"