Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

I just turned the last page. Wow. I really enjoyed the book for all the great ideas it contains. Snow Crash was written between 1988 and 1992, when the Internet and the world wide web were nothing like what they have become. Computer viruses were already a fact of life on the net, even the first several worms had gone around. Only the most paranoid and poorly informed people thought that a computer virus could infect a human being and we, hackers who knew better, used to laugh at them. This book turns things around and creates an interesting framework to support the speculation that it could very well be possible that such viruses would exist. Drugs, hackers, virtual worlds, skateboards, linguistics, organized crime, organized religion, geeks, and bionic dogs all play some kind of part in Snow Crash and make it a fun, exciting read.

All that said, I tried to start reading this book about three or four times until it would finally take. The first several pages seemed too focused on the hip action "glitz" and "glamour" and that turned me off for quite a while. To be honest, I didn't care much about the Mafia controlling pizza delivery stuff, I wanted good sci-fi from the get go. Since the story wasn't throwing this grappling hook on me early enough, I ended up losing interest and putting down Snow Crash after a few starts. When I decided to be more perseverant, I finally found what I was looking for and got really into it. My problem with this book, which is admittedly small, was the alternation of crazy, leave-you-breathless action in the style of The Matrix, with the scientific, speculative material. It felt to me like the two aspects of the story couldn't co-exist in harmony, that they had to take mutually exclusive access to the reader's attention. There are points in the story where they do go hand in hand, but most often, that doesn't happen. From my perspective, the ending is also a weakness: it is a bit abrupt, as if the author had suddenly decided he'd had enough of the story.

I might still read this again someday to recap on all the ideas of the integration of reality and virtual worlds (the idea of the gargoyles is what people are trying to achieve with augmented reality today), of hacking in the Metaverse (which sounds very much like Second Life with better HCI than what we currently have), and of intersection of linguistics and cognition. This book is so rich in ideas that it deserves a "companion" kind of summary to remind you of all the good stuff it proposes when you're done learning about the fate of the characters. (In the absence of the real companion, Wikipedia's entry for Snow Crash is a very good alternative.)