Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

Pros: remarkably fresh and visionary, even sixteen years after publication
Cons: the slight flavor of kiddie porn

When you've been given the name Hiro Protagonist, you're typecast from the day your birth certificate was completed. Luckily for our hero Hiro, however, he meets the challenge quite nicely: he's both a world-class swordsman when wielding the ...

Pros: Fast paced story, non-conventional characters, easy to read
Cons: May contain too many historical and philosophical references for pure cyberpunk readers

There are quite a few Cyberpunk novels out there, and many more are coming out every year but Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is still one of the best. Even though it was first published in 1992, the concepts and the storyline in this book is still...

Pros: A katana wielding hacker takes on religious fundamentalism and delivers pizza.
Cons: The book ended and I had to return to reality.

After reading this book, I couldn’t think of anything cooler than a katana-wielding computer cowboy who spends equal time delivering pizza, hacking computers, and saving the world. And as such, I was drawn into this novel, and loved it. Really, the...

Pros: Loose cannons
Cons: Loose threads

Note: Minor plot details are revealed herein.

Here's a recipe:

Combine, in roughly equal proportions, the startling imaginativeness of Philip K Dick, the cyberpunk sensibility and savvy of William Gibson, the surrealism of Thomas...

Pros: Raven, Sword-Fighting, Raven, the Mafia, Raven
Cons: Flat ending...and some characters just get left behind.

It really says something about human nature that even when the entire US of A has been turned into a gigantic strip-mall and pizza delivery is handled by the Mafia that people will still try to argue that it hasn't been "30 minutes or less" and...

Pros: Frenetic, funny, and utterly brilliant
Cons: Abrupt ending

Peer into my little crystal ball and take a look at the future, a future tinted with a cynics eye, a future where every little fragmented chunk of society has fragmented some more. If you think that future is right around the corner, then your name must...

Pros: Post-Modernism at it's best. Breaking away from conventional genre type-casting
Cons: It ends wrong, and too fast.

Once in awhile you read a book that makes you understand totally the concept of why you cannot beat a book with a movie, game, or other form of entertainment. This book does that eloquently. Easily a fore-runner of the cyber punk genre, it is so much...

Pros: Madly inventive, great pacing.
Cons: Not much.

I read this book on a vague recommendation; on the strength of this book, I'm going to read everything Neal Stephenson produces.

The genre is cyberpunk, and the style is fast-paced, but the book is so much more. This isn't by any...

Pros: Wonderful writing and phrasemaking, narrative that really flies.
Cons: No-holds-barred action may offend some.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has about the same pace and character as an amusement park ride. Often laugh-out-loud funny, it somehow manages to put across a wide array of interesting ideas while never surrendering its manic tempo.

You...

Pros: Exciting, fantastic, not overly wordy
Cons: Sometimes loses continuity

I got a free copy of "Snow Crash" when I bought Spectre VR a number of years ago. Since I wasn't all that thrilled with the idea of a book that was bad enough to be given away, I missed out on this for about a year.

Then, I found my...

Pros: Great story, I really can't say enough about it.
Cons: Can't really think of any.

When I was in elementary school my mother was real good at making us read all summer. I read a lot of good books that way, and I picked up the talent of speed reading. However, once I got to high school and it's propensity to force you to read these...

Pros: picaresque profound convincing alarming
Cons: none

"Snow Crash" is a picaresque and comic, yet thought-provoking and even profound, journey culminating in a mythic contest of the hero Hiro and his antagonist the Aleut Raven, with stakes no less than the survival of humanity.

The...

Pros: Excellent idea backed w/ historical background and sound futurism
Cons: Tracking the Sumerian legends got a bit confusing after a while

This book is a true masterpiece of science fiction. The main premise is that a computer virus, language, religion, and the human brain are all pretty well intertwined. I'd love to go into more detail, yet this would be giving away too much. The book...

Pros: amazingly creative and entertaining futuristic vision
Cons: very little plot, theorizing in middle bogs story down

Snow Crash starts off with a samurai delivering pizzas for the mob in an amazing car of the future, and that's only the beginning. The pages of Snow Crash are filled with creative, humorous, and sometimes depressing, visions of the future. A future...

Pros: Amazing depth, Sumerian mythology in cyberpunk!
Cons: None in my opinion.

If you are looking for a book to pick up and read any time in the near future, "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson is my reccomendation. I'm not normally a fan of the cyberpunk genra, but this novel is not your generic cyberpunk reading material.
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