Book of the Week: ‘Snow Crash.’

Why Snow Crash? Because…

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

When I write something that’s that good, believe me: I’ll let you know.

And so, adieu to Ringworld.

12 thoughts on “Book of the Week: ‘Snow Crash.’”

  2. We obviously travel in different reading circles Moe (that’s why I like this place), but you are correct, that is damn good writing. Not to one up the author, but this post made me think of this Faulkner line, mentioned by Shelby Foote in Ken Burn’s Civil War doc.

    “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago….”

    William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

  3. I’m sure Moe had a really good… Reason… to push Snow Crash.
    .
    I may or may not have had a series of computers named after various Stephenson concepts and characters. “Novusordo” and “erasmas” and “deliverator”.
    .
    Also, I know Stephenson has disavowed The Big U, but I rather liked the tale of university politics, Lord of the Flies-esque societal upheaval, and LARPing in steam tunnels, personally.

    1. I’m afraid I’m missing your .. Reason .. reference, but that’s okay – I’d put Snow Crash in one of the most *fascinating* dystopias I’ve ever read. Very much enjoyed it, though I *really* don’t want to live there.
      .
      Mew

  4. Ha! “See, I told you they’d listen to Reason” is another of the great lines from the book. And the whole part about the Deliverator… and…
    I just wish that when you are done with a Stephenson book (like this or Cryptonomicon or Anathem) you didn’t have the feeling that the publisher called him – as he was just beginning to kind of start to think that maybe he should consider wrapping it up – to demand the work RIGHT NOW. The final chapter or two feel like they were done by a different, not especially good, writer.

    1. No, that’s just Stephenson. Even his early books, which presumably didn’t have an editor breathing down his neck for the book, still have the “Um, the bad guy gets hit by a bus. The end” endings. I think Zodiac may have been the only book of his that I remember that had an actual traditional ending.

      1. His writing seems, at least to me and with the note that it’s been a while since I’ve re-read his stuff, to be “a window opens” / “a window closes” …
        .
        The action is presumed to have been going on for a while before the window opens, and is presumed to continue on afterward .. so I don’t see a need to “tie everything neatly into a bow” .. but I’ll agree that his efforts to do so are .. sub-par.
        .
        Lee & Miller (freebie here: http://www.baenebooks.com/p-595-agent-of-change.aspx) do a much better job of *not* tying up all the loose ends, in this cat’s opinion…
        .
        Mew

      2. I never managed to finish REAMDE nor System of the World, so I can’t judge there, but Anathem most definitely had an ending that was a bit more… traditional than other Stephenson affairs. Not coincidentally, it’s far and away my favorite of his dictionary-sized works. (Snow Crash and Diamond Age are his best shorter works.)
        .
        Ever read Interface, written under an assumed name (Stephen Bury)?

  5. That book has the greatest opening page or 2 of almost any book I have read…”I am the deliverator…”

    Although, “Kill the Dead” by Kadrey is pretty close to that in being a great opening 2 pages.

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