Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy.In his 1999 essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash'". Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of the main influences on Snow Crash.The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According …
Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy.In his 1999 essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash'". Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of the main influences on Snow Crash.The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program, which he called a nam-shub, that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).
Stephenson originally planned Snow Crash as a computer-generated graphic novel in collaboration with artist Tony Sheeder. In the author's acknowledgments (multiple editions) Stephenson recalls: "it became clear that the only way to make the Mac do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept..."
Snow Crash was nominated for both the British Science Fiction Award in 1993 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994.
I suspect that I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I'd read it 30 years ago. Reading it now, the cyberpunk stylings all feel incredibly dated and are unable to paper over the many problems with this novel. Starting with the characters, who amount to a collection of one-dimensional stereotypes about which it is impossible to care.
The plot doesn't feel like it's going anywhere for much of the time and when Stephenson starts talking about technology, everything starts to become increasingly ludicrous. This book really hasn't aged well.
Tja, was soll ich sagen? Hätte ich Snow Crash vor fünfundzwanzig Jahren gelesen, wäre ich wohl ein absoluter Fan. So sind das Buch und ich 25 Jahre älter geworden und werden uns wieder trennen, ohne Freunde geworden zu sein.
Die dystopische Welt kennt man ja beispielsweise aus Filmen wie Blade Runner und Soylent Green, oder auch den Rollenspielen CyberPunk und Shadowrun. Auch die virtuelle Welt, die deutlich mehr an Second Live als die literarisch verkitschte Variante aus Otherland erinnert, gibt einem das Gefühl von Heimat. Wo ich ein wenig kritisch bin, sind die Erwähnungen von eigentlich damals schon absehbar vom Aussterben bedrohten Technologien (FAX, Videorecorder, Münztelefon), was ich aber gerne als gewollten Anachronismus durchgehen lassen will. Meist werden sie so eingebunden, dass ein Gegenspieler dadurch als rückständig diffamiert wird.
Worauf ich völlig hätte verzichten können, war die Sex-Szene. Insbesondere weil es bei einer 15jährigen Protagonistin einen leicht zweifelhaften Touch hat. …
Tja, was soll ich sagen? Hätte ich Snow Crash vor fünfundzwanzig Jahren gelesen, wäre ich wohl ein absoluter Fan. So sind das Buch und ich 25 Jahre älter geworden und werden uns wieder trennen, ohne Freunde geworden zu sein.
Die dystopische Welt kennt man ja beispielsweise aus Filmen wie Blade Runner und Soylent Green, oder auch den Rollenspielen CyberPunk und Shadowrun. Auch die virtuelle Welt, die deutlich mehr an Second Live als die literarisch verkitschte Variante aus Otherland erinnert, gibt einem das Gefühl von Heimat. Wo ich ein wenig kritisch bin, sind die Erwähnungen von eigentlich damals schon absehbar vom Aussterben bedrohten Technologien (FAX, Videorecorder, Münztelefon), was ich aber gerne als gewollten Anachronismus durchgehen lassen will. Meist werden sie so eingebunden, dass ein Gegenspieler dadurch als rückständig diffamiert wird.
Worauf ich völlig hätte verzichten können, war die Sex-Szene. Insbesondere weil es bei einer 15jährigen Protagonistin einen leicht zweifelhaften Touch hat. Die Geschichte hat dadurch nur verloren. Glücklicherweise blieb es bei dieser einen.
Mein größtes Problem ist aber die Übersetzung und das Lektorat dieser Ausgabe. Natürlich ist der Goldmann Verlag für seine billige Produktion bekannt, aber "order and hygiene" als "Orden und Hygiene" statt "Ordnung und Sauberkeit" zu übersetzen, ist doch ein arger Schnitzer.
Insgesamt war ich aber immer noch gut unterhalten. Die Geschichte war stimmig und allenfalls fehlte mir ein Literaturverzeichnis, um die Referenzen der Mythologie nachtzuprüfen. Bei den Unterhaltungen mit dem Bibliothekar hätte ich mir Experten der verschiedenen Fachbereiche an meiner Seite gewünscht. Da war mir die herausgearbeitete Theorie dann doch zu gewagt und ich hätte gerne Rückfragen zu gewissen Aspekten gestellt.
Wer kann, sollte sich lieber die englischsprachige Version zulegen und somit die Übersetzungsschwächen vermeiden. Wenn man nicht zu viel erwartet, erhält man einen ordentlichen Zeitvertreib.
Boy-o-boy am I surprised I didn't like this more. Its rating here on Goodreads is very good. People whose opinions usually align with mine gave it 5-stars. 10 years ago I read Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon' and really liked it: I gave it 5 stars. Esquire put Snow Crash on their list "The 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time"!
Some of the ideas are pretty interesting, and the story outline is good. But the thing is, I just never really got into it. I found the writing to be bland. (Detail: The writing 'voice' of the robot dog felt like a person trying to write in the voice of a robot dog.) I found the protagonist Hiro to be kinda boring, the love interest was unconvincing, and the big bad never felt super menacing. I did like the Aleut assassin Raven, and kinda liked Y.T. I did not like their …
Boy-o-boy am I surprised I didn't like this more. Its rating here on Goodreads is very good. People whose opinions usually align with mine gave it 5-stars. 10 years ago I read Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon' and really liked it: I gave it 5 stars. Esquire put Snow Crash on their list "The 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time"!
Some of the ideas are pretty interesting, and the story outline is good. But the thing is, I just never really got into it. I found the writing to be bland. (Detail: The writing 'voice' of the robot dog felt like a person trying to write in the voice of a robot dog.) I found the protagonist Hiro to be kinda boring, the love interest was unconvincing, and the big bad never felt super menacing. I did like the Aleut assassin Raven, and kinda liked Y.T. I did not like their relationship though.
For me it's a middling 2+, rounded up to 3. For context: 1 star is 'did not finish', and 2 is 'I thought about putting it down but soldiered on', so 3 is the 'right' rating for me for this book even if it feels generous.
As for liking Cryptonomicon but not really liking this one: Cryptonomicon was published around 7 years after Snow Crash. I'm thinking, hoping, that it means that I like newer Stephenson books so I can maybe try another one some day.
