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Snow Crash

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Snow Crash

By: Neal Stephenson
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
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About this listen

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Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison - a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.


In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about Infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous...you'll recognize it immediately.

©1992 Neal Stephenson (P)2001 Audible, Inc. Adventure Fantasy Hard Science Fiction Science Fiction Fiction Dystopian Cyberpunk Linguistics Computer Science Espionage Technology Imperial Japan

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Critic reviews

Brilliantly realized...Stephenson turns out to be an engaging guide to an onrushing tomorrow. ( The New York Times Book Review)
"Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the 21st century." (William Gibson)
All stars
Most relevant
I enjoyed listening to snowcrash its` pace variation fitted in well with my other activities. The two 'universes' worked well although I became confused with the different city-states in the real one (but my american geography never was that good!) As usual with this narrator the pictures are so vivid it beats HD TV.

Vivid pictures

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Brilliantly presented. The retro style audio effects really add to the aesthetic. The world is a hilarious satire that has aged like a good scotch.

Hilarious, well performed.

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It's difficult to know how to rate this one as parts of it are engaging and there are some great ideas here. The main problem is that it comes over as a bunch of disparate elements mashed together into one volume that doesn't quite work. Large chunks of the story ar like sitting through a theology lecture and, while interesting enough, it adds a somewhat pretentious air. The plot does eventually meander its way to a conclusion which is satisfying enough, though a great deal of material could have been jettisoned to the book's benefit. Worth a listen if you're running out of other material.

Theologibabble

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It would be 'Snow Crash'

This is my first ever cyber punk novel, which means that my experience of that particular genre is limited.
Set in a futuristic almost dystopian America, Hiro Protagonist, (yes, that’s his name) lives two lives. Pizza delivery guy by night and hacker extraordinaire by day. We are also introduced to a courier named YT and as their paths cross, they are both plunged into a web of conspiracies, viruses and the destruction of both the online and offline world of information.

If you think that’s complicated, the author adds an extra element, Sumerian, Biblical and a touch of Babylonian myth and philosophical and theological sociological concepts which he manages to fuse with computer programming and cinematic action.
Seriously, why hasn’t this been made into a film already?

The world was gritty, and the way technology was depicted, eerily reminded me of today, perhaps slightly off kilter, which was interesting as it was published just at the beginning of the 90’s.

Critical, satirical and on occasion sarcastic in tone it described a society in near collapse, addressing issues such as racism, immigration, war and strangely, linguistics and more. All this rapped up in a neat packaging full of neon floodlight streets and digital desert landscapes; blistering action pact swordfights, mysteries and conspiracy theories.
If ‘The Matrix’ had an ancestor, it would be ‘Snow Crash’.

As the novel was written in the present tense, it took me a little while to get into, but once the story took off, it was like the smooth glide of a skateboard down a precipitous glass ramp.

Now for the audio, Jonathan Davis’s fantastic narration fitted the tone of the story like the perfect earbuds, smooth and with more than a hint of irony, it made me feel that the narrator was a separate character, similar and yet distinct from the others.
Normally, I don’t talk about the quality of the audio recording itself, as perhaps mistakenly I have come to expect the high quality of the production.
It’s clear that this was recorded and produced a little while ago, but that didn’t detract from the quality of the narration and the interesting use of minimal sound effects.
Highly recommended if cyberpunk is your kind of thing.

If ‘The Matrix’ had an ancestor...

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The story started well and the concept for its time of writing is original. The narration is well performed and easy to listen to.
However, I have made a mental note to check publication dates in future. I can cope with the use of terms relating to recording media at the time it was written (I have been alive through all the manifestations of such). Changes in perspective about the use of specific words highlight terms that are no longer acceptable, and the age of the primary female character raised hackles in some of the scenes. The rights or wrongs of moral judgement is debatable as this is a fictional future where the mores of our current society do not exist.
However the main premise for the plot line strayed into the world of biological viruses and the inaccuracies about how they work eventually killed the story for me. Probably because this is my area of knowledge, but in the end I could not finish it.

Okay…ish

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