Snow Crash By Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash

By Neal Stephenson​

"Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"

Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"

Hiro and Juanita, Chapter 26​

A meme is a behavior, idea or style that spreads from person to person, it is the unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices. They can be transmitted through any means of communication: speech, writing, music, images, even gestures can be used to transmit a meme or become a meme. Some supporters of the idea often compare memes to genes, in that they replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. That's not the book we're reviewing today, instead we're reviewing another book that tackles memes and did so before the phrase Dank Meme broached from the dark depths of the internet. Snow Crash, approaches the idea of memes in a very related but very different way, instead of comparing memes to genes. Mr. Stephenson in Snow Crash instead compares memes to viruses.

Neal Stephenson was born October 31, 1959 in Fort Meade Maryland to a family of engineers and scientists. His family would move to Iowa afterwards where he graduated high school. He then returned to the east coast to study at Boston University. He started out as a physics student but switched to geography upon realizing that would give him more time on the university mainframe. In his first couple of books, he sharpened his skills for satire, parody, and tense action. Snow Crash, which was released in 1992, was his big break grabbing him a lot of attention, and was nominated for the British Scenic Fiction Award and the Arthur C Clarke award, Time magazine would place it on the 100 best English Language Novels.

Snow Crash takes place in an early 21st century LA where economic collapse has all but killed the United States. The land of the nation has been divided into patches of privately owned gated communities, such as New South Africa, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong and more. Each of these enclaves have their own legal codes, enforced by hired mercenary security forces and are linked by privately owned highways that compete for traffic (Editor: So… Ancap heaven? Hell for me I suppose, but at least all the ancaps agree that child sex-slaves are bad…That is not necessarily a foregone conclusion.). Even the mail is privatized. Everything is delivered by hired couriers. Even national defense and intelligence services are done by private corporations with the federal government broken into a few struggling enclaves that are increasingly irrelevant to the society around them. Even organizations like the Mafia and the South American Cartels have become corporations that operate in broad daylight, with the Mob and the Cartels often taking their competition to the level of open urban warfare. We also learn that while North America has degraded into anarcho-capitalist chaos a lot of the world is even worse because refugees from Asia come across the Pacific in their hundreds of thousands by the Raft. The Raft is a massive conglomeration of ships tied together propelled by the tide and wind of the ocean with the aircraft carrier Enterprise at the center (What. The. Fuck?). Every couple of years in a cycle the Raft unleashes a tide of refugees who survived the violent lawlessness of the Raft by being the fastest, strongest and most ruthless of the people trapped on the Raft (Cannibalism! Fun for the whole family!) onto the beaches of the west coast. The good people of the west coast react in a number of way and surprisingly only some of them involve machine guns!

Within this manic chaos live and work our characters: the freelance hacker and master sword fighter Hiro Protagonist and the 15 year old skateboarding radical courier, Y.T (standing for Yours Truly). Neither of these two were born with those names. Hiro, the half black, half Korean son of a WWII vet, adopted the name because, let's be honest, you're never forgetting that name are you? Not being forgettable is rather important when you're a freelancer. Hiro does most of his work in the Metaverse, a Virtual Reality style internet that people interact with through the creation of avatars. Hiro was one of the early coders of the Metaverse, he helped write the software that keeps it running and as such he knows a number of little exploits that allow him certain advantages. In real life Hiro isn’t bad with the matched pair of Japanese swords he wears, a traditional daisho of katana and wakizashi. But in the Metaverse? He's the best damn sword fighter in the world, because he wrote the code that allows for sword fighting in the first place (Dev Hax!). Y.T changed her name to keep her mother, a federal worker, from figuring out that she skateboards on freeways using a magnetic harpoon to latch onto cars to go faster as she delivers packages for a living, and because she thought it was cool. That second part is as anyone with experience with teenagers will tell you is the main reason. Despite her age, she is one of the best couriers in LA and incredibly skilled at taking care of herself and others. When she feels like it. Hiro and Y.T are partners in intelligence gathering and they are both separately and together pulled into a massive plot to destroy the world and rebuild it in someone else's image. This is where the meme's come into play you see.

There's a new drug on the street that shares a name with a virus appearing in the metaverse. Snow Crash, when used in the metaverse it disconnects the target from not just his computer but attacks him through his mind. It only affects programmers, attacking them through their understanding of binary. In the real world, the drug snow crash causes people to increasingly disconnect from reality, behave irrationally and increasingly experience bouts of glossolalia, or as most of us likely know it as speaking in tongues (Dang it! It’s a virus and not lovecraftian? Someone call Charles Stross.). The two are clearly related but how? Additionally how does this tie in to the reappearance of Hiro's ex-girlfriend and love of his life Juanita and her obsession with the language and religion of ancient Sumeria? (That’s more like it! Bring on the lovecraftian nightmares!) Hiro finds himself digging through the collected research of a professor who had been working on a theory about how Sumeria; the fact the humans speak many different languages; and religious expression throughout history, are all connected and can be used as an instrument of control. Mr. Stephanson also leaps into languages, in specific the discussion of not just why do we have a bunch of different languages but why do languages tend to diverge over time instead of converge? (Because language evolves by a process very similar to natural selection and isolation creates change?) Now this may seem strange because these days we live in a period of massive language convergence, which is due to the ease of global travel and communication. Not only are many languages disappearing under the onslaught of mass media, global trade and cultural assimilation but the languages that remain strong tend to pick up words from each other. You can see this by the appearance of English words in Japanese for example. The existence of English itself is a massive example of this, as it started as the unwieldy fusion of the French Normans and the Germanic language of the Anglo Saxons. Mr. Stephenson uses the idea of the Tower of Babel and in doing so also creates a bit of alternative history to go along with his Cyberpunk, which is a pretty good mix overall.

Meanwhile Y.T finds herself increasingly connected with the Mafia and the plans of Uncle Enzo the leader of the Mob in America to find the source of the Snow Crash drug in the real world and end it before it becomes a danger to the Mob's business plan (yes, this is a story where the mob saves the world, because it's good for business). It's through this that we see the Mob's own understanding of meme's which is rather rough and ready and how they see them as something to resist. Their belief is that they can resist ideology and through it the transmission of harmful memes by eschewing ideology all together and instead instituting a system of personal relationships and promises to substitute for policies and belief systems (So… neo-feudalism?). This is however subtly shown as failing because that idea itself is an ideology and therefore a meme. This is shown by the dissatisfaction of the elders of the Mob with the middle management that is coming up the ladder behind them. Often complaining that the youths and managers they've trained to look over the vast corporate empire that the Mob has built lack flexibility and a certain hungry desire. Instead they stick to the traditions laid down for them and operate by the procedures outlined for them. As always I find these complaints by elders very ironic since my reply to elders complaining about the youth is pretty much always the same. They are what you made them to be. If they have been made into something you didn't want, maybe you should start asking yourself just what you've been doing this whole time. Y.T on the other hand gains the approval of the Mob by rejecting the structures of it and the ideas underlying their organization. She's a very self sufficient young woman, who refuses to be to closely identified with a group, even her own couriers group. This is displayed by her relationship with Hiro, where she works outside the normal role of a courier by also dabbling in information gathering, and her willingness to ignore basically any rule she doesn't care for. Granted in this version of the future there aren't too many rules left to ignore.

The book shines mostly in its character work, the characters are well defined and in many cases larger than life. Hiro is an incredibly American character, being a half Black, half Korean man who is utterly obsessed with Japanese ideas and cultures but doesn't have the firmest grasp of what they actually mean. Meanwhile Y.T herself displays a cocky self-assurance through most of the book that masks the fact that she's not even old enough to drive and isn't really thinking everything through. Which I think most people would also consider rather American. They're supported by characters that don't take the center stage but are still powerful characters in their own right. Uncle Enzo would easily be an interesting protagonist for example, as would Juanita. The antagonist are suitably terrifying, especially the Aleut Raven, who would also be very able to serve as a centerpiece for a story. Mr. Stephenson also shows a great talent for humor and dancing between the line of parody and seriousness. Snow Crash parodies a great number of the ideas of cyberpunk and the common elements that appear in those stories by taking them to their ridiculous end point. At the same time there's enough realism mixed in and enough seriousness that you don't feel that Mr. Stephenson is trying to be hateful towards the genre but instead inviting everyone to take a step back and have a chuckle at just how silly some of this stuff can be when you look at it in the right way. The book itself takes a good hard look at memes especially those communicated through religion, which even today is one of the most effective memes and vector for their transmission, and how that can be a tool for good or evil. Meme's can promote independence, rational thought, and freedom of expression... Or they can promote mindless obedience, self destructive behavior, and willing enslavement of yourself to people who view you as a resource to be expended. That is always something you need to keep in mind. In the end, even the dankest of memes is nothing more than a tool.

The book's not perfect, Mr. Stephenson does get some historical facts wrong and also makes a big deal about the disappearance of the Sumerian language. While there's still some debate about it, most folks think it might have had something to do with the conquest of Sumner by the Akkadians, who were the first guys in human history to build an out and out empire. With that conquest Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian and while it lingered much the same way Latin does today, eventually it was replaced by other languages. Another note is the fact that Pentecostal Christianity didn't start in Kansas, the idea of speaking in tongues did but it wasn't codified as a part of worship until the Pentecostal churches got started... In L.A. I don't think this detracts from the book that much although I am enough of picky nerd to point it out in the review. Still I can forgive a science fiction writer for playing a little fast and loose with history in order to tell one hell of an inventive story that encourages you think a bit on things. That said, I love this book. It shows just what you can accomplish with science fiction and Cyberpunk in general and the fact that you can look at these serious and heavy themes but still have the space and time to have a good laugh. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson gets an A from me.

Next week, we get a little more modern with Ready Player One. Keep reading.
This review edited by Dr. Ben Allen.