[books] Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)

One of the things that I liked about Robocop, both the movie and TV version, was the way it viewed the future. At first glance, it seems totally ridiculous, but the more that you think about it, the more you realize that everything makes perfect sense, and that this future is an almost logical progression from where America is right now. Neal Stephenson takes a similar approach to the future in Snow Crash. It almost seems too silly to take this book seriously at first, especially when the Mafia has become a pizza franchise, and the protagonist in the story is named...Hiro Protagonist, but it works, and works well. Hiro becomes the protagonist, and later the hero, when his friend and business partner Da5id (and don't ask me how to pronounce that) is stricken with a neurological virus. Hiro and Da5id's are a couple of hackers whose claim to fame is designing the Metaverse, a virtual world that makes chat rooms look like smoke signals. The interesting thing to note is that places like the Metaverse are starting to appear on the Internet, in the realm of what is called "avatar-based chat". Anyway, Da5id's illness forces Hiro to search for the cure to this bizarre virus, both in the real world and in the Metaverse. Mixed up in all of this is a young skateboard courier named Y.T., who is helping Hiro as well as Uncle Enzo, the head of CosaNostra Pizza, after saving Hiro's butt by delivering a pizza for him. In the process she falls in love with one of the bad guys, a hulking Aleutian mass of destruction named Raven, who happens to carry a nuclear bomb around with him in order to get his way. Raven is working for evangelist L. Bob Rife, who appears to be at the root of the virus, the origins of which date back to Sumerian mythology and the Tower of Babel. Sound confusing yet? Oddly enough, the story stays together very well, which is a testament to Stephenson's characters and his story-telling ability.

The historical aspect of this novel is also worth noting. While I can't comment on the validity of the information, Stephenson certainly seems to have done his homework on Ancient Sumer and the interpretation of the Tower of Babel story. His attention to historical detail, whether true or not, and his interweaving of history into a story about the future adds a tremendous amount of depth to the plot. This is beginning to emerge as part of Stephenson's style, as Confucian China and Victorian England get a similar treatment in his more recent novel, The Diamond Age. The strength of his characters shines through these historical passages as well, as the stories within the story must be presented by credible sources. In this case, it is an interactive librarian that also plays straight man to Hiro's wise-assed comments, providing some amusement among the deep background.

Good cyberpunk is generally regarded (and has been actually defined by some, including writer Bruce Sterling) as stories about people outside of the mainstream in a future that isn't necessarily pretty, but doesn't seem too far-fetched, either. Neal Stephenson is proving himself in the genre by addressing these hallmarks in a style entirely his own, and concocting a heck of a story in the process.