It's a fantastic fucking book, one of my all-time favorites in this life. It's wild as fuck and absolutely packed with mind-bending shit, but still manages to feel real and grounded. Feels like a mixture of Hitchhiker's Guide, Shadowrun and Snatch, with characters getting wrapped up in each other's schemes against the backdrop of a balkanized hypercapitalist hellscape, where information is king and there truly is no society.
I am leaving out so, so much.
If you ignore most of the oversexualization of the secondary main character "YT", who is an underage girl. Then yeah it's a decent read filled with absolutely insane shit. The first chapter gives a pretty good feel for what the rest of the book is going to be like when he describes the main character and finally gives his job occupation.
Tangentially, the part where we meet YT's mom and learn about her horrible depressing job in Fedland hit really hard. I find it relatable as the child of two corporate office drones, that mixture of love, gratitude and deep psychic horror.
It's great. Stephenson writes at a breakneck pace, especially in the first act. It explores a ton of wild concepts without asking much of your suspension of disbelief, especially since VRChat is a thing now lol
It's good. I enjoyed it. It's like the "post-Cyberpunk" Cyberpunk book, though. So if you haven't read the grand-daddy of the genre (Neuromancer) you should probably do that before reading Snow Crash just to compare/contrast the genre.
I love the neurovirus idea in it. It starts out as libertarianism.jpg but that quickly becomes a weird mix of linguistics, neuroscience, and history. It's one of those sci-fi books that I come back to every year or two because of how damn interesting it is.
I thought it was pretty good. The setting was fun and interesting but it also kinda felt like he was trying too hard to be over-the-top or unusual in some places, and I'm not a fan of action sequences in cyberspace where the author is constantly having to explain the rules as the sequence unfolds.
Worth reading, but I far prefer Anathem.
I liked it. I haven't read that PKD book but you'd probably find Snow Crash more engaging, considering the pace of his other writing i've read.
