Snow Crash is the cyber-punk book that turned the currently existing sketch of the same genre into a 32-bit colour, 4 million pixel full blown mosaic. It catapulted author Neal Stephenson to the top with the likes of William Gibson - the man who invisioned the Internet in his first book Neuromancer back in the mid 70s - and is the book I am dedicating this article to; in despite of the fact Snow Crash was published back in 1992. Why? I am re-reading it, after purchasing it again in oversized having it lost to some friend I loaned it to some years ago, and get this: it is still great!

Computer Geeks (CGs), let us reflect upon this briefly; if you are not a CG or consider yourself to be interested in such things, skip ahead to the next paragraph. 1992 was the turning point in X86 boxes with the release of the Pentium chip in 1993. The best box in 1992 cased a version of the intel 486 CPU: SX, DX, perhaps even a DX2 or DX4, presenting CGs with the blazing CPU Mhz range of 25 to 100 MHz. Today's best machines available to the public are running at about 3,000 Mhz in comparison. The book, pulished in 1992, must have been written in at least 1991, perhaps even in part in 1990. Let us not delve into the thoughts of computers and the 80s. Laugh at me you masses of readers when I say: the Cyber-Punk genre didn't care too much for CPU clock speeds, and never will. This genre holds to a gritty future where hacking is a trade, profession, necessity and open to the public, or black marketed, corporately financed, both or none at all. Information is always the key to success! How many dot-coms fell to stupid planning and unrealistic expectations. This author, never having written in this genre before, grabbed what we'd expected from William Gibson by the balls and stuck in everything that was missing, polished up what was there before, and delivered it to us in a style of writing that makes small things like pizza delivery impact your brain like a god-send. As you saw Keanu Reeves' stunning performance in the novelette turned movie Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu demonstrated his blithering ineptitude and bodacious skill in getting inside the head of the information-courier of the future and portraying said courier. I give the same scathing credit to director Robert Longo. Perhaps Neuromancer the movie will be better, for they are trying to do that. Pray bitches.

But I digress. A snow crash is not something every CG sees. It's when a program went so far off the track into the bad side of computer memory land, it fucked things up enough to screw up the monitor and busts it, presenting the user with a screen of snow just like a TV would with no signal. With several main cast both from the good guy team and the bad guy team, it is immediately apparant the world has gone to the shitter. The mafia control the pizza delivery business, and to be a Deliverator is to be one seriously loved member of the Family. Meet Hiro Protagonist, our main character and until the end of chatper 1, a Deliverator. Now he must free-lance on his information gathering skills through the Metaverse; something like a present time Ever Quest world with no purpose. Oh wait, there wasn't any purpose to EQ was there... Switch to the realworld and imagine couriers passing through different parts of town, states, all over, never having to be stopped by guards to sign-in, or show ID for access because they have a racing car style jump suit that has logos and barcodes plastered all over it giving them access to otherwise restricted areas when passing through a gate loaded with scan guns; information must get from A to B. Meet another main character, somewhat on the good guy side, teenage dropout Y.T. and her poon-gun (that's as in "Magnetic Harpoon" to latch on to passer-by vechicles and hitch a ride on suped-up roller blades you pervs). The bad guys are those who would deal for some purpose yet to be revealed, the supposed drug called Snow Crash. Hiro knows, as do you (I hope), that is impossible to give someone drugs over the Metaverse. Duh. But hackers are dying, going brain dead, getting a snow crash on their Metaverse goggles. People are after our Hiro and Y.T. (which stands for Yours Truly) but luckily for them, Hiro is so not white! He's half Nipponese half African with spikey dreads, and a pair of Japanese swords: the Katana and accompanying Wakizashi. He's the world champ with them too. That's about all he has though, skill in swords and hacking and he could give a rat's ass about the rest of the world were it not for the fact that he knows the people who have died because of Snow Crash and someone strange already offered him some, so what's up with that? The bad guys are somewhat mysterious, occassionally plagued throughout the book by a robotic attack dog capable of breaking the soundbarrier, sometimes appearing as strange men in business suits (think Agent Smith from The Matrix) with breifcases holding rail mini-guns. They are out and about now that they Library of Congress merged with the corporate CIA. A mammoth native american is the most common bad guy called Raven, but let's be frank and remember no one is really good or innocent or even bad. You don't get to be the world champ in dueling with Japanese swords without cutting peoples heads off, you don't pretend to think you can evade the mafia cleanly, the possession of information and distribution of it can make any courier a serious threat and thus a target so being prepared to defend yourself is only common sense, and since when did big beefy men named Raven care about rail guns being in the way?

If you ever wanted to know what the whole cyber-punk thing is, without trying to figure out Japan's Anime movie AKIRA (because you can't if you watch the dubbed version and it was only cyber-punk esc in some senses), while wadding through all of William Gibson's novels, then read what brings out the best in all of these pockets of the genre with Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Not recommended for pre-teens for a variety of reasons including subtle humour.