My rating: *****
Book title: Snow Crash
Author: Neal Stephenson.
Genre/s: Science-fiction, cyberpunk, drama.
Publisher: Bantam-DoubleDay
Published: 1992
Neal Stephenson can be credited with writing the first cyberpunk novel ever with Snow Crash. After reading this novel, you'll wonder if Stephenson had a time-travel machine because he foresaw the coming of the world-wide-web in such a big and accurate way -- after all, the novel was published in 1992 which means that it was written prior to 1992. The net wasn't a big force prior to 1995 and it wasn't a force at all in 1992 or even 1993.
Snow Crash is actually a virus but of a different sort: people get infected by it if they view it on their computer screens. It looks like "snow" (hey you RGB people -- you know what I mean!) but it has a horrible consequence -- death! The hero of this novel loses an old friend to the virus. Thus begins his quest for the search of the origins of the virus and its perpetrators. This is an amazing book because it's not really your traditional science-fiction with nebulae and space travel and so on but it's stuff that computer geeks (such as myself) can really relate to. One of the virtual reality simulations that is described here runs on a UNIX box -- I got a real kick out of reading that. The book is destined to be (some say it already is) a classic because it spawned a whole new type of literature. Get it and enjoy it (and once you are done, get Stephenson's other books).
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