The Highs and Lows of Snow Crash

*Spoilers crowd this post like groupies outside the Black Sun--read at your own risk*

Do you know what’s great about Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash?  The world he creates.  Stephenson’s turn-of-the-century world is fantastic satire of the logical extension of capitalistic ideas and the drive that existed in the late 80s when Stephenson began writing Snow Crash—and is still a desire among many conservatives today—to privatize as much as possible that was once the purview of the U.S. government.  In the novel, the U.S. government has been shrunk down to an insignificant size, and everything from suburbs to highways to police to entire armies has been privatized, marketed, given a logo, and franchised out.  Come on, a western-themed prison franchise?  How fantastic is that?  Bribing cops to take you to one prison franchise over another?  The competing forms of currency?  The existence of burbclaves and franchulates?  The reduction of the Library of Congress to a pay-to-use library to which individual intel-gatherers can upload information and then get paid by the download?  This is the stuff of a brilliant world right here!

Do you know what else is great about Snow Crash?  The virtual reality that is the Metaverse.  The notion of The Street with its monorail and ports, along with the all the rules that govern avatar appearances and interactions are wonderful.  Clints and Brandies as pre-purchasable avatars, as well as the details of black-and-whites from public terminals without good connectivity are all details that bring the Metaverse to life.  Hypercards as visual representations of packages of data that can be shared or exchanged between avatars are a great detail.  And how much do I love the history of the Metaverse, from its origins as a playground for hackers with no rules to a structured and marketed world that is used by hackers and average folks alike?  So much.

Do you know the other thing that is great about Snow Crash?  The mythological structure that forms the skeleton upon which Stephenson hangs his critical plot points.  All of the middle scenes of Hiro making connections with the help of the Librarian are riveting.  It is a pure joy to watch all the dots appear like stars in a rapidly darkening night sky and then to watch them all be drawn together into a giant constellation.  To connect the story of the Tower of Babel to the Sumerian language and the digital information that codes the human brain at a prelinguistic level to draw a parallel between computer operating systems and human being and between the en and hackers and me and programs—all of that is thrilling to witness.  Plus, what is not to love about words and phrases like “informational hygiene,” “infocracy,” and “infocalypse”?  It is also great fun to watch all the connections Stephenson can make between viruses and the world around us.  One of my favorite of these connections is his discussion of the franchise:   

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another.  You just have to find a sufficiently viral business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder—it’s DNA—xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane.  Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.

There are a lot of neat ideas and fun connections that for the muscle and connective tissue of this narrative body.

Do you know what isn’t so spectacular about Snow Crash?  The characters, especially the main characters.  Hiro is about as developed as his name implies—he’s our protagonist, and that’s pretty much his main job in the novel.  Yes, he has cool swords, cool hacking skills, cool driving skills—but there’s really nothing to him, and there really nothing about him that affects the structure of the story.  He’s got the right skills and the right personality to help Stephenson unfold this one story.  Y.T. has a lot of vim and vigor, but she is all surface explosions and skater girl teenage hipness.  Like Hiro, she is much more a function of the plot than anything that demands a life of its own.  Other than revealing a few signs of vulnerability and some sexual desire, there is nothing under her surface.  I was about to complain that she is only 15 years old, which I think is a horrible decision, but once again the plot has forced her to be underage because she needs to live with her Mom (and thereby have that connection to the Feds) and have something to rebel against that makes her brash and hip.  I really like Fisheye as a character, but really, he’s not much more than a stereotype with a glass eye and a Gatling gun that fires spent chips of Uranium.

Do you know that else isn’t so spectacular about Snow Crash?  All that bone and muscle and connective tissue doesn’t really go anywhere once it is assembled.  What I mean by that is there are a lot of cool things here but they don’t add up to much of anything beyond their own coolness.  Two of the critical blurbs on the cover and inside pages of my edition compare Snow Crash to Neuromancer and Vineland, and I can see why readers would make those connections.  The quirky absurdities that lie in the details of the novel are certainly reminiscent of Pynchon, and the bringing together of disparate areas of study and showing how they are all interrelated is classic Pynchon, but the comparison unfortunately only points to Snow Crash's shortcomings.  In a Pynchon novel, all the ideas build on top of one another and add up to something greater than the sum of its individual connections.  Something unified is said about the world we live in our way of perceiving it.  It’s crazy, mind-blowing stuff and it feels like you are in the presence of something truly brilliant.  All the chaos of Stephenson’s passages with the Librarian, when Hiro is piecing together the mystery, is shown to be merely the energy of moving particles.  In chapters 56 and 57, Hiro brings Ng, Lee, and Uncle Enzo up to speed on what he has learned and he lays out all the connections for us in one smooth narrative.  What amazed me about these chapters was how lifeless it all felt when statically presented.  Yep, there it is, all wrapped up into a neat package that doesn’t point to anything other than itself and the plot of the novel.  That’s not brilliance; that’s cleverness.  Admirable, to be sure, but not breathtaking.  From those chapters, having laid out they mystery in cold hard clay, the novel devolves into a series of chase and fight sequences which are far less interesting than anything in the first three-quarters of the novel. 

Snow Crash is an incredibly fun novel with fantastic ideas placed in a wonderful world.  For me—and I say “for me” knowing that there are a ton of diehard fans out there who will readily disagree—the novel falls victim to its own plot, which restricts its characters and its ideas instead of letting it all breathe and grow into something phenomenal.