The Newish World of Snow Crash

Snow Crash throws so much information at you at one time, it’s hard to decide what, if anything, you are feeling at all. But, like most books, after you get past the first few pages of new terms and confusing sci-fi definitions and conditions that this imaginary world abides by, I can describe how I feel. I feel like a special person intruding with special permission into a world that is not only new and foreign to me but completely interesting. For the good beginning portion of the book, you don’t know for certain what’s going on; new terms are being thrown at you, and you can’t decipher how much of this new world is based on parts of the world that you do know. Stephenson makes you feel lost in an entirely new world you aren’t prepared for.
That being said, there are more specific feelings that come in mind after the first few chapters are finished. Right away, you can connect with the proposed hero of this story, Hiro Protagonist. It might be hard to understand his whole history because we don’t exactly know how he came about, besides being the son of a soldier. You do know that he lives day to day, is not extremely rich but not destitute, and you know after a while that he was someone of importance until he decided otherwise. Stephenson shows that he is not the richest man, and that he has suffered a lot, and that he has a lot more to work through.
One of the passages that made me feel for Hiro the most is when he is conversing with his ex business partner and former friend Da5id. On page 71, Hiro thinks to himself that “he’s always considered himself to be Da5id’s equal, and he can’t stand the idea of feeding off Da5id’s little crumbs and tidbits , like a dog burled up under his table,” when learning new gossip from Da5id. I think this is appropriate of the pity you can feel for Hiro; he is not nearly as wealthy as he should be, and a lot less so than Da5id, but still holds some pride for himself. It’s sad to see someone who used to be great to be reduced to listening for small bites of information.
I think the Metaverse is also a place of great feeling, but not of pity or sadness, but of simply being in the future. Although we have plenty of Avatar-like games in our present society, it is mostly reserved for “nerds” and “dorks”. But in this alternate world, it is a completely normal and usual thing to be walking around in a computerized universe. You feel technical just reading this book, learning about hackers and computer programmers. I, for one, don’t know how someone makes up a universe where anything is possible on a computer. But I also know that we may be headed to a very similar future, as the back of the book states. Snow Crash is a universe that we can almost immediately recognize as close to our own.