Walking down the sidewalk towards my office building in one of my louder shirts, shades, and my indisputably awesome hat (not that you can't dispute its awesomeness, it's just that I won't listen), I feel so cool I can almost forget my geeky station in life. It's after hours but I'm at work because my life has made that the best strategy for the next few days. It's pretty sweet - no one is around but the security guard, and as I security-card my way through a multitude of doors and elevators I feel like a secret agent. The shades and the hat help, as does the clovey scent of my Djarums. It's back-to-work time, but first I have a few moments left to rant about the shitty book I'm reading. It's by a guy called Neal Stephenson, and it's called Snow Crash.
Maybe I shouldn't rag on it. It's near-future sci-fi that was written in 1992, so a decade and a half later the guy can't really be expected to be taken seriously. But then again I've just been reading some Orson Scott Card books that were written even earlier, and coming off that stuff, this seems like it was written by a retard with friends in high places in the publishing industry. I'm sorry, but I'm only at page forty-two (Douglas Adams made that two-digit number better than all the words on the pages I've read so far in this book), and I'm thinking I might get more enjoyment out of this book if I were to smoke it.
I'm not sure where I got the book. It's one of the ones that I never bothered to read for one of my classes - it could have been the sci-fi class or the modern literature class - and I thought I would pick it up at long last. Mainly because I'm currently out of Orson Scott Card.
The book starts out with overly-flashy language, cheesy imagery, and overabundance of rubbish made-up neo-pop words, and such a non-gripping plotline that I think super glue and velcro would slide right off it. The book is also annoyingly written in present-tense (much like this blog entry) - I suppose Stephenson means to give the reader the feeling of being "in the story" by doing this; God knows the imagery and characterizations do little to help this end. Stephenson periodically interrupts his non-plot to go on at length about the minutiae of a farcical near-future world where (surprise surprise) America is a cultural wasteland run by the mob and a bunch of large corporations. Am I too jaded to say that this idea is getting boring? I mean, even one of the "books" I have been writing uses this idea (and I probably butcher it as well, but I started that book seven years ago and should really give it a stern look) - we're all pretty clear that this is the way the world is going. Maybe it seemed fresh in 1992.
Just recently, the book started describing an online world with a striking resemblance to Second Life, but with some unnecessary restrictions and some aggravatingly non-prescient predictions. Oh, yes, I'm sure that in the future only the richest people will be able to afford computers that render images with any level of quality, and online avatars from poorer computers will be, to paraphrase the book "like looking at a bunch of photocopies of people's faces in slow succession." Oh wait a minute... doesn't my Xbox have the ability to map my face quite cleverly onto high-quality avatars right now? Maybe in the future, computers will suck more.
For a sci-fi author, Stephenson seems oddly bound to the paradigms of 1992. I realize it's hard for people to accurately predict the future, and we end up with things like the old Star Trek, where data is still recorded on reel-to-reel tape. But on the other hand, sci-fi writers are supposed to be optimistic, in-touch with science and tech, and if anything they should over-estimate future tech. For all of Star Trek's reel-to-reel tape, they still had shields, transporters, and warp drive. Stephenson seems to think the coolest thing about the future will be cars with extra-wide tires, and skateboards with wheels capable of overcoming bumps in the road. Ooh boy.
This book better get better, because I have a proud policy of never quitting partway through a novel. So far, every page of this piece of... whoah now I better contain my rage a bit... but so far I've not liked Snow Crash very much. I can't belive one of my professors recommended it. I furthermore can't believe all the shocked and amazed book-review quips all over the jacket and first couple pages. For instance:
Brilliantly realized ... Stephenson turns out to be an engaging guide to an onrushing tomorrow.
Other reputable rags go on to call Stephenson and this book things like "hip," "witty," and "wry," and rant and rave about how well Stephenson predicts the upcoming digital age. I think Stephenson, like his oh-so-cleverly-named main character "Hiro Protagonist," must owe the mob a favour. There's no way this book would have been published if I had had any say in it.
What's worse, is all these reviewers keep comparing Snow Crash to that behemoth of the sci-fi world, Neuromancer.
If Neuromancer is anything like Snow Crash, I'm glad I haven't read it yet.