Comment by planetguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by planetguy | Hacker News Reader

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Snow Crash is an interesting book, but a deeply flawed one. Stephenson's later books are much better (though after Diamond Age they become too long to film anyway).

It is a bit of a dumb action movie, in many ways. A guy with a sword takes on an entire flotilla, if I recall correctly. The coolest moment in the entire book involves somebody saying "I'm sure they'll listen to reason" and then pulling out an enormous gun labelled "REASON". So if the movie turns out to be full of dumb action sequences it'll only be consistent with the book.

Another major flaw of the book, as written, is that it has chapters upon chapters of exposition which are basically dialogue scenes between Hiro and the librarian program. Most of the actual overly complicated plot stuff winds up getting explained in these scenes.

The third problem with the book is a rather dated view of the future... or by now a rather dated view of the immediate past. Both Hiro and the other dude are reasonably young guys whose fathers fought in World War 2, which puts a fairly stringent limit on how late you can possibly set it (unless you play around with which war it was; I think the fact it was WW2 was fairly vital to the backstory though).

Anyway, I'm not against a Snow Crash movie at all, I'm just pointing out that it needs some serious work to be adapted, and that may wind up throwing out some of the bits that many people like best about it.

> The coolest moment in the entire book involves somebody saying "I'm sure they'll listen to reason" and then pulling out an enormous gun labelled "REASON"

It's actually quite a small gun, labeled "Ultima Ratio Regum", and the original owner (who delivers that line) dies when its software crashes. And if you think that was the coolest moment, I'm not sure what book you were reading... Did you miss the downhill skateboarding in an office building? The nuclear-powered cyborg security drone? Hiro deflects a spear with a katana. There's a man with his own nuclear deterrence strategy.

Snow Crash is definitely action, and definitely dated (it's more alternate present than near future at this point), but if it's dumb I would sure like to see smart.

> Did you miss the downhill skateboarding in an office building? The nuclear-powered cyborg security drone? Hiro deflects a spear with a katana. There's a man with his own nuclear deterrence strategy.

Seriously, all these things are like you asked a 90's teenage what would be "kickin' rad". I loved the book, but in many ways it was just Stephenson saying, "Check out all this cool shit I thought up".

Of course. One of the themes in the book is the adolescent fantasies of male badassitude which follow them well into adulthood, with a diminishing but ever-present sense of possibility.

Not to sound too pretentious, because it definitely presents those fantasies in a sincere way, but the book also satirizes the idea; Hiro, a consummate badass who literally carries samurai swords with him everywhere he goes, is constantly placed out of his element, relying on other people to save his bacon. He frequently reflects that what he sees as his own badassness is probably down to just dumb luck, as the frequent deaths of his companions who are objectively more badass than him demonstrate. He behaves like an action movie character, but it's a sham; somewhere at the back of his mind, he knows he doesn't actually have what it takes to play at this level (a realization literally embodied by Raven). In the end, he wins only because he was actually a pretty good hacker.

Again, I'll agree the book is not conceptually perfect nor brilliantly executed, but it does got a lot more going on than it seems.

Agree and also: this plays into the irony of the hero/protagonists name

One of the themes in the book is the adolescent fantasies of male badassitude which follow them well into adulthood, with a diminishing but ever-present sense of possibility.

Actually I'm not sure that is a theme. There's a brief meditation on the theme of adolescent badass fantasies, but it's only used as a way of introducing a new character who is an even more ridiculous adolescent badass fantasy than the ridiculous adolescent badass fantasies that we've met up to this point.

The passage you're talking about is specifically about the fact that Hiro feels a sense of relief from the fact that he will never be more badass than Raven. That's a very particular angle on the situation, and you can read it at least partially ironically, because in fact it doesn't stop Hiro from trying to be, well, a hero, and if anything causes him to be more badass in the future.

But the book is full of male characters who die because they are trying to be or think that they are badasses. Raven is held up as an an ironic sort of idol; he demonstrates how badass you actually have to be in order not to die, and it's a comically excessive amount. And yet he's the only one who seems not to be motivated by that desire at all; he's just trying to get something done.

I don't think it takes a particularly close reading to see this theme; you just need to be willing to entertain the possibility that it's not just adolescent fantasy.

Almost all 60-70-80s SciFi is the adolescent fantasies of male badassitude of the author.

What? That's definitely not what late 60s - early 70s sci fi was all about. It would be hard to get much further from the truth, actually.

That was a period of social introspection in sci fi, to almost too great an extent.

Now, late 70s and 80s, maybe was about male badassitude. Some of it, anyway. But even then, there's a lot of deeper stuff in that era.

Sturgeon's law

"Snow Crash is definitely action, and definitely dated (it's more alternate present than near future at this point), but if it's dumb I would sure like to see smart."

I enjoyed reading Snow Crash, but I have to agree with the other posters -- it's a good story, not a great book. The prose is ...weak, to say the least, and it felt like science fiction for the sake of science fiction -- which is not to say that's bad in of itself, but it lacks the thrust and weight of Vonnegut or Pynchon (both of whom I recommend reading if you want to see 'smart').

The prose is ...weak, to say the least

Really? I mean sure, on the scale of "everything written in the English language" it may not be top notch, but I think it's one of Stephenson's best crafted works. The allusive density and rhythm of the prose is delightful, and it's packed with juicy, gritty metaphors. Who could forget:

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters... You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Yeah, it may not be provocative, life-altering science fiction, but dammit, Snow Crash is good storytelling.

A lot of people really hate the present tense, I think.

I wasn't trying to say it's a "smart book" per se; it's certainly an exercise in indulgent cyberpunk fan service, for better and for worse. Only that calling it a "dumb action movie" implies that the reader is not particularly aware of the state of action movies.

Personally, I'm a DFW man.

Reading DFW is like being run over by a train of literature.

I mean that in the best way possible -- he's an amazing author and one of the most unique voices that we've been fortunate enough to receive. If you haven't read it, his Kenyon address is stunning: http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...

If you want to double down on hyper-referential and symbol-laden and keep the guns and stuff from Stephenson, try getting through _Gravity's Rainbow_.

if you're looking for smart books, you want _The Diamond Age_

<rimshot>

The barrel of Reason is small, but you're forgetting the suitcase-sized ammunition case and the isotope heatsink.

My desktop computer is not hand-sized because I have a slim keyboard and mouse.

Your desktop computer was called a microcomputer in the era when normal computers filled rooms. Reason's a depleted uranium gatling gun which is man-portable... that's small. Hiro is counterattacked by guns of a similar type which are way bigger.[0]

Perhaps I should have specified "small for what it is", though.

[0] Something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS , as I recall.

> Stephenson's later books are much better (though after Diamond Age they become too long to film anyway).

I disagree - his most recent novel, REAMDE, is twice as long as it needs to be (and badly in need of a ruthless editor), takes itself far too seriously, is full of absurdly unlikely plot scenarios, and is in general almost totally unreadable.

What you are portraying as negatives (meandering detours into entirely unnecessary, but hilarious, trivia; absurdly unlikely plot scenarios [since when is anything about Snowcrash a likely scenario?]; etc.) are probably what loom as the largest selling points for fans of Stephenson's work from Cryptonomicon onward. I don't think we buy the books for the "plausability" factor.

Also, the books hardly take themselves seriously.

The Baroque Trilogy literally changed how I see the way the world works. Those endless detours are worth quite a lot.

The best textbook on modern banking and finance I've ever read.

Which, I realize, is a really damning endorsement of a novel, but I honestly found it fascinating. Once I chewed through enough (roughly half) of the first book to the point that it was engaging.

And yes, its exposition was itself an exploration of the baroque.

Some of them are. Some of them are truly pointless. Neal Stephenson apparently had a giant map of 18th century London on the wall of the room where he wrote it, and as such apparently feels compelled, on certain occasions when a character goes from one place to another, to name every street he passes on the way. That's not atmospheric or interesting, it's just filler.

The point of Baroque architecture and music is to have too much detail at every level to take in - presumably he was trying the same thing in writing.

I thought it was pretty readable, but painfully predictable and fairly unoriginal. It was pretty much Stephenson's writing style grafted onto a grocery store checkout line novel's plot.

REAMDE was a bit long, true, but I had a blast reading it anyway. For one thing, it's really fun — right now — to read a book which accurately portrays up-to-the moment garbage like social media, MMORPGs, and a bit about startup culture. Plus, much of the text is hilarious, especially Ivanov's lines.

I was with you up until the final point; I loved it, and devoured it in a couple of days on my phone.

I enjoyed it, though I'd agree that it comes off as a bit of a goofy spy novel in the end. My guess is that Stephenson overcompensated for the perception that his earlier novels had anti-climatic endings.

I stand corrected on the latest one, which I haven't read. I've picked it up in the bookstore a few times but the combination of a thousand pages of thickness and a less-than--compelling blurb on the back (wasn't this a Michael Douglas movie?) have failed to convince me. Thanks for the anti-recommendation... a thousand-page book is a serious time commitment and there's a lot of other things I want to read.

To be honest Cryptonomicon is the only NS book which I really and wholeheartedly recommend. Diamond Age and Anathem are definitely interesting and I'm glad I read them but they have their flaws, Snow Crash comes across as juvenile, and the Baroque Cycle is approximately five hundred pages of a fantastic book bound at random with twelve hundred pages of boring.

> To be honest Cryptonomicon is the only NS book which I really and wholeheartedly recommend.

We're on the same page then, I agree with you. I really enjoyed Cryptonomicon. Diamond Age was interesting but tended to read like the script for an over-the-top sci-fi movie.

Oh man, The Diamond Age is my all time favorite and the book that drew me to Stephenson in the first place

It's not fiction BUT if you like NS on a good day you must read his history of telegraph cables (it's free online)

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

Diamond age is interesting, he almost gets to write actual characters. Snow Crash is an 80s heavy metal album made into a book. Cryptomincon is excellent.

The Baroque cycle - you have to like Baroque. All those gold filigrees and cherubs of a Baroque opera house don't compare to the elegant lines of a Gothic cathedral and these three books aren't a lean story.

Anathem - I have to read again to decide if it's simply too long or if there is a point.

Readme - I can only assume he got a massive tax bill or is channeling the spirit of Michael Chrichton on a bad day. The only thing that raises it above Tom Clancy is that his editor managed to cut out 1000pages of weapons specifications.

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