Week Eleven: Snow Crash

Snow Crash was a reading that was very out of my comfort zone. Even though it is a type of story that I have frequently seen before in Cyberpunk and Sci-Fi works (Player One for example) this reading proved to be way more complex than what I expected, and slightly harder for me to get by.

One of the reasons for that is the very descriptive and complex world building in the work, with Stephenson frequently throwing computer language and coding-related explanations all around, which I didn't have a clue of what it meant.

However, although Snow Crash did carry some social-political underlying tone in it, this work sounded much like a satire of the genre, rather than trying to be just another cyberpunk book in the shelf. The reason I say that is because everything seemed to be purposefully too convenient, way too convenient. While it did follow the classical cyberpunk formula, showing a horrible reality in which the impact of technology caused the doom of the world as we know it, and big corporates took control over the society, Snow Crash also seemed to be purposefully enhancing those aspects throughout the work as well.

An example of that are the names, an our very own protagonist, whose name made me snort in disbelief: Hiro Protagonist. I genuinely thought I had read it wrong at first, but then realized that was indeed his name. It was funny to notice how sometimes the characters also broke the forth wall, or rather perhaps, the author himself threw some jokes around to the readers who understood his message, such as in the very beginning of the book, when a character named Y.T (which is short for Yours Truly,  Ha!) asks Hiro what was his name and when he replies she says "That's a stupid name" to which he answers "But you'll never forget it", and indeed we never did.

As I continued to read the book I noticed that the names weren't just fun puns, but held some meaning in the book as well, adding more to this idea that identity is something slippery in this world that they live in. For instance having Hiro, our protagonist, as a hacker who typically work undercover and have their identities unknown for most people.

However one thing that I kinda enjoyed in Snow Crash was how it made me notice the patterns in Cyberpunk works. We are set in your typical dystopian society, in which we are doomed to be controlled by machines, only to find out that there is a corporation and a mastermind behind such, controlling all of us without our knowledge. This said corporation creates an universe (or material thing) that lures society to take part of their work, and thus, falling under their mighty ruling. That is a pattern we have seen over and over in several works of the genre, and often authors try to spice things up by trying to make the "discovery" not so obvious or imminent. In Snow Crash that is not so different. Just like several other works I have seen (Ex: Ready Player One and the movie Gamer), the book follows the same pattern, only difference I seemed to have noticed was that Stephenson didn't shy away from the obvious and convenient, and clearly paved his entire story in a circle of quite predictable events. He seemed to grab all the ingredients of Cyberpunk and dystopian stories, mush them very well together, pour a few wordy words in it and finally present to his readers a work that describes a future that is in fact, not that far away from us anymore.