Snow Crash

Snow Crash is an intense cyborgesque thriller set in bizarre future America where the government has mostly crumbled and has been overshadowed Corporate giants and franchises. Companies reign over sovereignties of land that have since ceded from the United States, and inflation has driven the Trillion dollar bill to be worth almost nothing; the standard form of small tender is the Gipper (a Quadrillion dollar bill). The story mainly takes place in a Los Angeles no longer part of the United States, and a fully interactive, 3-Dimensional child of the Internet, dubbed the Metaverse.

The protagonist is the very appropriately named Hiro Protagonist, a pizza deliveryman for Uncle Ernzo's Pizza, a Mafia run Pizza franchise that takes it's delivery of delicious assorted cheese and meat pies very seriously. But this is hardly what defines Hiro, for when he is off-duty, he is the "Last of the freelance hackers and Greatest swordfighter in the world", or so his business card says. Hiro roams the Metaverse searching for data, anything and everything, and then sells said data to the CIC, the for-profit organization that spawned from the CIA. In one fateful incident, Hiro loses his job as a pizza deliveryman and meets Y.T., a Kourier that delivers her packages via skateboard. Y.T. and Hiro team up as hackers in the Metaverse and soon learn of the existence of a drug called Snow Crash in a club in the Metaverse. The drug is unique in that it not only affects the user in the Metaverse, but in reality as well. Hiro and Y.T. begin to investigate it and trace it back to a fiber-optics cable monopolist named L. Bob Rife, who distributes the drug through a network of Pentecostal churches. Rife lives on a fortress Raft populated by boat people that speak in tongues. Hiro also learns of connections to

Sumerian mythology and culture within the drug, and eventually an ancient Sumerian myth intertwined with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Sumerian is described in the novel as being to the human race as what binary is to computers; it affects the listener on a much deeper and more basic level than other languages. Sumerian is rooted in the brain stem and relates directly to "me", or the biological version of software, which holds the rules and procedures of tasks such as cooking or making pottery. These "me" were held by high religious figures known as en, and one of these en was a God named Enki that could write new "me", being the equivalent of a programmer. A Goddess named Asherah took it as her duty to create a linguistic "virus" that would corrupt the "me" and eventually effect the entirety of the human race. Enki programmed humanity to no longer be able to use or respond to the Sumerian language and create differing languages, thus creating the tie with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel where people who were trying to build a tower to God wee found as blasphemous and where cursed with speaking in different languages so they could never understand each other. Unfortunately, Asherah's virus was not completely destroyed, and is the Cult of Asherah spreads the virus using prostitution to transmit it sexually and feeding babies with infected breast milk. Snow Crash infects the user on the level that the Sumerian language does, and Rife is trying to use it potentially take over the world.

The novel is highly enriched with motorcycle chases, explosions, intrigue and suspense while holding a high literary merit. Snow Crash is certainly a very well spent investment of your time and while it certainly pushes certain themes more attractive to certain demographics, it is still a great read for almost anybody.