Where to begin with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash? There’s so much to talk about with the premise and the plot that it’s hard to believe that Stephenson got it all in 438 pages—especially consider the length of the books he’s written subsequently.
The opening pages give the reader little hint of where the book is really going to end up. We meet Hiro Protagonist (it’s hard for me to read that character’s name without seeing the author winking at me) as he’s delivering pizzas in a California that is utterly unrecognizable from our current reality. America has fragmented into franchulates (franchise plus consulate), franchises that have the legal rights to act like micro nations. They can even offer citizenship and asylum to their residents. The United States itself has disintegrated and turned into a Stalinist paranoiac nightmare. (Employees have weekly polygraphs.) The Internet has evolved into a fully immersible alternate reality where you can wear whatever skin you chose. Hyperinflation and pollution are rampant. And yet, it all kind of works. It’s not pretty, but it works.
Back to Hiro and his pizza. Things quickly go wrong and Hiro ends up dumping his delivery car into a pool and losing his job. He retreats into the Metaverse (the grandson of the Internet) to collect information for the Central Intelligence Corporation (formerly the Central Intelligence Agency). Old acquaintances draw him into one of the most bizarre conspiracies I have ever seen committed to paper. Soon Hiro and his partner (a courier who helped him out with the pizza) find themselves chased by religious fanatics, the United States, the Mafia, a harpoon wielding Aleut, and hackers. The chase runs from Los Angeles to British Columbia and even out in the Pacific on a floating community of refugees with glossolalia.
When I picked up the book, I knew it was considered a classic of cyberpunk. But I wasn’t expecting that Stephenson would plumb the depths of linguistics, history, and religion to create his story. (If I’m honest, I will say that the information dumps towards the end of the book to cover all this material will make the book drag if you’re not particularly interested in those topics.) This confirms my theory that in order to become a classic, a book has to rise above the conventions of its genre. And what Stephenson does with these topics is truly incredible. I’m reluctant to say more for fear of giving away the crux of the conspiracy.
But I can’t resist the linguistic ideas that Stephenson plays around with. I think I can do this without giving everything away, so here goes. Linguists have observed over and over again that languages will start to change and diverge if one group of speakers is isolated from the rest of the speakers. This makes sense to me since the only thing language really has to do is transmit ideas from one speaker to another. If the speakers can understand each other, mission accomplished. The isolated speakers don’t necessarily have to communicate outside their community, so they’re free to create their own jargon, slang, and idioms and mess about their their grammar as much as they want. But Stephenson points out that as communities have come back together again, language should start to converge again. You can actually see it when fad words crop up. Think about the history of the concept of cool. The word for that concept changes every generation.
Stephenson takes it farther by playing around with the idea that once, a very long time ago, we all spoke the same language and that that language did not diverge if speakers were isolated from each other. This flies in the face of all the linguistic theory I learned about as an undergraduate, and even my own observations. Through this thought experiment, Stephenson shows that we need diversity. Diversity gives rise to innovation and competition, propelling science and art and a whole raft of other activities forward.
Snow Crash has so many ideas in it that I know I’m going to think about its implications for days.