Snow Crash

I've been reading a fair amount this summer (more at the beginning than recently), and I have to say that Snow Crash ended up in my top two favorites so far, with the other one being "Without Remorse" by Tom Clancy.

"Snow Crash" reminded me in some ways of "East of Eden" in that the story ended up mirroring a mythological event which was itself central to the plot of the book. "East of Eden" accomplished this with a bit more subtlety and grace, but I'm not going to criticize too harshly here...

The novel occurs both in the real world and the "Metaverse" (Neal Stephenson's name for virtual reality) and documents the spread of a virus in both realms, along with the main characters' attempts to stop it. In the real world (admittedly my favorite of the two settings) the virus is spread largely through a form of Christianity that loosely (very loosely) resembles Pentecostalism. At first I was mildly offended because Stephenson's initial portrayal of Christianity reminded me of Heinlein's, but as I doggedly stuck with the story I was comforted to see that Stephenson bothered to make distinctions between types of monotheism - some were related to spreading the virus, and some weren't. The virus tends to replicate via a person's blind acceptance - by exploiting the emotional, irrational core of a person, and so it is possible to resist the virus to some extent by developing critical thinking skills in the areas that the virus tended to exploit.

I feel like I can really relate to one of the characters, Juanita. (And not just because that was ALWAYS my name in Spanish class...) She goes voluntarily to join the cult spreading the virus after she spends years with Jesuits developing "immunities" to it. When Hiro Protagonist, her ex-and-possibly-new-lover and actual protagonist in the novel, asks her why she's done so she replies with a pretty simple answer: she's interested in religion and hacking, and she wanted to know how it was done - she wanted to be able to do what the virus did, just for the sake of knowing. Yes.

The book also talked a bit about relationships, and some of the points really hit home.

"Hiro, you are such a geek. She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after."

"Well, what is she after, do you suppose - keeping in mind that you've never actually met the woman, and that you're going out with Raven?"

"She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable."

The above was spoken by Y.T. (stands for "Yours Truly"), the other female character in the book. Usually for whatever reason I don't really relate to the female characters in books I read, but sometimes I could almost imagine myself saying and thinking a lot of her words and thoughts. Somehow Stephenson managed to pull off two excellent characterizations of Girls Who Do Computer Stuff.

Anyway, I can't really do the book justice. Suffice to say, it was a highly satisfying read. Many thanks, Dan.