Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The last time I read this novel, it was brand new. And the last time I read this, it must have embedded itself a bit too permanently in my head, NLP'ing its way deeper than any kind of sleeper proto-language ever could.

Why do I say that?

Because I've forgotten more about this novel than I have the guts to admit, and what's more, it firmly ensconced my love of studying ancient Sumeria, the gods, mythology, the history, the literature surrounding it -- and that little fact completely escaped me until now, upon this belated re-read.

I feel like such a fool. And what's more, even though I had read Neuromancer before Snow Crash, I have been chasing THIS PARTICULAR HIGH ever since reading THIS PARTICULAR NOVEL.

Yeah, it's that good. Fun all the way through, with fantastic characters, a brilliant hybrid virtual/real adventure in an anarchistic capitalist hellscape in California, where everything is run by thuggish mobs of all flavors (including the remnants of the US government) and where pizza delivery really does go hand-in-hand with a samurai blade.

It's wild. Vibrant. Clever. And it is just a cool as an adventure as it is a philosophical treatise, a NLP dissertation, a Sumerian mytho-history guide, and a cautionary tale of rampant predatory capitalism.

Oh, yeah, and don't forget creating a slave-race of religious followers on a floating city-state or glass-knife villains with nukes.

Does this novel keep up with modern readers? I should say so! It's one of the wildest movies-in-my-mind I've read in absolute ages and if it ever gets made as a tv series, it better get a huge-budget HBO or Showtime treatment so that it gets the treatment it ABSOLUTELY deserves.


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