Snow Crash argues that a person is a machine running on language, and that anything running on code can be hacked. Stephenson takes it one step further. If you could reach the machine tongue underneath every human tongue, the assembly language the brainstem still answers to, you could write a virus for people, speak it aloud, and watch the listener's higher functions drop offline. That is the premise. The fact that he smuggles it inside a comic novel about a pizza driver is one of the great bait-and-switches in science fiction.
The first chapter is why people keep pressing this book on each other. Hiro Protagonist delivers for CosaNostra Pizza, which is the actual Mafia, which has staked its honor on a thirty-minute guarantee. Run late and Uncle Enzo comes to the customer's house in person to apologize. Picture that. A man in a very good suit standing in a stranger's doorway, explaining that someone has let them down. So Hiro drives a car with smartwheels and a radar gun down a freeway walled in by franchise logos, at speeds that would be suicide anywhere with a functioning government, and Stephenson writes it in short present-tense blasts that read like someone shouting over an engine. Nine pages. Then a fifteen-year-old skateboard courier delivers the pizza for him, and the novel has already shown you what it thinks of dignity.
The America under all this has been franchised down to the pavement. Sovereignty is chopped into burbclaves and franchulates, each with its own laws, its own passport, its own immigration desk at the end of a cul-de-sac. Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong will admit anybody. New South Africa will not admit Y.T. The federal government technically survives, and its employees spend their working hours reading policy memoranda about toilet paper consumption while a monitor clocks their reading speed for signs of disloyalty. The joke works because Stephenson never explains it. He just puts a woman at a desk and lets you watch her do her job.
Y.T. is the best thing in the book and the part that has aged strangest. She is fifteen, she harpoons moving cars with a magnetic poon and lets them tow her at highway speed, and she is more competent than nearly every adult around her, Hiro included. Her chapters have the cleanest momentum in the novel. She also gets tangled up with Raven, an Aleut harpooner carrying a nuclear device wired into his own brainstem, and that thread goes somewhere a book published today would handle differently. Stephenson does not dwell on it. He does not soften it either, and it is worth knowing before you arrive.
Then there is the Library. Roughly a third of the way in, Hiro starts interviewing a research daemon about Sumerian religion, and for a long stretch the novel turns into two people talking. Enki, Asherah, the nam-shub that shattered the original human language, the me as executable programs the priesthood handed down. Stephenson is blending Julian Jaynes's bicameral-mind theory with a stack of ancient Near Eastern scholarship into something that is not remotely true and is enormous fun to carry around in your head. The ideas are not the problem. The problem is that they arrive as lecture, and the engine idles for a hundred pages while the professor talks. I have never met a reader of this novel without a strong opinion about that section.
The last act pays out as a chase across a floating raft of lashed-together refugee ships, and it moves fast enough that some of the plot slides past unresolved. The finish is abrupt. Threads that looked structural turn out to be scenery.
Why you should read
- Great if cyberpunk with a loud comic streak appeals to you
- Great if you like satire that still takes its tech seriously
- Great if you want the novel that named the metaverse
- Great if a long tangent on Sumerian linguistics sounds like fun
What to expect
- A blistering opening chapter that sets an unfair bar
- A hundred-page stretch of mythology delivered as dialogue
- Present-tense action writing with real forward speed
- A fifteen-year-old co-lead in some uncomfortable territory
- An abrupt finish that leaves threads hanging
None of which dents what this book actually pulled off. Stephenson coined avatar in the sense everyone now uses and gave the Metaverse its name, and three decades later one of the largest companies on earth renamed itself chasing the idea, apparently without noticing the original was a satire. The image I keep is Hiro himself. Best sword on the Street, famous across a world made of light, and when he logs off he goes to sleep in a twenty-by-thirty storage unit he shares with a roommate. Stephenson had that split worked out in 1992, and he thought it was a punchline.
