Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 83: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Snow Crash is a dystopic view into the future from the early 1990s when the internet was emerging to an imaginative world of a United States that has devolved into corporate, religious, and ethnic enclaves and the metaverse, the virtual world created by hackers and populated by avatars, becomes the escape from reality. Hiro Protagonist and Y.T. are the two primary protagonists that are navigating this chaotic world where they are exposed to a plot which threatens to grant control to all humanity to the mysterious L. Bob Rife and his religious front Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates. The plot moves from technological to religious to philological speculation about the original human language being similar to the binary language of computer language. Through infecting hackers who have learned the machine code and using their blood to create a drug which allows his followers to practice glossolalia, the Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues which is also for the book the base language that was shattered in the story of Babylon. In a plot that involves the Central Intelligence Corporation (formerly CIA), the Mafia, Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong (a multinational business franchise), the muscle bound and menacing Raven who carries his own nuclear device, the Raft (a conglomeration of ships centered around the U.S.S. Enterprise and a tanker) the plot is inventive if excessive.

Science Fiction is probably the toughest genre to write an enduring story within because as time passes the technology evolves in ways that can undercut the story’s credibility. Snow Crash is one of those rare novels where its concepts become the language of future technology: for example, the metaverse and the popularization of the term avatar. It also provided a fertile base for other works that would project a future where the metaverse becomes the escape from reality like Ready Player One. The religious and philological speculations were a part where, because of my background, I had trouble suspending my own knowledge to accept the premises of the novel and the devolution that the novel foresaw into commercialized interests thankfully never occurred in the United States in the way the book envisions. Yet, in the thirty years since the publication of this book there are areas where the author was accurate as we live in a time where they are beginning to construct an alternative reality and a corporation which rebranded itself Meta is one of the leading forces in creating this metaverse. Unfortunately, the book is accurate that there are many people who escape from the real world into the digital world and what was envisioned as a dystopic reality is at least partially being adopted as normal.