Stephenson wanted to have some fun with it, and the opening pizza-delivery scene reads like you are being launched out of a cannon. This was my first cyber punk novel (I still hadn’t read Neuromancer for the first time), and every page read like the author was dropping new ideas onto the page like Mardi Gras beads hitting the ground on Bourbon Street. But Snow Crash was like nothing I had ever read before. At this point, authors well understood the main ideas of the style: stories written in a near dystopian future where technology is advanced, governments have withdrawn in potency to be replaced by corporations, and man-machine interfaces and cyborg beings are the norm. Stephenson wrote this book in 1992, eight years after Neuromancer. Cryptonomicon is the best “hacker” novel I have ever read, and after encountering that, I went scurrying back to the library to see what else Stephenson had written.

But it was not until I read Cryptonomicon and In the Beginning.Was the Command Line, both published by Stephenson in 1999, that I became a fan. To do the research, he traveled to each location where the cables made landfall and told the story about how it all comes together. He told the story about how the world is connected through massive runs of transatlantic cables that traverse the ocean floors and electronically and physically connect three continents to each other. I first learned about Stephenson after reading his excellent article called “Mother Earth Mother Board” in Wired Magazine in 1996. Well, that, and as I’ve already mentioned, Stephenson is one of my favorite authors in this or any genre. I recently reviewed the classic cyber punk novel Neuromancer, so I figured I would continue the trend and review another classic in the genre to see if it too still holds up. Stephenson is an author who truly understands the hacker culture, so it’s not surprising Snow Crash wound up on Time magazine’s list of 100 novels everyone should read, among countless other accolades. His description of the “Metaverse” and the “avatars” that live in it, both terms he made famous in this book, are so prescient that anybody playing World of Warcraft or using Second Life today would feel right at home. Neal Stephenson is a cyber geek of the first order, and his personality is all over this story.

It has everything that we like: Metaverse hacking, real-world swordplay, awesome weapons, and-to cap it all off-the hacker ends up with the girl.

Every cybersecurity geek on the planet should embrace this book.

Snow crash stephenson