Snow Crash

A follow-up to Neuromancer, the book is as interesting as it is quirky. Stephenson is great at making everything in the novel somewhat absurd and although it might be his style, it took away from some of my immersion in the novel. The story is about Hiro Protagonist (that’s actually his name), who delivers pizza in the real world but is also an elite hacker and a samurai swordsmaster. He regularly goes to the Metaverse, a virtual reality social space, since reality is pretty worn-down in his world. However, a virus is spreading about within the Metaverse that threatens to break the fabric of virtual reality to impinge on actual reality, and Hiro embarks on a quest to investigate and stop the perpetrator. The plot is a bit hard to read because of the converging storylines and the amount of miscellaneous information that is given, but it’s still a great look at early concepts in virtual reality, especially in looking at how Stephenson describes various features of the Metaverse.

The interesting idea here is the concept of the “neurovirus” (I made the word up due to a lack of better description) described in the story. In the story, a friend of Hiro took a scroll in the Metaverse from a stranger and glanced at its contents, and immediately after fell into catatonia. Although why the scroll had such an effect is a big part of the story, it reminds me of flashing red-and-blue screens causing epilepsy on computers. In a headset, the effects could be much worse, and security concerns in virtual realities might compromise not just information as is the current norm, but people’s mental states and health. So far, I don’t see much development in terms of user protection or cybersecurity in virtual reality, which is to be expected since security is a realm that only gets attention when something goes terribly wrong. Snow Crash is an early warning that when something does go terribly wrong, it may be much more terrible in the medium of virtual reality than in computers.