October 5, 2025 by A.S. Van Dorston

Favorite book #4. “See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places…”

Neal Stephenson’s career took off with his third novel, which was actually a salvage job from an abandoned graphic novel. He tried to use his Macintosh to create the graphics but it was too much for the primitive software/hardware, and “snow crash” described the fuzzy screen on the computer that would result from computer failure.

It felt like the worthy successor to Neuromancer, with an even more hyperactive energy that cranked the absurdity to 11 in a noirish world of low lifes and high tech where hacker/pizza delivery driver (the Deliverator) Hiro Protagonist lives. Like Gibson, Stephenson coined some iconic terms that would help define tech culture in the coming decadesk with avatars and the metaverse, a 3D virtual world accessed by wraparound goggles, paid with digital currencies like Kong Bucks. Hiro works for mafia run Cosa Nostra Pizza but is also a skilled swordsman kind of a big deal when jacked into the metaverse, and teams up with a skater courier YT to broker information as their side gig. They stumble upon a file called Snow Crash that turns out to be a digital virus based on an ancient Sumerian language that can also recode human brains.

Stephenson went on to write even more acclaimed novels, from historical speculative fiction to techno thrillers, but he’d never again be quite this fun in such an unhinged manner.