Snow Crash
What made me want to read this?
It was the late 90s, the Internet had just become a thing, and I was deep into the hacker and cyberpunk sub-culture. Apart from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, this book — Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, was yet another cyberpunk masterpiece folk talked about.
This book is often credited as the book that coined the word ‘Metaverse’. In the book, the Metaverse is a shared virtual reality world that people use their headset to log into. They have personal avatars and could interact with each other. It is a place where some work, transact, and do other things.
But there is a computer virus that is spreading around in the Metaverse, and it has real-world consequences. Hackers that saw this virus in the virtual world would have their brain fried in the real world.
The hacker ‘Hiro Protagonist’ — that is his name in the book — starts to investigate the origin of the virus, which leads him back into ancient Sumerian culture. Snow Crash was a wild ride.
I’ve written about how after re-reading it in today’s context, it gives a different perspective. How the tech and the bleak dystopian future isn’t that too far away. Read Cyberspace and Metaverse.