Snow Crash [Paperback]

From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city states, and the Internet--incarnate as the Metaverse--looks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai swordsman and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible. --Acton Lane

Stephenson excels in marrying geekspeak with riotous action (Guardian )

A cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. This is no mere hyperbole (San Francisco Bay Guardian )

Brilliantly realized. Stephenson [is] an engaging guide to an onrushing tomorrow (The New York Times )

A fantastic, slam-bang-overdrive, supersurrealistic, comic-spooky whirl through a tomorrow that is already happening. Stephenson is intelligent, perceptive, hip (Timothy Leary )

Like a Pynchon novel with the brakes removed (Washington Post ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

The only relief from the sea of logos is within the well-guarded borders of the Burbclaves. Is it any wonder that most sane folks have forsaken the real world and chosen to live in the computer-generated universe of virtual reality? In a major city, the size of a dozen Manhattans, is a domain of pleasures limited only by the imagination. But now a strange new computer virus called Snow Crash is striking down hackers everywhere, leaving an unlikely young man as humankind's last best hope.

Neal Stephenson has published four novels: The Big U, Zodiac, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. For the last of these he won a 1996 Hugo Award. He also writes (with J. Frederick George) as 'Stephen Bury'. Their books are Interface and Cobweb. Most of his books are published in Penguin. He lives in Seattle, where he is at work on other novels.