Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)

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Neal Stephenson,Snow Crash (1992)
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(No Transcript)
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Neal Stephenson

• American writer, b. 1959
• Has a degree in geography both parents were
  scientists
• Is also a practicing computer programmer and was
  involved in a space-research company, Blue
  Origin, until 2006
• Wrote the alternative history trilogy of eight
  The Baroque Cycle and its prequel, Cryptonomicon
• Also wrote a book on computers, In the Beginning
  Was the Command Line, and other non-fiction
  essays
• Like Adams and Gibson, he is a Mac user

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Snow Crash and Cyberpunk

• Often described as postcyberpunk
• Originally planned as a CGI graphic novel
• Has influenced actual-world developments, esp.
  online games
• Popularized the term avatar for a users online
  representation (originally comes from Hindu
  mythology)

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Stephenson on Cyberpunk

• It's a great label. You get to wear black
  leather jackets and mirrored shades and be hip
  and cool as long as cyberpunk is hip and cool.
• for a while, information technology was
  incredibly important, yet it had been ignored or
  gotten wrong by science fiction. There was this
  vast terrain of virgin territory, and there was a
  land rush. Now the revolutionary nature of that
  technology has become familiar. To make the
  obligatory social criticism kind of comment here,
  the bursting of the Internet bubble has proven
  that information technology is just another
  technology.
• Snow Crash turned out to be a failed prediction.
  People have shown limited interest in immersive
  3-D technology, so I think it worked better as a
  novel than as a prognostication. But it provided
  a reasonable, coherent picture of a particular
  kind of entertainment technology.
• Science fictiondoesnt always mean its about
  the future its an awareness that this is
  different.

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Stephenson on GibsonTaken from a 2004 interview
on Slashdot

• A year or two after SNOW CRASH came out I was
  doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in
  Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and
  extended his hand as if to shake. But I
  remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me.
  For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a
  pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in
  a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had
  crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth
  pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca.
  During the regeneration process, telescoping
  Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into
  Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of
  time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it
  up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos
  pierced it as if it were cork board, but this
  spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my
  wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and
  swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a
  force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling
  table knocked over a space heater and set fire to
  the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I
  dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while.
  Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense,
  his Praying Mantis style was no match for my
  Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a
  cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the
  place. The streets were crowded with his
  black-suited minions and I had to turn into a
  swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

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Stephensons Use of Humour

• Hybrid of Adams and Gibson?
• Parody of cyberpunk, as Adams parodied
  traditional SF?
• Expository narrative
• Character names (real or adopted?)
• Pop-culture references
• Extrapolation via exaggeration

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The Society of Snow Crash

• anarcho-capitalism essentially the opposite
  of Banks Culture
• Hyperinflation
• Corporate culture gone wild countries give way
  to franchises
• Everything is privatized and for-profit
• Mafia as corporation - some might ask, whats the
  difference?

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• A Burbclave, thats the place to live. A
  city-state with its own constitution, a border,
  laws, cops, everything
• Short for suburban enclave - like gated
  communities in the actual world?
• Designed to conform to each other everything
  looks the same in America there are no
  transitions now
• Have to bulldoze lots of neighbourhoods to do
  it, but those 70s and 80s developments exist to
  be bulldozed, right?
• Segregated societies, including racism
• Racial mix of main characters (Hiro is
  Japanese/Korean/African-American)
• Theres only four things we do better than
  anyone else music, movies, microcode (software),
  high-speed pizza delivery

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• Office bureaucracy gone wild - a theme shared by
  Stephenson and Adams
• Polygraph testing - reminiscent of Dick?
• Punishment by social ostracism (branding) -
  suggestion of Banks?

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Stephenson on Politics

• Artists often make fools of themselves, and
  begin to produce bad art, when they decide to get
  political. A novelist needs to be able to see the
  world through the eyes of just about anyone,
  including people who have this or that set of
  views on religion, politics, etc. By espousing
  one strong political view a novelist loses the
  power to do this. Anyone who has convinced
  himself, based on reading my work, that I hold
  this or that political view, is probably wrong.
  What is much more likely is that, for a while, I
  managed to get inside the head of a fictional
  character who held that view.

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The Metaverse

• VR-based interface
• Popular as an escape from reality
• Designed on a computer screen, but with an eye
  toward the elegance of things past and forgotten
  about
• In the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior
  prince

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• Avatars can be anything you want, limited only by
  imagination and bandwidth
• Generic avatars (Brandy and Clint)
• Daemons - avatars with no human users
• Hypercards used in the Metaverse to represent a
  chunk of data
• Differences between the Metaverse and Reality -
  e.g. Hiros reaction to killing an actual person
  vs. an avatar

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• Hiro gets information...gossip, videotape,
  audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox
  of a document - and all of it goes into CICs
  Library
• The Librarian source of expository information,
  guide to Stephensons world
• Stephensons fascination with powers of 2,
  especially 65,536 (another possible answer to
  everything?)

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Other Technology

• Smart boxes
• Kouriers skateboards and magnetic harpoons
• Kouriers as hybrid of Gibsons cowboys and
  Adams hitchhikers?
• The Rat Things - cybernetically altered animals
  (cf. Dicks replicant animals)
• Military technology Reason, atomic bombs
• Hiros Japanese swords
• the only American who actually knows how to set
  the alarm on her digital wristwatch

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Stephenson on Religion

• A lot of secular, modern people claim to be
  disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart
  person is religious....The fundamentalist
  churches nowadays do a much better job of
  promulgating their views and are much more vocal
  and outspoken, and if you're a secular person who
  doesn't have much interaction with organized
  religion, then the only time you ever see a
  Christian, it's someone saying that evolution is
  a lie and the world is only 6,000 years old. It's
  very easy to miss the fact that the Catholic
  Church and all the mainline Protestant
  denominations long ago accepted evolution and
  have no problem with it at all. I frequently run
  into militantly secular types who think that all
  Christians, for example, deny the theory of
  evolution. That accounts for a certain amount of
  the militancy of secular types in public
  discourse. They just can't believe people believe
  this stuff. It seems patently idiotic to them.

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• Reverend Waynes Pearly Gates - religion as
  corporation also plays on desire for conformity
• L. Bob Rife - modelled on L. Ron Hubbard (who
  started out as a writer of SF)
• Why atheism and intellectualism seem to be
  connected in the popular imagination 99 of
  what goes on in most Christian churches has
  nothing whatsoever to do with the actual
  religion
• Juanitas conversion and her fascination with the
  Snow Crash project

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• Religion as escape from reality, or connection to
  hyperreality - analogues to the Metaverse?
• Symbolism of the Tower of Babel story Snow Crash
  as Babel in reverse?
• If its provably false, then the Bible is a lie
  and if its provably true, then the existence of
  God is proven and theres no room for faith
• Glossolalia and xenoglossia speaking in
  tongues
• Pentecostals and Charismatics

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More on Stephenson and Religion

• Codification of religion (e.g. compilation of the
  Hebrew Bible) reflecting changes in belief and
  practice
• Repression, or redirection, of the feminine in
  religion?
• Sacred texts / master narratives as
  sociopolitical allegories
• Is Stephenson questioning religious history or
  making use of it for his own purposes?
• the defeat of chaos, the separation of the
  static, unified world into a binary system, is
  identified with creation
• Roles of unity, chaos, multiplicity?

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Linguistic Theories

• Universal / Transformational Grammar (Chomsky et
  al.) the ability to learn language is coded in
  the brain deep structures
• Relativism language determines thought processes
  (cf. Derrida There is nothing outside the
  text)
• Monogenesis all languages can be traced back to
  a proto-language
• Polygenesis languages evolved separately

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• Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions.
  Marxism. No matter how smart we get, theres
  always this deep irrational part that makes us
  potential hosts for self-replicating information.

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Religion, Viruses, and Memetics

• Memetic theory introduced by Richard Dawkins in
  The Selfish Gene (1976) and Douglas Hofstadter in
  Memetics (1980) from a Greek word meaning
  imitator
• Memes are units of information, named by analogy
  to genes (the term is now often used to refer to
  Internet jokes - thus the word itself becomes a
  self-referential example)
• Spread of memes is often compared to spread of
  viruses (e.g. viral marketing) cf. Douglas
  Rushkoff, Media Virus (1994)
• Dawkins essay Virus of the Mind (1991)
  specifically compares religion to viruses

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Snow Crash and Sumerian Mythology

• This Snow Crash thing - is it a virus, a drug,
  or a religion?... Whats the difference?
• Asherah - the Sumerian mother goddess (also
  referred to in the Old Testament) known as
  Queen of Heaven (cf. Isis, Mary)
• connection between biological viruses and memes
• The Me - divine laws and agreements
• Inanna in the Underworld - connection to Juanita
  going after Rife
• 0 and 1 in the drawing
• Religious reformers as proto-hackers (Enki,
  Jesus others too?)
• Suggests the vicious cycle of religious history
  each reform leads to rigidity in its own right

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• A really advanced hacker comes to understand the
  true inner workings of the machine - he sees
  through the language hes working in and glimpses
  the secret functioning of the binary code

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Viruses and Drugs

• Drug use, esp. steroid use, in the society
• Snow Crash as both virus and drug - similar
  effects in both computers and users?
• Snow Crash penetrates the walls of brain cells
  and goes to the nucleus where the DNA is stored
• They infect people by injecting them with the
  blood of sick hackers

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Immunity?

• Ive got so much antiviral medicine in my system
  that nothing could get through
• Your brain has an immune system, just like your
  body. The more you use it - the more viruses you
  get exposed to - the better your immune system
  becomes.
• Critical thinking as antiviral programming

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Stephensons Female Characters

• Y.T.
• 15-year-old messenger
• Streetwise and independent, but knows when to ask
  for help
• Relationship with her mother
• Significance of her name
• Enhancements? (e.g. her anti-rape device)
• Is she a typical cyberpunk heroine?
• She is briefly mentioned in The Diamond Age
• Cf. Gibson (Molly)

• Juanita
• Intellectual and religious - sees no discrepancy
• Helped establish the Metaverse
• Nature of her relationship with Hiro?
• Attitudes of her co-workers the especially
  virulent type espoused by male techies who
  sincerely believe that they are too smart to be
  sexists
• Cf. Banks (Yay) Adams (Trillian)

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Hiro vs. Raven

• Hiro does not make a fuss about being mixed-race
• Spends too much time in the Metaverse Time to
  get immersed in Reality
• Becomes a security consultant in the Metaverse

• Raven defines himself by his race and by
  historical prejudices
• Pentecostal Russian Orthodox - his religion as
  escape from his reality?
• The Western, American lifestyle had come this
  close to killing me - so he decides to kill it

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• Their skins were different colours but they all
  belonged to the same ethnic group Military
• Connection of Hiros father to Ravens - origin
  of Hiros swords

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Other Characters

• Uncle Enzo - businessman / crimelord /
  ex-soldier sympathetic gangster use and
  subversion of stereotypes about his ethnicity and
  professions
• Da5id - always...certain of everything, even
  when hes totally wrong
• Lagos - the meta-librarian
• Ng - Metaverse as nostalgic re-creation
• Fido - chapters from his POV emphasizes his
  memories of Y.T.
• Mr. Lee - stereotypical Hong Kong businessman,
  poor translations and all

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Stephenson and Popular Culture

• Globalized culture - everyone borrows from
  everyone else diversity among conformity?
• Vitaly - Ukrainian nuclear fuzz-grunge
  collectives in LA
• Uncle Enzo and Cosa Nostra Pizza Inc. - Italian
  influences on American culture
• Pop-culture presence in the Metaverse
• Sushi K - more style than substance, but lyrics
  allude to cultural fusion, outsourcing, etc. use
  of Japanese culture

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Pre- or Post-Apocalyptic Society?

• References to historical wars, but not to any
  recent ones
• Sudden transition or gradual changes?
• Disparities between rich and poor Metaverse vs.
  the Raft
• Infocalypse
• My system crashed....I had been washed in the
  blood....I belonged to the Word now
• Warnings/implications for the actual world?

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The Metaverse and/in Reality

• Preference of one over the other, and why? (e.g.
  the Gargoyles)
• Is one being developed at the expense of the
  other? (cf. Dick Gibson)
• Metaverse as re-creation of important memories?
  (e.g. Ng, the Rat Things)

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Stephenson and Other Writers

• Stephenson vs. Lem use of academic discourse
  influence of real-world academic writing
• Stephenson vs. Dick role of animals role of
  entropy
• Stephenson vs. Adams humour and social satire
  light-hearted treatment of SF conventions
  (Stephenson as Adams counterpart in cyberpunk?)
  playful approaches to serious questions AI as
  guide
• Stephenson vs. Banks treatment of anarchy
  influence of games and gamers
• Stephenson vs. Gibson treatment of virtual
  worlds, esp. in relation to reality role of
  hackers and messengers influence on actual-world
  computing