Snow Crash book review

 This week I read an interesting and insightful novel Snow Crash, which was my first in-depth encounter with the cyberpunk genre, and many of its Settings were familiar to me. For example, everyone has a unique avatar in the virtual space. When a character dies in a virtual space, he or she is forced to be disconnected and can't be logged in again for some time. The eyepiece that projects the virtual space onto the retina, just like the VR in the current society. But more familiar the novel is, the more surprised I feel because the successful prediction. Most of the other new technologies in the story are also being implemented now.

 

There are many cool elements in the novel, such as a hacker with a samurai sword delivering pizza, a skateboarder and a gangster killer. The novel adopts the classic "high tech, low life" mode, described a repressive, dim future. To be more specific, although there is not a technology of disaster, but the government has collapsed, the law fails, a monopoly regime type development, inflation to have one trillion dollar bills, the house prices is too high so people even have to share a storage warehouse together; not to mention the drugs, crime, gangs and religious chaos. This is where the essence of cyberpunk is most evident.

 

As the central metaphor in the novel, Snow Crash has a solid theoretical background, not only in computer viruses but also in biological viruses, a duality that breaks the boundaries between hardware and software, body and mind. Viruses in your body can affect your mind, and viruses in your mind can affect your body. Although people speak different languages, the basic structure of how the brain works is common. In this fiction, this deep structure is like computer code, embedded in DNA, ideas and culture. It has persisted from ancient times to the present, and if there is a loophole, it can be infected. Invading the brain is no different from invading the computer. In conclusion, viruses, drugs, and religion are all the same in fiction. Unexpected forces of destruction threaten the foundations of society.


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