Despite what you might have been told, science fiction books have a lousy track record at predicting the future. But let's be grateful. Who really wants aliens to invade the earth, asteroids to hurtle toward our planet, or mutants to take over our inner cities? Do you want Big Brother watching you? Or "firemen" burning down the local Barnes & Noble? If you could pick a story to come true, you are advised to choose a Harlequin romance or Hollywood rags-to-riches tale, while bypassing most of the classics of science fiction and fantasy.
Yet every once in a while, a science fiction author hits the mark, whether through deep wisdom or just dumb luck. Jules Verne anticipated to an uncanny degree the later Apollo space program in his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon —even to the extent of picking a launch site near Cape Canaveral, choosing a crew of three astronauts and describing with reasonable accuracy the size of the space capsule and duration of the journey. The word "robot" came from a 1920 play by sci-fi writer Karel Čapek.. Aldous Huxley anticipated cloning and genetic engineering in Brave New World (1932). The term "cyberspace" was invented by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer (1984) which also went a long was toward outlining its ramifications, including firewalls and hackers.
Eight years after Neuromancer , Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash (1992), which further explored the concept of virtual reality, his book's release coinciding with the launch of the World Wide Web. Indeed Stephenson anticipated the later evolution of both the web and sci-fi books with remarkable prescience. Time magazine would eventually select Stephenson's novel as one of its "All Time" (pun apparently intended) English-language novels — which despite the name was not "all time" but only included titles dating back to 1923. Even so, this placed Stephenson in the elite company of Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Fitzgerald and other literary lions.
Don't be misled by the company he keeps. Stephenson's campy, lighthearted tone is worlds away from Absalom, Absalom! or Mrs. Dalloway . But the "lost generation" of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises might not be too much of a stretch. In the world of Snow Crash , citizens live in "burbclaves," work at "franchulates" and spend their spare time in the virtual reality "Metaverse." Stephenson populates his book with disillusioned young people who learn how to work the system without ever becoming compliant cogs in its operation.
You don't need to dig deep here to find the secret meaning. The novel's protagonist is even named Protagonist — Hiro Protagonist, to be specific. He starts out, in chapter one, as pizza deliverer for Uncle Enzo and CosaNostra Pizza. Could we get any more obvious? In time, Protagonist discovers the impending threat posed by the spread of "Snow Crash" through the Metaverse — think of "Snow Crash" as a cross between a computer virus, a narcotic and a cult. This is something more than your usual MacGuffin, even as it serves as a springboard for adventures on land, air, sea and cyberspace. Along the way, our author mixes in doses of hip- hop, geek talk and Sumerian mythology. A few years after the publication of Snow Crash , Stephenson would start writing big, bloated novels that ramble through centuries the way a flâneur strolls through the Jardin du Luxembourg, but even at this early stage one picks up on his nervous energy and willingness to stretch the story to bring in the most disparate elements.
In addition to the inherent appeal of its extravagant story, Snow Crash has gained some renown as the original source of the now commonplace concept of an online avatar . If not for Stephenson, only Hindu deities might possess avatars, but our author made it possible for everyone on Facebook and Twitter to follow in the footsteps of Vishnu and Shiva. Here is the relevant passage from Snow Crash , describing a cyberspace avatar:
"He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse....If you are ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup."
At this stage of his career, Stephenson could still make his points with a light, irreverent touch — in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the late Kurt Vonnegut. "When you are wrestling for possession of a sword," he writes, "the man with the handle always wins." Or: "There's only four things [Americans] do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery." Some of the funniest sections of the book do little to advance the plot—the interlude about Japanese rapper Sushi K's attempt to build a following in Los Angeles may be my favorite part of the book—but demonstrate that Stephenson doesn't need to go highbrow to show off his talent.
I'm Sushi K and I'm here to say I like to rap in a different way.
So I will get big radio traffic When you look at demographic
Sushi K research statistic Make big future look ballistic
Speed of Sushi K growth stock Put U.S. rappers into shock.....
Snow Crash was praised early on by a disparate cadre of supporters, including Timothy Leary and William Gibson, but not everyone saw a future classic when first peering into this novel. Upon its initial release, Kirkus Reviews scorned Stephenson's book: "The flashy, snappy delivery fails to compensate for the uninhabited blandness of the characters. And despite the many clever embellishments, none of the above is as original as Stephenson seems to think. An entertaining entry that would have benefited from a more rigorous attention to the basics." Even as the book became a cult classic, a backlash set in from academics and the literary elite. Philosopher Richard Rorty weighed in with an intriguing dismissal: "Novels like Stephenson's...are novels not of social protest but rather rueful acquiescence in the end of American hopes." Summarizing this position in the context of his critique of Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels explains that such a perspective implies that "the problem with Snow Crash is not that it isn't true — after all, it's a story — but that it isn't inspirational."
The fact that such interpretative stances toward fiction are not uncommon hardly compensates for their reductionist heavy-handedness. If "inspirational" is the measuring rod for our stories, Jonathan Livingston Seagull would be superior to Madame Bovary and Paulo Coelho would outrank Dostoevsky. For all its unhinged and campy elements, Snow Crash is an important book. It anticipated many of the elements of the world we now inhabit, and what it lacks in psychological depth it more than makes up for in brashness and vitality. True, the very success Stephenson had in predicting the future means that many elements in this novel will no longer surprise or shock us—hackers bringing down the CIA web site or flash riots caused by Twitter are familiar headlines in the current day. But Stephenson hardly needs cyberspace wonders, when his panache and storytelling skills work so well on that old-fashioned throwback known as the printed page.