Thursday, December 08, 2005

Snow Crash

Over Thanksgiving, I had some free time to do some reading for pleasure, and finally finished Snow Crash.

Wow. I know I'm about 15 years behind, but what an amazing book. After reading tons of business/marketing/pop-culture psychobabble back-to-back, picking up an amazing piece of fiction was a treat.

It has a great Wikipedia page, but be warned that it contains spoilers. The coolest thing by far was realizing how many of Neal Stephenson's imaginative ideas are coming true today - especially around the idea of the metaverse where people buy virtual real estate that sustains economies. I recently read a news story about this happening today. What will happen tomorrow? And will governments become less significant as corporations become more and more globalized?

2 comments:

The Rural Technocrat said...

I know I'm way late with this but thank you! Yes this book is awesome. I actually just read it this past summer and after six months of nagging have gotten my sister just today to start to read it. It's so awesome.

Anonymous said...

Snow Crash is by far one of the best books I've ever read. Now that you're done with that, I highly recommend Cryptonomicon. I only know two other people who have made it through to the end, but the story is nothing short of amazing. Diamond Age is a bit of a tougher read - the end brings a very physical twist to the process of debugging.

Thanks for the Snow Crash wikipedia link...I'm all over that now.