Heaven forbid anyone read the Hackernews darling, Snow Crash in a similar light.
I sometimes get put in a position where i state my favourite book. Snow Crash. What's it about they ask?
Well there's a guy who delivers pizza, 'a deliverator' they call him but his name is Hiro Protagonist (yes seriously that's the main characters name folks). It's set in the dystopian future where you have to deliver pizza in under 30minutes or face public execution for the entertainment of the people who didn't get their pizza in time. He uses a skateboard and grappling hooks to get around and has samurai swords because he studies the way of the blade. He logs into the metaverse where he's a hardcore hacker by night. He ends up meeting a biker who has a nuclear bomb in a sidecar with a tattoo on his forehead that reads POOR IMPULSE CONTROL... (i could ramble on for a while like this trying to explain what it's about but you probably get a sense for it).
I actually think Neil Stephenson was intentionally trying to write the most ridiculous book possible but the truth is the book is FUN. I don't care about clever plots or prose. I want FUN. Da Vinci code is similar. It's an Indiana Jones movie in book form.
I recently watched a new show called Prime Target. Watching it frustrated me as some aspects just didn't hold together, or were totally overstated. The wife would get frustrated with me in turn when I would point these out.
"How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine". I wasn't sure how to answer that at first, but I think your comment solidifies it. I can accept ridiculous and unrealistic scenarios as long as they are fun, and held together within an equally ridiculous world.
Theres a fine line between something that is clearly a dramatisation being frustrating or just fun.
> "How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine"
Marvel and Star Wars aren't fine--the writing is execrable whenever they aren't outright plagiarizing something else.
Star Wars was schlock meant to sell toys that just happened to become huge. Marvel is pretty much just straight up garbage across the board (some characters are interesting--the stories and world though are pretty uniformly trope-ridden crap).
Modern movies also have the problem that a lot of their revenue comes from overseas--China in particular. They can't risk having writing that is either too subtle for a foreign audience or cover themes that might get them banned by the government.
Thus we get Michael Bay syndrome--spectacle after spectacle and the minimum writing necessary to connect them.
(To be honest--this is nothing new to Hollywood--Michael Bay can trace his roots the whole way back through "Towering Inferno" to "Noah's Ark", etc.)
Haha, I love this. Strong opinions strongly held. Obviously you're not wrong, and I'm not arguing against this (mostly because I agree), but I do also think _some_ of the Marvel work can be quite....inspired (not sure thats too strong a stance, hear me out!), mostly around the animated medium. The What If series has been good, and I've loved the Spiderman animations, very similar to the recent TMNT movies. Just want to add the new Transformers animated movie was very enjoyable, which I wasn't expecting. So yeah, the Michael Bay-esque style gets old quickly in real life movies, but it can work really well when animated.
I'm sure alot of this can be traced back to Manga roots.
I was thinking more along the lines of simply the Hollywood movies where the dynamics are set by the enormous market forces which basically filters against anything which isn't lowest common denominator.
When you get down to comic books and animations, the market forces aren't quite so vicious and your "10% okay vs 90% of everything is crap" doesn't get so filtered out. Consequently, you get more of the standard curve--some stuff is bad, most stuff is average, some stuff is good, and a few gems poke up every now and then.
I read Wuxia (chinese cultivation novels) which can go on for over thousand chapters. And often the plot is repetitive and thin, but I like it over cheap dramatisation that can be solved if the two parties decided to talk to each other (when there's no other reason that prevent them other than not wanting to). I'd take talking and not agreeing or being powerless over not talking and creating misunderstanding every day. Especially when the plot is all about not creating the chance to talk.
Snow Crash is so hilariously, and intentionally seemingly low effort it couldn’t be pulled off without a lot of actual skill and effort. It’s literary modern art, and it is fun.
If you want the Snow Crash version of Da Vinci Code, then you might like The Illuminatus Trilogy. Robert Anton Wilson is something else. Umberto Eco's book Foucault's Pendulum is a slightly different vibe, but very entertaining read.
I’m convinced Dan Brown read Foucault’s Pendulum and thought “cool idea, I’ll write two dozen sequels where the Plan is real and nobody is punished for their epistemological sins. Also what the hell is a semiotician? My hero will be a Symbologist!”
I'm pretty much convinced that Brown cribbed his Da Vinci Code from a pulpy 80s book, this one. Annoyingly the authors didn't win their copyright case.
I remember reading it in the 90s and being very put off by the insanity and lack of logic. As it later turned out: The conspiracy theory of HBHG and DVC was in the end invented by a French document forger who in his own forgery seemed to be the last merovingian king/descendent of Christ:
I've read most of the first two books. They're difficult because there's often no real structure to them. It's like written acid. Everything just jams together and you'll read all of the words, but somewhere along the line you'll notice you've started with a cop investigating a crime and now you're in the submarine of a crazy rich person.
It's an interesting book, and it does engage, but it is also quite the trip.
Seconding this. Rare to see almost exactly the same vibe layed out like this by 3 different authors like they were doing exactly the same thing but optimizing for different levels of reader sophistication / paranoia / drug usage.
This is sometimes called conspiracy fiction, and one cool thing about it is that the form as such doesn’t strictly imply or require a specific genre, so it works just as well with any or all of sci-fi / noir / historical fiction. Apparently renowned author Dan brown can easily understand that mixing with actual treasure hunt instead of some kind of forbidden knowledge is part of the formula for giving it the most popular appeal.
While we’re at it as the op of the post I’d also suggest people give ‘murderbot diaries’ a read. Lighthearted fun books is my jam and these are right up that alley.
The super bike is later in the book and temporary. When delivering pizzas he has a car so cool and intimidating it makes other drivers get out of the way so he can deliver pizza faster. But he actually wrecks it and looses the delivery job near the start of the book. For most of the story he doesn't have any iconic means of transportation.
Hiro doesn't use a skateboard you're thinking of "YT" the courier.
Hiro uses a high-performance pizza-delivery-specific car early on and then later a motorcycle that has wheels that aren't even continuous discs, but made up of many individually coordinated linear actuators with grip-pads on the end.
Yep. His motorcycle is introduced in great detail and then afterwards Stephenson deliberately trolls us with "...after that, it's just a chase scene" and it's never mentioned again. ;)
The book also has a sex scene featuring (spoiler, I guess) a 15-year-old girl. It's probably possible to write something like that in a way that isn't gross, but Stephenson definitely didn't pull it off.
I like Stephenson, he's written some great stuff, but even ignoring that scene, Snow Crash is IMO just a bad book to read once you're out of high school.
It is kind of gross, but so are many things in many books, including in that one (eg all of the disembowelings)
For me it is less problematic than it could have been, because: YT is shown to be naive, reckless and impulsive, and Raven (is that his name? I think so) is an awful person just in general. The author is in no way implying that sex for those two is a good idea, in any way. It's just a thing that happened in the book.
It's also not a sexy scene, so it's not written to be titilating (IMO), and it's short and it does ~something for the plot.
Stephenson at the time Snow Crash was published could write brilliant sentences, so he took ten thousand of them and strung them together into a novel. He matured a lot after that, although I think it took writing the Baroque Cycle to work through his syntax obsessions.
the idea of an 0day for the brain via optic nerve stimuli in the same vein as adversarial failure cases for neural nets was the interesting bit for me.
i'm not really sure i grokked the whole 'sumerian is machine code for mankind' thing. might have to re-read it, my last go-through was in high school.
When you realize it was supposed to be a graphic novel, that makes the over-the-top scenes make so much more sense. It's a comic book without the comics.
I sometimes get put in a position where i state my favourite book. Snow Crash. What's it about they ask?
Well there's a guy who delivers pizza, 'a deliverator' they call him but his name is Hiro Protagonist (yes seriously that's the main characters name folks). It's set in the dystopian future where you have to deliver pizza in under 30minutes or face public execution for the entertainment of the people who didn't get their pizza in time. He uses a skateboard and grappling hooks to get around and has samurai swords because he studies the way of the blade. He logs into the metaverse where he's a hardcore hacker by night. He ends up meeting a biker who has a nuclear bomb in a sidecar with a tattoo on his forehead that reads POOR IMPULSE CONTROL... (i could ramble on for a while like this trying to explain what it's about but you probably get a sense for it).
I actually think Neil Stephenson was intentionally trying to write the most ridiculous book possible but the truth is the book is FUN. I don't care about clever plots or prose. I want FUN. Da Vinci code is similar. It's an Indiana Jones movie in book form.