Metaverse!

You can’t get more cyberpunk than Snow Crash.

I thought you could.  I read the book Neuromancer.  I read all of the book Neuromancer, despite wanting to quit halfway through.  That main female had sunglasses surgically fixed over her eyes, and I thought you couldn’t get more cyberpunk than that. 

I was wrong.

            Neuromancer, while a classic SF text of the eighties, got so far embroiled in its own existential questions that its characters ended up seeming shallow and barely-understood.  Snow Crash, on the other hand, started with a bang, but quickly sacrificed its flippant bad-assery for a conspiracy theory and complex character-development. 

Need specifics?  The book is by Neal Stephenson.  Set in SoCal after the U.S. has become a war-zone of corporately-owned nation-states called Burbclaves, its hero and protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, delivers pizzas for a pizza-chain owned by the Mafia.  He calls himself the “Deliverator”, and sports a katana and business card that, among other qualifications, describes him as “the greatest sword fighter in the world.”  I, personally, thought this was cajones and nothing else; to my glee, however, the reader learns a few chapters later that Hiro Protagonist actually is the greatest sword fighter in the world. 

When he almost delivers a pizza late one evening (therefore risking being whacked by the Mob), he’s saved by a teenage gal on a computerized skateboard who goes by the name of Y.T.  This, we learn, stands for Yours Truly.  Y.T. and Hiro Protagonist team up to investigate a mysterious new substance called “snow crash” which functions as a drug and a computer virus.  The trail leads them to a lot of discussion of the ancient Sumerians (the same civilization that wrote The Epic of Gilgamesh) and the tower of Babel.   Popping in and out of the Metaverse (the computer-generated virtual world), Hiro and Y.T. must undermine the apocalyptic schemes of a Texas mega-zillionaire and a dude with a nuclear bomb on his motorcycle.   They must do this while wearing swords.

Yep—can’t get more cyberpunk than that.

&

Okay, let’s rewind for a moment.  We need to retrace our steps.  What makes something “cyberpunk”?   

           Wikipedia (I know, the most scholarly of references) says that cyberpunk is a postmodern SF genre focused on “high tech and low life.”  Slap in a bit of post-industrial dystopia, a dash of film noir, and a hearty helping of techno-social revolution, in other words, and you’ve got it: cyberpunk.

From my experience, fiction that fits into this category has to have

A)    Computers,

B)    Consumerism,

C)    Self-referential humor,

D)    Large-scale social critique, and

E)     High-top sneakers.

The nineteen-eighties were when personalized computers were first sparking into life; the eighties was also the decade when cyberpunk had its strongest and most trendy hold on the American psyche.  It might have started with the movie Blade Runner (which isn’t as good as the book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, just so you know).  In any case, SF authors in the eighties were wondering how advanced electronics would affect their lives and culture in the near future.  Have we become so complacent, with our iPads and smart phones, that we aren’t willing to speculate anymore?

On a deeper level, I’d say that a lot of cyberpunk is focused on the links between how computers understand the world (i.e. as a binary system of 1s and 0s), and how humans have interpreted the world all along.  This is certainly the case with Snow Crash.  A whole section of the plot is, in fact, devoted to the convergences between linguistics and information theory.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’ll add that this book is very educational: I learned, for example, that the ancient Sumerians worshiped a god named Enki who filled the waterways and rivers with semen.

Food for thought.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to take a sharp, idiosyncratic look at language, capitalism, and computer tech.  I recommend it to anyone with a sense of humor.  And most of all, I recommend it to anyone who wants to lace up their Converses and take a step back into a simpler, radder time.  A time when turtles could be ninjas, and nobody realized that having the only black man in the Power Rangers be the “Black Ranger” was clumsily racist.  A time of intellectual rap and in-line skating.  A time before computer tech went mainstream, and a few brave writers, holed up in their basements, went on 400-page rants about how the times, they were a-changin’. 

Now, we have the advantage of being able to look back and ask if they were right.  The answer is

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<System Malfunction>

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<Cannot Analyze Data.  Reboot>

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<Who Am I>

<Am I Human>

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