by Jonathan Klotz
| Published
From the beginning, science fiction has been the domain of futurists, talented creators who weave stories not about today's world but about tomorrow's world. Star Trek's impact on technology today is well documented at this point, but what's missed among today's Internet users is how a novel from the 1990s envisioned the future World Wide Web. Snow crashWritten by Neal Stephenson, it is popular internet slang used today, the Metaverse of Facebook, Xbox, Google Earth, and even Wikipedia, making it one of the most important cyberpunk books of all time.
The founding text of Cyberpunk
Snow crash It follows Hiro, a standard Cyberpunk hacker who makes ends meet as a delivery driver, and you can add Doordash and UberEats to the list of technologies that exist today, with an alarming level of precision, in Stevenson's story. After receiving the “Snow Crash” virus, which manifests as a static form visible in the Metaverse, rather than in the Facebook experience, Stevenson actually named his virtual world of avatars the Metaverse in 1992; He is immersed in a journey involving Sumerian, conspiracies, big corporations, and the power of language.
The novel is dense, and Stevenson's writing style can take some getting used to, however Snow crash It is considered an iconic cyberpunk novel for very good reason. This is partly due to the language he uses, where terms like Metaverse are common today, but he also popularized the use of “Avatar“to describe someone's personality within a virtual world. Today, we don't think of calling digital characters avatars, and the use of adaptable 'smart wheels' portends a future full of random smart technology, like a toaster.
In fact, most appeal Snow crash is how Stevenson envisioned the future as a capitalist hellscape. This is the standard for cyberpunk settings of the various media that preceded the novel Blade Runner and Run shadow to Cyberpunk (Backgammon game that was adapted as Cyberpunk 2077) and even contemporary novels, Marvel's 2099 Comics. But the difference is how Stephenson predicted the accuracy of the Internet in 2024, right down to putting a price on public information.
Imagine today's future
The Central Intelligence Corporation (CIC), which arose when the CIA and the Library of Congress merged, manages the library, which is a private collection of information that people are paid to contribute to, and in practice, this is the very common wiki style of most online databases Today, from Wikipedia to Fandom. Another piece of CIC technology is the “Earth,” a digital representation of the planet that even Google technicians have cited as an influence on the development of Google Earth. Snow crash Although the Metaverse is strange today in a world full of smartphones, it helped people envision an interconnected 3D digital world, including good and evil, which eventually led to… Second life,Metaverse, and Xbox Live (Microsoft CEO J. Allard considered the novel required reading).
Neal Stephenson's vision of the future became so accurate that he embarked on a second career as a futurist, consulting with the same kind of giant corporations that dominated the world of technology. Snow crash. However, not all of his techniques became real. We're still waiting for portable railguns and robotic dogs, but Boston Dynamics seems to have a good handle on the latter.
Snow crash He may have envisioned and helped shape the modern Internet, but perhaps because the novel relied so heavily on language, it has not yet been adapted by any studio. The first attempt to bring the novel to life was in 1996, but it never left pre-production. In 2017, Amazon wanted to make it My neighbor series for Prime Video, but again, nothing happened, and HBO's latest attempt in 2021 was abandoned.
Many have tried, but no one has changed the story
Cyberpunk novels are similar to their retro-futuristic ones com. steampunk Its counterparts, which, yes, were named as a sarcastic response to their future sibling, in that they're, like Snow crashare so imaginative and creative that it's difficult for Hollywood to do them justice. Blade Runner It's still one of the best films in the genre, but even that is a classic rather than a blockbuster Matrix The most successful franchise of this type. Netflix Variable carbon It is a modern, big-budget cyberpunk series based on the fantastic novel by Richard K. Morgan, but even that only had enough juice for one amazing season before budget issues bogged down the second season.
She is over 30 years old, however Snow crash It's still relevant today, perhaps even more so since you can order from a modern Delivernator while streaming music on your phone while reading about a future dystopia. Although the Sumerian subplot is relevant to the story and something I found fascinating, it may not be of interest to everyone, but it is still worth your time. Of course, the problem is in reading Stevenson's moment Science fiction The classic is that you'll look around and realize we're living in this futuristic dystopia right now.
