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Snow Crash

a novel by Neal Stephenson

"Hiro Worship" Page

A note about copyrights: Any material by Neal belongs to Neal. Okay, so go buy all of his books and shower him in money. However, some of these materials are impossible to find, especially his short stories. His online stories are in an even worse situation, in that there seems to be a universal rule that they must all be in the worst possible HTML format, so that nobody can actually read them. In those cases, I regretfully, and respectfully, duplicate the page, clean it up, and leave it here until/unless a competent official version becomes available.

Yes, this sucks. The sole explanations I can give are that the material's not reasonably available in any other form, I'm not making any money on it, and Neal's not losing any money on them.

Note that The Big U is now back in print! If you had a pirated version, do the right thing and go buy a real copy - I did.

Online Stories by Neal Stephenson

In the Beginning was the Command Line

Mother Earth Mother Board

In the Kingdom of Mao Bell

The Great Simoleon Caper

Spew

More Information

Cryptonomicon web site

Hotwired: Club Wired chat with Neal Stephenson 95Jan19

Hotwired: Club Wired chat with Neal Stephenson 96Dec17

Jeni's Snow Crash Site (worst web page background *ever*!)

Overview and commentary on his article Global Neighborhood Watch from the Wired Scenarios special issue (unfortunately the article itself is not apparently online).

Mark/Space book info

Breaking The Code With Neal Stephenson

Reviews of The Alphabet Vs. the Goddess by Leonard Shlain

A random subdivision/housing development/rest home name generator

Excerpts from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash

   Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down it.

   ...

   Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. ... The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist--it's just a computer graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere--none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the world-wide fiber-optics network.

   ...

   In the real world--planet Earth, Reality--there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City.

   That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.

   "The Brandy scroll wasn't just showing random static. It was flashing up a large amount of digital information, in binary form. That digital information was going straight into Da5id's optic nerve. Which is part of the brain, incidentally--if you stare into a person's pupil, you can see the terminal of the brain."

   "Da5id's not a computer. He can't read binary code."

   "He's a hacker. He messes with binary code for a living. That ability is firm-wired into the deep structures of the brain. So he's susceptible to that form of information. And so are you, home-boy."

   "What kind of information are you talking about?"

   "Bad news. A metavirus," Juanita says. "It's the atomic bomb of informational warfare--a virus that causes any system to infect itself with new viruses."

   "There's no difference between modern culture & Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or aliterate & relies on TV--which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite--the people who go into [cyberspace], basically--who understand that information is power, & who control society because they have the semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages."

Last modified: 2001Jul12
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