Snow crash Book

What would VR and AR be without being hooked on a potentially fatal wonderdrug, as only chance to escape bleak reality, in an anarcho capitalist nightmare controlled by corporations, organized crime, and the rest of government mutated to a bizarre self satire of bureaucracy.

In contrast to the somewhat Dickensian Diamond Age, this one is pure cyberpunk, accelerating the badass dystopian transhumanist ideals to degenerated turbo capitalistic free market terror.

One of the most famous, best, important, and mind boggling ideas of this work is that any ideology, memes, manifestations of epigenetic and cultural evolution in progress, sadly often faith and sick ideologies, are parasitic, viral information, infecting the minds of humans as a first, single, abnormal mutation in the brain of just one, possibly a bit incestuous, ape. I don´t wont to discriminate incest proponents, it´s just that one of the many, negative side effects are mental illnesses.

Mix this with the cool, quick writing style, extreme high complexity and density of ideas, philosophy, switching between action scenes and deep, linguistic introspections, inner monologues, dialogues, and social criticism, and one has a milestone of sci-fi and literature in general.

I wonder how many sci-fi movies have been influenced by literature, someone should consider making a list, because I watch close to no TV and will thereby never be able to compare it. In this case, I am not even sure if Gibson, Stephenson, or a forgotten, unknown author was the first one to mix economic criticism with VR and humanities.

I´ve said this before, don´t read all of Stephenson´s work if you aren´t really into sci-fi or like to skim and scan lengthy passages, because Diamond Age and Snow Crash aren´t like many of his other novels that are often more something like hard-science fiction, space opera, philosophical theory hybrids that are really exhausting to read, don´t care about writing conventions, and could have been much better, if just reduced to an acceptable length and included in a normal, suspenseful plot, instead of just egomaniacally letting the author drivel about whatever comes to his mind in the form he thinks is cool.

That´s how Stephenson sabotages himself and his legacy, by being too much focused on the high brow, deep, art aspect and forgetting that he once was one of the prodigies of cyberpunk and sci-fi itself before becoming unreadable for a vast majority of the bibliophiles, even sci fi holics like myself. I´ve read many of his works and enjoyed it, but won´t reread it, because the best genre of them all is my lifeblood, but I couldn´t find another author who got so hypercomplex, interwoven, and difficult or impossible to understand as Stephenson with his close to 1k page behemoths of books. Yes, they offer unique and intelligent insights and revelations, but this would taste far less bitter without the knowledge that most readers, for completely understandable, logical, and appropriate reasons, won´t ever become comfortable with it.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: