Snow Crash is 100% over the top satire but also 100% enjoyable. When the first chapter of the book introduces you to your protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, you know you're in for something a little off.
It is a story that knows exactly how stupid it is, and that means it can get away with anything. It's just played so straight that half the target audience misses the joke. That's like if Bored Of The Rings was somehow more popular and enduring than the Tolkein novels it mocked - the high-fantasy tropes are still there, and the book does function as a hero's journey. It just stars Dildo Bugger and his son Frito.
The measure of any adaptation - if that somehow exits development hell, one of these decades - will be the car chase in the middle. If they show it, they've failed.
Nooooo! 😭 I so badly wanted this to be real. I had even looked it up by ISBN to try and order it. The ISBN is for a book titled Brute Orbit, if anybody is curious.
No but William Gibson does have a bunch of near future novels that i recommend
I think with ChatGPT and Tinder getting in bed together recently as well as advertisers creating their own AI influencers, the book Idoru is probably a pretty decent read for anyone who wants to give him a try
This book is made-up. Snow Crash is just the closest thing in real life, and it's deliberately stupid in its own unique ways.
It's the book where Hiro Protagonist, arguably the main character, gets harpooned out of his cozy life-or-death pizza delivery job and winds up saving anarcho-capitalist North America from the most evil force in the universe: the telephone company.
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.