Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (4 stars)

The United States of America is reduced to a suburb-state within its previous geographic boundaries; millions live in palaces in a virtual reality Metaverse while their bodies sit in 'houses' in former storage garages subdivided into a concrete ghetto; the mafia delivers pizzas, and being a pizza delivery driver (a 'Deliverator') is a high-risk superstar occupation like being a formula-1 driver of decades past:

When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Stephenson creates a fantastic cyberpunk world, with a good eye for forward-looking technology advancements, given it was penned in 1992. He has a wry sense of humour and witty writing style that pervades all parts of the book, including our hero protaganist 'Hiro Protagonist' and offsider 15-year-old Your's Truly or 'Y.T.':

"Y.T. Where are you?"
"In the parking lot of a Safeway on Oahu," he says. And he's telling the truth; in the background she can hear the shopping carts performing their clashy, anal copulations.

Everything is a franchise: countries, crime, the mafia, religion. Compton is still a dangerous place, run by managers following instructions from a three-ring binder that tells them how to run their Narcolombia franchise. I loved the description of Fed-land where penny-pinching is taken to the extreme such that employees need to establish toilet-paper communal funds to stock bathrooms.

Snow crash is wreaking havoc on the Metaverse, and the real world at the same time. Cue the incredibly boring, ridiculous explanation of verbal viruses based on Sumerian ancient texts and other religious historical research in worse-than-Dan-Brown format.

"Deuteronomy is the only book of the Pentateuch that refers to a written Torah as comprising the divine will: 'And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, from that which is in charge of the Levitical priests; and it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, by keeping...

yawn. It is a tragedy that Stephenson wrote these passages where Hiro has lengthy discussions with the Librarian. They destroy the flow of the book, and seem to only exist because Stephenson spent a lot of time doing this research and wanted to include it in the final product. The book would have been far better with no explanation, or a limited summary such as Hiro gives to Mr. Lee and Uncle Enzo. It cost you a star Mr. Stephenson, I'm sure you're crushed.

4 stars.