Snow Crash

Front Cover
Penguin Books Limited, Oct 27, 1994 - Fiction - 448 pages

THE 30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH NEW, NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED MATERIAL

After the Internet, what came next?

Enter the Metaverse - cyberspace home to avatars and software daemons, where anything and just about everything goes. Newly available on the Street - the Metaverse's main drag - is Snow Crash. A cyberdrug that reduces avatars in the digital world to dust, but also infects users in real life, leaving them in a vegetative state.

This is bad news for Hiro, a freelance hacker and the Metaverse's best swordfighter, and mouthy skateboard courier Y. T.. Together, investigating the Infocalypse, they trace back the roots of language itself to an ancient Sumerian priesthood and find they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.

In this special edition of the remarkably prescient modern classic, Neal Stephenson explores
linguistics, computer science, politics and philosophy in the form of a break-neck adventure into the fast-approaching yet eerily recognizable future.

'Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the twenty-first century' William Gibson

'Brilliantly realized' New York Times Book Review

'Like a Pynchon novel with the brakes removed' Washington Post

'A remarkably prescient vision of today's tech landscape' Vanity Fair

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About the author (1994)

Neal Stephenson is the author of New York Times bestsellers including The Diamond Age, Zodiac, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World, REAMDE, Anathem, Seveneves, Fall: or Dodge in Hell, and Termination Shock, as well as nonfiction works such as In The Beginning . . . Was the Command Line. He has worked for Blue Origin and Magic Leap, and more recently co-founded Lamina1, a startup creating an open Metaverse platform.

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