So a friend of mine is making her way through Snow Crash. Plowing, as she cleverly puts it. Reading her midpoint assessment of it reminded me of the first time I read it. How the opening passage, with The Deliverator, grabbed my attention, how everything seemed comic book slick and sf movie out-there.
It was like an especially good novelization of a wicked cool dream some nerdy guy might have. Which is why it held such appeal for me then and still does. But after a couple times through it, and having learned more about how stories get crafted, it's no longer a book I'd rave about to someone.
In fact, as much as I really deeply enjoy Stephenson books, it's not even the first Stephenson book I'd suggest someone new to him read. For sheer accessibility, I'd recommend Interface and even then I'm not convinced I'd recommend Stephenson to most people. Honestly, the kind of fetishization of information and language and long perspective view needed to really suck the marrow out of the bones of his novels is not very common.
That is, it's a niche of an already niche market. A subselection, as it were. I don't exactly construe it as a guy vs. gal thing but I think there are probably social forces which make it more likely that there is a higher percent of gears which will mesh in a guy's head when reading Stephenson than will click with a gal reader.
I know. Exceptions. If you're reading this, you're quite possibly in the self-selecting narrow range of people who read about the kinds of books I read and write about, even if you don't read those books, yourself.
So I think it's a fair assessment to believe that Snow Crash is a book which will predominantly appeal to guys, in particular a subset of guys who are computer savvy, language obsessed and who, yes, fetishize girls on skateboards. I suppose by now the market must be relatively flooded by derivative and imitative works which refer or have the underlying assumption of familiarity with Snow Crash but I haven't sought them out because, after Snow Crash hit all those buttons for me, I was satisfied.
But that implies to me that there is, somewhere subsequently, a novel which is enough like Snow Crash that the bit-head guys would dig on it but which has broadened out enough in appeal that people outside of that demographic, even just a little bit [bit-head gals, non-bit-head guys] or way, way out [non-bit-head gals] would enjoy but if that is true, even if I were to become aware of the book, would I even recognize the similarity? Would I be able to read it?
I know I couldn't read many of the Tolkien-inspired fantasy books, and when I could I would be unsatisfied at how incoherent, contradictory or blandly derived they were.
So if Alli Dalisay had asked me for a book recommendation sort of in the cyberpunk modern style, I wouldn't have said Snow Crash. I'd have said When Gravity Fails or if she wanted Stephenson in particular, Cryptonomicon -- hey, it even has scenes in the Philippines.
posted at 10:52 PDT (-0700) (comments disabled) permanent link Technorati tagged as: book, review
