What I Owed the Kitchen Sink

A coworker put a beat up paperback in my hands during a slow Tuesday close, said I owed it to myself, and she wasn’t wrong exactly. Snow Crash is Neal Stephenson, Bantam Books, 1992, and the first chapter alone is worth the whole cover price, Hiro Protagonist delivering pizza for the CosaNostra franchise with thirty minutes or less to make it happen and a car that handles like it means it. I read that opening standing at my counter after a double, laughing out loud at one in the morning, which doesn’t happen much.

Then it slows down, some. Once Hiro’s in the Metaverse and Y.T.’s running skateboard courier jobs off harpoon guns clamped to car bumpers, the book turns into two different books stapled together, and the second one is all Sumerian linguistics, nam-shubs, a computer program called the Librarian giving you Enki and Asherah lectures for pages at a stretch. I like a history lesson fine, I just wanted my hands back on the wheel. There’s a cyborg guard dog named Fido, a Rat Thing, who gets maybe four scenes total and steals every one of them, more personality than half the human cast put together.

This is the book that coined the terms “avatar” and “metaverse,” which is the kind of thing you don’t appreciate until you notice how much of the internet is still running on words this guy made up in 1992. That part holds up. The ending doesn’t, not really, all the sudden it just stops, like the kitchen ran out of ticket paper mid rush.

Worth reading for the opening thirty pages twice over, worth pushing through the middle for the Rat Thing and the ideas even when the plot loses the thread chasing them. I’d hand this to somebody who works nights and needs something that moves.