Snow Crash

Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Its subject matter is wide-ranging, taking in history, linguistics, anthropology and archaeology alongside religion, computer science, politics, cryptography and memetics. In 1993 it reached the shortlist for the British Science Fiction Award, and a year later it did the same for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The title comes from a Macintosh software failure mode in which a crash left gibberish on the screen.

America has been carved into franchised city-states, and Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia between sword fights and shifts in the Metaverse, the shared virtual world where he is somebody. When a friend views a file called Snow Crash, his computer dies and his mind goes with it. The same drug is turning up in the real world.

Hiro and a fifteen-year-old skateboard courier named Y.T. follow it back through a hired biker with a nuclear warhead in his sidecar, a religious media baron and a very old idea about language itself. The file, the drug and the biker all trace back to the same place, and the explanation connects a Sumerian myth to a virus that can be spread by words. Stephenson has cited Julian Jaynes's book on the bicameral mind as a major influence.

The novel is written in a fast, present-tense style that treats its inventions as unremarkable, and it helped popularise the word metaverse. It is a standalone story set in a world the author returned to in a later collection of linked stories.