Snow Crash is a book that was recommended to me by a friend years ago. I bought a copy, intending to read it, but it unfortunately sat on my shelf for several years. But with my new determination to do more reading for pleasure and that fact that I’m home to stop the spread of the corona virus, I decided to pick it up and give it a try. While it took me a little while to get into it (Neal Stephenson’s world is so different, I think it took me a little while to get adjusted), I really ended up enjoying the book and loving the characters. It’s zany, funny, and exciting, but the stakes feel really high. I’m also something of a history nerd, so I actually loved Stephenson’s digressions on ancient Sumer.

Snow Crash takes place in what was the former United States, which seems to have been sold off piece-meal to corporations, franchises, and other countries, until what remains is a Balkanized hodgepodge of isolated communities. Many people’s lives are so constricted and impoverished, their main escape is the Metaverse, an internet that people access via virtual reality googles and headsets.

Hiro Protagonist is the main character (yes, I think his name is meant to be ironic), a dejected hacker who initially works as a pizza delivery boy for a Mafia-owned pizza chain. But my favorite character ended up being Y.T., an irreverent teenage girl who works as a courier, delivering goods and messages from her hi-tech skateboard. I started off thinking Y.T. was annoying, but I ended up loving how she managed to be brave, incredibly foolish, and yet show some startling amounts in insight into herself and other people. Without giving too much of the plot away, she’s also the source of some amazing drama/comedy gold that made for some of the best parts of the book. Even the ancillary characters such as Uncle Enzo, the head of the mafia, or Eng, a disabled Vietnamese immigrant who drives around in a giant tank that doubles as his wheelchair, are incredibly vivid and interesting.

The main antagonist, Raven, is equally fascinating. He at first appears like one of those silent sentinel types you see in fiction, a murdering automaton that appears to have very little interest in anything besides, well, murder. But Stephenson doesn’t leave him as a mysterious and silent evil entity. In fact, Raven’s backstory and motivations are some of the most interesting and compelling parts of the latter half of the book. And his downfall as harrowing, gruesome, and comical as almost anything I’ve ever read (how can it be all those things? You seriously have to read the book).

I’d recommend Snow Crash to anyone who enjoys science fiction or action in books. It’s honestly hard to imagine why this hasn’t been made into a movie yet, unless it’s because so many movies have stolen some of the scifi dystopian elements of the book already. I could easily imagine this as a series on Netflix. One last thing—I loved that fact that even though the book is more or less set in a dystopia, the characters still seem to be building lives and have hope. I’d like to think that even if the world “ended,” most people would just figure out a way to keep on going and build new lives in whatever grim future they faced. Throughout the centuries, millions of people have seen their lives upended by plagues, or the fall of an empire, or wars, but the vast majority of those people just did what they needed to in order to survive. I think that’s an important thing to remember, as things are starting to get bad this year with the new virus. It’s going to suck, and it will be difficult. Some people will die, others will lose their jobs, and some of us will have our world turned upside down. But we can survive, and move forward, and find hope for the future.