Notes on 'Snow Crash' (1992) by Neal Stephenson (b. 1959)
Highly versatile Neal Stephenson has made several significant contributions to sf since the early 1990s, Snow Crash being the most important. Snow Crash is a vertiginous tale of corporate greed which pushes many of the traditional Cyberpunk tropes to their extreme. Famous for introducing the concept of the ‘Metaverse’, his hugely influential post Cyberpunk work enjoys a cult following in Silicon Valley and directly inspired the first generation of virtual world video games.