A 1990s sci-fi novel that shaped the internet, no one can match it

by Yonatan Klotz
| published One second ago

From the beginning, science fiction has been the preserve of futurists, gifted creators who weave stories not about the world of today but about the world of tomorrow. Star Trek’s impact on today’s technology is well documented at this point, but lost on today’s Internet users, a 1990s novel predicted the future World Wide Web. Snow crashby Neal Stephenson, popular internet slang in use today, Facebook’s Metaverse, Xbox, Google Earth and even Wikipedia, making it one of the most important cyberpunk books of all time.

A founding text of cyberpunk

Snow crash Follows Hiro, your standard cyberpunk hacker who makes the month as a delivery driver, and you can add Doordash and UberEats to the list of today’s technologies that exist, with disturbing accuracy, in Stephenson’s story. After receiving the “Snow Crash” virus, which manifests as visible static in the Metaverse, not a Facebook experiment, Stephenson actually named his virtual avatar world “Metaverse” in 1992; He is drawn into a journey involving her guardians, conspiracies, mega-corporations and the power of language.

The novel is dense, and Stephenson’s writing style can take some getting used to, though Snow crash Considered the defining cyberpunk novel for very good reason. This is partly in the language he uses, with today’s terms like Metaverse becoming common, but also, he made the use of “rolling” to describe someone’s character within the virtual world. Today, we don’t think of calling digital characters avatars, and the use of adjustable “smart wheels” envision a future full of random smart technology, like a toaster.

In fact, most of the appeal of Snow crash is how Stephenson saw the future as a capitalist hellscape. This is standard for the cyberpunk settings of various media that predate the novel, m Blade Runner and Shadowrun to Cyberpunk (The board game adapted approx Cyberpunk 2077) and even the contemporary novels, the Marvel comics of 2099. The difference, however, is how Stephenson accurately predicted the Internet of 2024, to the point of putting a price on public information.

Imagine the future today

The Central Intelligence Corporation (CIC), created when the CIA and the Library of Congress merged, manages the library, a private collection of information that people pay to contribute to, and in practice, it’s the wiki style very common in most online databases today, from Wikipedia to Fandom. Another part of CIC’s technology is “Earth”, a digital representation of the Earth that Google engineers even cited as influencing the development of Google Earth. of crushed snow Metaverse, although strange in today’s smartphone world, helped people imagine a connected three-dimensional digital world, including good and evil, which eventually led to Second LifeMetaverse, f Xbox Live (Microsoft executive Jay Allard deemed the novel required reading.)

Neal Stephenson’s vision of the future has become so disturbingly accurate that he has embarked on a second career as a futurist, consulting with the same kind of real-life mega-corporations that dominated the world of Snow crash. However, not all of his technology has become real. We’re still waiting for mobile railguns and robot dogs, but Boston Dynamics seems to have a good handle on the latter.

Snow crash It may have predicted and helped shape the modern internet, but perhaps because of how the novel relies so much on language, it has yet to be adapted by any studio. The first attempt to revive the novel was in 1996, but it never left pre-production. In 2017, Amazon wanted to make it an A influx series for Prime Video, but again, nothing came of it, and HBO’s last attempt was abandoned in 2021.

Many have tried, no one has adapted the story

Cyberpunk novels are similar to their retro-futuristic counterparts steampunk Peers, who, yes, were called as a slanderous response to his futuristic brother, in that they, like Snow crashSo inventive and creative that it’s hard for Hollywood to do them justice. Blade Runner It’s still one of the best in the genre, but it’s also a cult classic and not a blockbuster, whatever The Matrix The most successful franchise in the genre. of Netflix Different carbon is a big-budget modern cyberpunk series based on a fantasy novel by Richard K. Morgan, but even that only had enough juice for one amazing season before budget issues took over the second season.

It’s over 30 years, though Snow crash Remains relevant today, perhaps even more so given that you can order from a modern Delivernator while streaming music on your phone while reading about a futuristic dystopia. The Sumerian subplot, while relevant to the story and something I found fascinating, may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s still worth your time. Of course, the problem with reading Stephenson’s immediacy science fiction The classic is that you will look around and realize that we are living in this futuristic dystopia right now.