Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

Recently bought Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. Was ambushed while at PageOne, heh.

Anyway it's amazing! The book was released in 1992, and seems to predict alot of what we are already seeing in how data is collected and people are being represented online. I especially like the concept of the "Earth" programme.

And it's a really cool bonus that I started reading the book about 1 week after I saw future Hiro in "Heroes" with the cool getup and katana on his back - of course Hiro Protagonist is half-black half-Japanese/Korean, but that's not the point.

Anyway - worth a read, especially if you're a mythology addict like me. He links the whole story up using Sumerian mythology as a base, though other than his theories about the primordial language, I would also say that the way the story turns out, there is also an element of prophetic mythology, as in how many of the myth / belief systems seem to re-run the same event multiple times within the stories, either by having the same pattern of events re-running in two character's stories, or by having prophecies for the future set-up based on the events of an existing mythic story. It could even be both, with character A, in his story, being told a prophecy which mirrors a mythic story of character B who A is also aware of, and then going on to fulfil that prophecy, so that we actually are aware of the story 3 times - once in B's life, once in the prophecy in A's life, and one in A's life when he actually enacts the event.

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