Snow Crash

Snow Crash is Neal Stephenson's third novel, published in 1992. It follows in the footsteps of cyberpunk novels by such authors as William Gibson and Rudy Rucker but differs from its predecessors in that it includes much satire and black humor. Like many of Stephenson's other novels it contains references to history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, and philosophy. Stephenson explained the title of the novel in his 1999 essay In the Beginning...was the Command Line as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "when the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set — a 'snow crash'". A similar behavior can be observed on computers with graphic cards after a GPU crash. The story takes place in Los Angeles, in the area formerly known as the United...