Snow Crash
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy.
In his 1999 essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line",Template:Full citation needed Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer.Template:Citation needed lead 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 crashTemplate:'". Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of the main influences on Snow Crash.
The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain.Template:Citation needed leadTemplate:Original research inline According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus.Template:Citation needed lead The god Enki created a counter-program, which he called a nam-shub, that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against AsherahTemplate:Citation needed (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).Template:Citation needed leadTemplate:Original research inline
Stephenson originally planned Snow Crash as a computer-generated graphic novel in collaboration with artist Tony Sheeder. In the author's acknowledgments (in some editions), Stephenson recalls:
- "it became clear that the only way to make the Mac do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept..."
Snow Crash was nominated for both the British Science Fiction Award in 1993 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994.
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