Snow Crash  

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A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)
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A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

Snow Crash is Neal Stephenson's third novel, published in June 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, its chaotic structure contains many references to history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, geography 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. About the Macintosh, Stephenson wrote 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 modern computers after a GPU crash.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Snow Crash" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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