So the CDProjekt thread on their new game gave rise to some arguments about cyberpunk as a genre and then landed squarely on Snow Crash as a focus of controversy. It is, of course, best to blame McCullough entirely for that direction, but in his defense he probably thought he was saying something uncontroversial. Which is a nice segue. Here are the points of view I've seen expressed so far, and I will arbitrarily group them as a means of staking my position clearly: Controversial (A): Snow Crash is not purposeful parody Snow Crash was not purposeful parody to "most readers" Snow Crash is incoherent/just plain bad writing, akin to Star Wars novelizations or R.A. Salvatore. Snow Crash can be accurately assessed as a "straight" Cyberpunk work that is simply badly written Noncontroversial (B): I don't like Snow Crash for x, y, z. Neal Stephenson's writing does not appeal to me I like cyberpunk, and I don't think the digs at it in Snow Crash are worthwhile Neal Stephenson's writing evolved in ways that appeal to me more after Snow Crash This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, of course, but you can see why mixing and matching from both lists could lead to collisions where neither side is going to walk away unscathed. So let's get scathed. See, this seems entirely uncontroversial as a sentence that begins with something other than "The trouble with Snow Crash".
For what it's worth, it definitely came across as a parody to me when I first read it. "Hiro Protagonist", right? Snow Crash was 1992, and that famous Mirrorshades collection that Sterling put together was 1986. I would argue that for anybody paying attention to science-fiction in the 80s, Snow Crash definitely came across as parody. That said, the cyberpunk genre was pretty underground in a wider literary context, so any casual readers of sci-fi may not have picked up on it. Cyberpunk as an aesthetic outside of literature didn't really pick up steam until the 90s, so it's not crazy to think that many people's first exposure to it was from Snow Crash and, hence, would not have known it was parody. As far as whether it's any good or not, well, you know, personal preference. I admire Stephenson as a writer more than I actually like him, but my general love of sci-fi died sometime around Dangerous Visions, so what do I know? I like him a hell of a lot more than William Gibson, that's for sure.
I was always very tickled by the idea that people generated viruses because of linguistic drift. It should have had a section about how 1918's big flu pandemic was statistically proven to be because enough people had learned Esperanto by then.
Is it controversial to say that Neuromancer has aged terribly? I read The Diamond Age before reading Snow Crash and for some reason assumed the two took place in a shared universe. The Diamond Age certainly didn't seem like parody to me, so I guess it just didn't occur to me that when I read Snow Crash that it was meant to be. I didn't necessarily think he was a bad writer. After all, I'd follow it up with Zodiac and later would get Cryptonomicon as soon as it came out. I just figured that he was very excited about his ideas. And I don't think that the fact of a character named Hiro Protagonist is the giveaway some people seem to think it is any more than characters named Johnny Mnemonic or Molly Millions make Gibson's works (intentional) parodies. It's a world where people can choose to be who they want to be. Hell, just look at Broken Forum. We've got a couple of people here who go by punny names.
It never occurred to me that Snow Crash could be a parody. But then again, after '89 we were flooded with 40+ years worth of accumulated works (which were previously unavailable under the old communism) and they certainly didn't come out chronologically.
I'm with candide, I never got any sort of parody vibe off Snow Crash. Unmitigated awesome, yes. Parody, not so much.
They do. Sort of. Maybe. At the very least, there is a fairly clear reference back to Snow Crash in The Diamond Age ("chiseled spam"), and the backstories are generally compatible. However, it is definitely true that the tone of The Diamond Age is rather different, and it is not as overtly farcical as Snow Crash was. The opening chapters, with the character of Bud behaving like a cliched cyberpunk character and then being swiftly dealt with, are pretty clearly meant to show that the sort of behavior which would pass almost without comment in Snow Crash will no longer fly. The world of The Diamond Age is supposed to be what you get after the sheer anarchy of Snow Crash has had some decades to settle down into something a little more stable. I find the question of whether the books are literally in the same "universe" or "canon" to be uninteresting. There's no narrative reason as to why they need to be, and in fact Neal Stephenson has gone out of his way to refuse to answer certain questions about that one reference to Snow Crash. There are definitely some thematic parallels between the books (the big one being decentralized currencies leading to the collapse of nation-states), but most of these are common to all of Neal Stephenson's books. With regards to whether Snow Crash is a "parody," I think it is really easy to fart around with the definitions of words without saying anything interesting. Snow Crash has rather a lot of fun with cyberpunk conventions, and seems to rapidly oscillate between taking itself seriously and not. Whether this constitutes being a parody I will leave to your opinion.
I liked Snow Crash, and what's more, it grabbed and maintained a good bit of space in my noggin. Re-reading it after playing EQ and WoW, the Metaverse seems terribly poorly constructed, but watching California's economy tank, the real-world portions still seem prophetic :( I thought it was, not exactly parody, but deliberately exaggerated in a way that none of his other books really are. (Edit: "farcical" is more or less the word I was looking for, ty Mighty Mooquack.} And I like it, but I wouldn't like a steady diet. I mean, yeah "Hiro Protagonist" is goofy, but that's part of the point about his character -- he's the guy that names himself Hiro Protagonist, the greatest swordfighter in the world. (Because he wrote the sword-fighting program.) By the way, I probably don't have to tell this crowd, but if you haven't read Vernor Vinge's 1981 short novel True Names, go get ahold of it.
I didn't read SnowCrash as a parody the first time I read it. I thought it was a neat, darkly comic take on cyberpunk themes. Later on once I had read more of the 80's cyberpunk books and I began to see it as more of a parody. I think this is because I came into it with my exposure to cyberpunk being role-playing games (Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun) so the essential silliness of the some of the elements didn't really register. I also came to it during a period where I was almost exclusively reading various RPG tie-in novels. It is much better written than the majority of those. I still really enjoy SnowCrash because it takes the cooler elements of cyberpunk and turns them up to eleven. Which tickles me the right way. I also still enjoy Neuromancer, I actually re-read it recently. Gibson's later work is better I think, but that is partly because the ideas introduced in Neuromancer are somewhat over-exposed now.
As I noted in the other thread I don't contest the author's intention to parody, nor that that intention makes it parody in an important sense, irrespective of how it was appreciated by whatever proportion of its readership. I just think that when a work of parody or satire succeeds at being a good example of what it's sending up (particularly if it's succeeding by trying to succeed, by being intentionally good as a story and not merely as mockery) it starts to be hyphenated or asterisked. In an entirely non-literary context one could categorize satirical news shows differently by the extent to which they focus on ridiculing journalistic foibles, public figures, or politicians specifically, and more recently by whether or not they begin to mutate into organs doing quasi-journalistic work, not merely in the sense of ridiculing the deserving but, say, investigating stories. They're all parody/satire, they're not all the same. I apologize for both linking to a crowdsourced "authority" operating on a lower level of rigour and sophistication, but TVtropes does have a label for works that are both parodical and yet successful (and appreciated as) the things they are parodies of and I think it's because there's definitely a no-man's land that exists for tongue-in-cheek, self-aware genre fiction. As per usual ignore about 95% of the examples cited. This is an inexact analogy because the authorial motives and means of content creation are different than with the writing of a novel, but take True Lies. To the extent that a summer blockbuster is capable of being satire or parody, it was. It was also successful as (and intended to be successful as) the best Arnold-Schwarzenegger shoots-things movies in a few years. Is it a parody of action movies or just, in bland IMDBspeak, an action-comedy? What about other genre-savvy action comedies? As I said previously I don't like to touch the Starship Troopers thing because of the semi-tangential Heinlein debates it engenders, but I judge it to be both a satire of fascistic militarism - I'd ask that those disagreeing with this just table the disagreement as we've been through that in different threads - but also, for lack of a better word, a work of "fascsploitation." One of my reasons for thinking that is the director's Robocop, because there's clearly the same tension in that. Robocop - which you should probably see if you haven't, LK - is both a Judge Dredd style ironic fascist fantasy but also a druggie-dirtbag shoot-em-up with Basil Poledouris booming away satisfyingly in the background with a conventionally heroic storyline and villains catering to both left- and right-leaning audiences.
The Dark Souls of broken forum posters was the first to reply to this thread, so our Snow Crash discussion difficulty curve has already peaked, thus making a subforum unnecessary.
I am a Snow Crash fan, as well as a Neuromancer fan, but the best cyberpunk novel IMO, is Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams, who btw is one of the most underrated sci-fi authors more generally. His Aristoi is arguably the best sci-fi novel of the 90s. As to Stephenson, I have long felt that his best book is Zodiac
I'd say this is entirely backwards--the best genre parody is always a good example of what it sends up. Mere mockery is easy and uninteresting. Pointing out the absurdities of a genre while simultaneously embracing its best elements is where it gets interesting. If you just mock, all you're saying is "I don't like this" or "this is crap". The former is uninteresting, and the latter a waste of time--there are many better ways to argue that summer action blockbusters are crap than to make one! The only reason to write a send-up of a genre is if you start with a fundamental affection for it.
I read Snow Crash well before I read anything that it might have been parodying, so I have no opinion on that subject one way or the other, except to agree with Bahimiron that Hiro Protagonist is not standing alone a signifier of parody. I tend to think Stephenson was going for humor more than parody but I'm open to the opposite interpretation. I read both Snow Crash and later Neuromancer as an adult and felt that Snow Crash was pure distilled awesome while Neuromancer was not so much. Then again, I adored Tad Williams' Otherland cyberpunk series, which I suspect will render me an outlier in this conversation, but not as far out as people who say Snow Crash is garbage.
At the time, I thought it was a hilarious, over-the-top farce, written with tongue firmly in cheek. In fact, I enjoyed Snow Crash (along with Vinges' True Names) more than anything else I ever read in the genre. But then I was never that big of a fan of cyberpunk in general, nor Gibson in particular. That probably makes me another fringe outlier in the discussion. I don't think it's Stephenson's best work though. For that, I'd give the nod to The Baroque Cycle.
Didn't realise Snow Crash could be considered parody - I'd always taken it as a brash novel from a new author. Overall, I found it a bit.. earnest? Silly perhaps? But at the same time it's full of fun and interesting ideas and isn't afraid to explore these fully. I do much prefer Stephenson's later books - Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle in particular. Stephenson has a great grip on "networks" - more so than Gibson ever did (back when I read his stuff, I don't know about now). I like how that theme plays outs in the Baroque Cycle in particular..
Eh, I get the "ah but it's the best kind of parody!" argument, but in practice I don't know that it works that way too often; is Spaceballs a good science fiction adventure movie? Plainly a goofball parody isn't the only sort of parody, but I think it's common enough for parodical works - all the umpteen pages of Mad magazine parody we all read as kids, Airplane! - to work primarily as comedy that makes reference to its subject matter.
I think Airplane! totally works as a Airport-style movie. It hits all of the same beats as those great Irwin Allen "classics" while still finding room for surreal comedy bits.
Please consider that I *like* Spaceballs, and it's a big part of my childhood. Good: Spaceballs is a tough nut to crack because it uses parody lazily on the basis of comedic attrition and breaking the 4th wall over and over and over again, which we'd later come to know intimately in its worst forms thanks to Scary Movies 1-57. It's got the benefit of some really good actors for those kinds of things, but really all it does to 9/10 of the ideas from the sci fi/fantasy it draws from is put them in juxtaposition with each other or include an awkward pause after they are presented for the obvious "isn't this ridiculous outside of its internally consistent universe". Turning a lightsaber into a dick joke is not exactly going to blow any minds. The polemical component of the parody is mostly sub-par observational comedy or really schticky stuff. Its more durable moments are there as a satirical record of the anxieties of the day, for better or worse, whether it's environmental theft or merchandising. If anything, the movie excels when the absurdism really works (like the chestburster) as a moment that is largely stapled on, or when the dialog is exceptionally good at working in pretty direct comedic notes. I haven't seen Airplane in a long time, but when I enjoyed it the first few times it was as straight (very successful) comedy because I hadn't (and haven't) seen most of the movies it apparently sends up. Which is I think what I find most curious about the Stephenson thing, that people intimately familiar with the genre don't see it as parody. Anyway, none of that has much bearing on my opinion of Snow Crash, for which many of the notes that fall flat for people are clearly parodic, has a mixed bag of satire, and underlying it an interesting but clunkily handily anthropology-scifi blend for the core arc which loops back into satire primarily at times.So basically it's a lot of things, and that's where I think the confusion arises. I like Damien's summary because it captures that tension without allowing much room for the "I will read this as if it's just sincere sci fi and find it lacking" perspective that I find strange. Most people that hate it are probably going to be in the parody that is the recurring face of the story, where you mix good ideas with awful ones (notably Uncle Enzo and the mob angle) and kind of have to take the successful experiments along with the bad. But again, that it's parody per se is really hard to contest, and I think when you look at more compelling serious works like Watt's Blindsight you find that it's really hard to get past the narrative clunkiness of big sci fi ideas so I understand the hurdles he was trying to write around.
Which then goes back to what Damien was talking about, which is what the different forms of parody really have to offer. When I think of books analogous to Snow Crash, I think of the Hitchhiker's Guide because while you know the elements themselves are parodic, the book lives or dies on how well it gets you to buy into it anyway. It's almost like how the placebo effect can still work after you know it's a placebo. When I think of movies, I think less of the "attrition" comedies like Spaceballs where the core story in terms of the genre is largely irrelevant except for how it connects bits, and more along the lines of what Scream does for slasher movies or the Three Amigos does for westerns.
On the basis of everything people've written I suspect I'll probably like it if I ever get around to reading it - certainly more than I liked Quicksilver, which I've long gathered was my bad luck for starting with. My point in replying to Damien Neil was that while one might think very highly of "parody that works admirably as an exemplar of the parodied," it's too much of a rarity to really work as "the standard of good parody." I think the idea that it's the standard of good parody perhaps comes from inverting the fact that the standard of bad parody is "lazy spoof," as exemplified by terrible Meet the Spartans-type dreck.
I liked Uncle Enzo! He was charming. I re-read it a few years ago, and it was really his terrible treatment of sex that stuck out. Like, you know, the "if you don't beat off or have sex with the spy you won't be able to crack sekrit codes as well" crap from Cryptonomicon.
Yeah, I'm waiting for it to percolate before I write about that aspect. It's complicated though, and not a one-dimensional terrible to me at the moment. I don't remember that part of Crypto at all, though it was a while ago.
In Cryptonomicon I took that as one aspect of the character's fucked-up-ed-ness (also an opportunity for a bit of Stephenson-style silliness). The grandson apparently had the opposite issue with Ol' Mr. Tate or whatever he called him while programming in prison. I really need to try Diamond Age again, I tried it after Snowcrash and couldn't get through it. Reamde is a little more Snowcrash like but irritating in its Second Amendment lust.
When I read Snowcrash I was already pretty well read in cyberpunk lore (although more a Sterling than Gibson man, myself), and I did not see it as a parody at all, just, as other folks have observed, an over the top first effort from a promising author. Funny is not parody, funny can be just funny. And as with many similar efforts, the book settles down after it gets going, and we have less "Hiro Protaganist delivering pizzas for the mob while avoiding skateboarding hitchhikers," and becomes more straight "Solve cryptic problems with action cyberpunk." And honestly? I've always missed the brash fun of young Stephenson, over the deeply involved socio-economics of the older Stephenson. I bogged down in the middle Baroque Cycle book, and never went back...
