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Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

_Snow Crash_ is one of Neal Stephenson's best, including the cinematic ending.

The novel's depiction of different tribes and factions is done with care and respect, so that the cultural melange of ethnicities, customs, and technologies is convincing and compelling.

Given Stephenson's sensibilities in _Snow Crash_, I wonder if Amazon will have the forthrightness and integrity to cast Hiro Protagonist as mixed-race black and Korean. [0]

  > His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean
  > woman whose people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro
  > didn't know whether he was black or Asian or just plain
  > Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant,
  > talented or lucky.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=RMd3GpIFxcUC&pg=PA61#v=one...

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I do agree it's good, though I personally prefer Diamond Age, but I also think it has the Standard Stephenson Ending Problem. The ending really is a great action sequence, and resolves the immediate problem that the action sequence was about -- Snow Crash is disarmed -- but it's also more a stopping-point than an actual ending to the plot. There's a lot of "what happened next?" both with the overarching stuff and with the specifics of what happened to all the major characters, so there's not much closure.

There's a certain amount of circumstantial evidence that Diamond Age is set in the same universe decades later, which probably answers at least a bit of that, particularly if you assume a certain character is Y.T. based on one reference. But still, that's not much of a save for Snow Crash viewed as a complete story in itself.

Please tag your spoilers!

You know, people who are a season behind on TV shows have sense enough to stay away from threads about the show.

I think we can expect the same for a book that's celebrating its 25th anniversary.

This isn't a thread about the content of the book to be fair.

Spoiler....

Eh, it's a 25 year old well-known book, and the spoiler was "the good guys win".

Everyone fawns about it and it sounds like an awesome novel, but I've tried reading it three times and every time I can't get past the fact that the hero (the protagonist, if you will) is literally named Hiro Protagonist. I know it's supposed to be funny, but after my eyes see those words five or six times, I can't do it anymore. Maybe Neal was the first, maybe he does it best, but I've read too much shitty sci-fi where heavy-handed slaps to the face like that are far too common, and it really ruins any plot the book gets going for me. I have a hard time reading the book when I'm imagining the author's shit-eating grin as he wrote it.

I'm sure it's an awesome book, but I really need a copy where someone did a find-and-replace and changed the hero's name to something other than Hiro.

Your problem with a book that begins with high speed pizza delivery by a coder-ninja into a fortified corporate suburb on behalf of a mafioso pizza company... is that the protagonist is named Hiro Protagonist?

I would have expected suspension of disbelief to have been broken somewhat earlier, if that's an issue.

>high speed pizza delivery by a coder-ninja into a fortified corporate suburb on behalf of a mafioso pizza company

That's really freaking awesome!

>the protagonist is named Hiro Protagonist

Super lame.

That's why it tears me up. I really want to like it.

Sometimes the terrible writing is what breaks the suspension of disbelief.

Very true. I read the Mistborn series and absolutely loved every minute of it, so I picked up The Way of Kings thinking I like Brandon Sanderson and it's a popular book of his. I didn't make it past the second chapter because the story demands I memorize dozens of ridiculous names, made-up words, magical objects, and fictional cities right off the bat.

Suspending disbelief is not the problem. The problem is when the author writes something so unbelievable that there's never a chance to suspend. It's all disbelief, all the time.

Again maybe I'm ruined by years of reading bad sci-fi and fantasy, maybe I would have been better off if I read it 20 years ago. But Snowcrash and The Way of Kings both start their story with all of the hallmarks of every awful book I've ever read.

I'm sure the durian fruit tastes great, but unfortunately I've smelled a dumpster before and now durian is ruined to me forever.

> I didn't make it past the second chapter because the story demands I memorize dozens of ridiculous names, made-up words, magical objects, and fictional cities right off the bat.

Is that a requirement for that book? Stephenson's Anathem starts off with a word-dump full of vocabulary that you as the reader will not know, but everything slowly becomes clearer.

On the other hand, I gave up on Stephenson's Baroque Cycle for much the same reason you mention.

It might not be a requirement to memorize all of the words, but then again it's hard to tell which ones will still be important later on. It does add a significant mental load not only trying to pronounce the words, but try to remember them and then try to recall those memories when the word is referenced later in the story.

I had a hard time with Game of Thrones for the first few seasons too, because of the absolutely massive cast of characters. It became easier when most of them died off. It's one of the reasons I don't read a whole lot of fantasy novels, every author considers themselves a Tolkien and has to show off how much work they put into world-building.

YT: "Stupid name."

Hiro: "But you'll never forget it."

I was excited by Snowcrash (the first chapter is awesome) but the plot kind of dissolves into a lukewarm mush by the end. AFAIK, people tend to love Snowcrash for the ideas and the world building rather than the plot.

Granted. And I certainly think Stephenson is the weaker of the names I'm about to mention.

But I don't exactly remember stellar plots from Gibson (earlier works) or Ridley Scott either. The cyberpunk-influenced genre is essentially defined by everyday troubles, draped with techno-decoration.

Personally, that's one of the reasons I like it. The fusion of slice-of-life pedestrianism w/ in medias res pacing always came across as more believable than any grand opera.

Statistically, significantly rare interesting events are far more likely to happen to a janitor than the King / Queen of the Universe.

IIRC, the reason the first chapter is so much better is that it started out as a comic book. After that peters out, he sorta falls back into long exposition with librarian AIs. Perhaps some day, story boarding will be a required part of Stephensen's novel writing process.

I thought it was characterization: the character probably picked that name for himself, like Da5id.

I read it when it came out and I enjoyed it then. It had some neat ideas (about online communities and how people would use them; CIC Earth; etc) but really it's just a book and it's okay to not like it for any reason. Also, it's 25 years old now, and some of it hasn't aged well.

I do remember disliking the hyperbole of exaggeration (In a few of his early books) - the fractal heatsink, the sharpness of the obsidian blade, the politeness of the tea, etc.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=843

1. Buy the book 2. Download an epub from somewhere 3. Open it up in an epub editor 4. Find / replace!

Would it help if you thought of it as a pseudonym?

Try listening to the audiobook instead.

Ok freehunter ;)

Hell I'm not even the hero of my own story, let alone a massively popular sci-fi novel :)

Hiroaki.

It's meta - breaking the 4th wall - breaking your suspension of disbelief. Rick & Morty do it all the time. Kind of cheesy, but not a big problem, especially on audio book. I hope they rename the character too.

Yeah, and make him a white guy. YT can age 10 years and become a romantic interest. Change Raven into a Chinese character, add in a subplot about Bitcoin, remove the motorcycle stuff, maybe move the setting of the Raft to something easier to film - like outskirts of LA...

Bleah.

Chloë Grace Moretz ("Hit Girl") would make a great YT. She's convincing as a snarky tough girl.

The Raft would be quite do-able. After all, there was Waterworld. (I met the guy who did the Softimage water shader for that. It worked out much better for him when he did the water shader for Titanic.) Worn-out ships are easily available. Chase scenes in open water are easier than ones near land, and you can add all the background ships in CGI.

There are ways to get the cost down. Watch this trailer for the Blade Runner remake.[1] Nothing expensive there, except old Harrison Ford. A smoke and fog world brings the costs down.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T2b0mp2hco

I'm being sarcastic at someone's suggestion that Hiro's name ought to be changed. I'm not actually suggesting any of this happen; it would be a travesty.

Which leads to an interesting question: how many mixed race talented black & korean actors are there of the right gender and age?

In LA? probably at least a few...

Would love to see a Seveneves cinematic production! A trilogy or three-part series could do well.

Ron Howard was working on one, but put it on hold to work on the Star Wars Han Solo movie

I find it really sad that the first question is about what races are the characters, and what races might the actors be.

I think there's a lot more to literature and cinema than a matrix for the demonstration of ethnicities.

(Sure, ask these questions if they're important to you. But don't make them be your chief criteria in judging the work.)

The ethnicity of Hiro and Raven are rather relevant to the plot (as well as other considerations within the novel - many Burbclaves are ethnically-divided), and given the amount of whitewashing Hollywood is prone to, it's a legitimate concern.

If Hiro ends up being played by a blonde Norwegian, it wouldn't be the end of the world, but it also wouldn't be Snow Crash. At that point, why make him a swordsman? Does YT have to be so much younger than him that the possibility of a romance is excluded? Can we tighten up the plot by ditching all the boring religious stuff? Is there any way we can work in a Transformer? etc., etc.

I don't see anything which indicates this would be the commenter's chief criterion in judging the work....

Of course there's a lot more to literature and cinema than just racial questions. There's so much that you can't possibly cover everything. Why is it that only racial questions get these "you should consider other things too" responses?

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