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Comment by xhkkffbf | Hacker News Reader

I liked _Snow Crash_ but I didn't realize it was popular enough to support such a big name auction at a big name house.

Nerds with more dollars than sense. And that's looking in the mirror; I feel the pull even though I no way could afford it.

Though I'd pay a bit more not to have the NFT. :P

Really? I'm no fan of NFTs, but they do fit the Snow Crash aesthetic. You could sell it for some sweet Kongbucks.

They fit the Snow Crash aesthetic in the torment nexus sense. Though, based on his recent professional decisions it turns out that all along, Neal Stephenson was actually advocating for the torment nexus!

It's a book which helped coin the term "metaverse", written by an author who also published a hit novel about cryptocurrency in the late '90s.

It might not be a bad time to cash in on that nostalgia and new money, especially if you feel bearish about how those concepts are being reified today.

For a science fiction novel it was pretty huge--selling over 125,000 copies[1] in its first couple years, and is ranked near the top 10 of all time. This list [2] has it in 12th place overall, but a lot of the others on the list have also been movies, which raises the profile of books a lot.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/02/21/... [2] https://best-sci-fi-books.com/the-bestselling-science-fictio...

It's not that popular in itself, but Snow Crash introduced metaverse as a term and a concept which is why it has such high status.

The term perhaps, the concept is much older. I remember 'Welt am Draht', but doubt that was first either.

There are variations on this in Philip K Dick's work, like the shared hallucinatory visions in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or the shared experiences via the empathy boxes of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which might be the biggest part of the book that the movie adaptations did not attempt to translate to screen.

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