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It starts with the almost pornographic display of advanced weaponry and logistics deployed to deliver a pizza

The opening chapter takes on a whole different meaning when you consider it as a heavily embellished self-narrative by a guy who lives in a storage unit and doesn't really have a career and doesn't have any prospects, delivering pizzas for a massive chain in difficult to navigate suburban sprawl and how he fucks up his job while sticking his neck out for his employer. He's driving a noisy, used and abused, yet tricked out, vehicle in risky situations, and they give him the cheapest, lamest weapon they can to defend himself, seemingly some kind of taser that charges in the cigarette lighter. So he feels more comfortable and empowered carrying swords. He calls himself The Deliverator, a member of an elite order; this is him telling himself "I am somebody".

The opening chapter isn't necessarily about all the high tech things of this dystopian future. It's the grandiose story a normal, struggling guy tells himself to feel more important and cooler than he actually is. Everyone considers themselves to be the hero protagonist of their own story, and Hiro (assuming that's his real name and not the name he's given his persona he created to deal with his station in life) is no exception.

There's definitely some near-future sci-fi technology/situations in the story such as Reason, the ratthings, Ng's deal, most of YT's accoutrements, the nuclear warhead sidecar. But even today, things like the metaverse, the Librarian and Earth, are increasingly becoming more mundane than futuristic. But they'll get described with more flourish and flowery language than is actually warranted.

I haven't thought too much about Hiro potentially being an unreliable narrator, and it definitely puts a different spin on things! In that case I certainly think the specific design of the technologies in Snow Crash is motivated by that narrative need to make Hiro's mundane life into something exciting, rather than the literally mundane motivations behind technology in the real world. Assuming anyway that we aren't careening into a future were all technology is driven primarily by hype... that's a scary thought.

> Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an excuse to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase scenes.

I don't think that's "most" of the usage of the metaverse in Snow Crash. The entire point of the metaverse in Snow Crash is to deal with the hubris of thinking that one protocol standard to rule them all could last and provide for the opportunity for a Tower of Babel-like fall of civilization as protocol wars break down an overly centralized metaverse. All of the cool stuff is just to show how high the Tower got built before it crumbled and fell.

I think any engineers using Snow Crash as an inspiration are probably missing the "Don't Build the Torment Nexus" message of the direct ending of the book.

> Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an excuse to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase scenes.

That's an interesting take. Personally, I thought those parts were the least interesting, and the larger social commentary was the most. As always, everyone takes something different from compelling fiction.

I've never viewed Snow Crash (or The Diamond Age) as predictions of the future though. They both seem to be commentary squarely about the present to me.

Yah "mostly" might have been a bit strong on my part. I think Neil Stevenson is capable of both expressing interesting ideas and shoehorning in great excuses for action set pieces at the same time. Certainly any good science fiction can inspire different interpretations by different people!

The ideas in both Snow Crash and Diamond Age are wonderful, worthy of considerable investment, but Stephenson's writing is harmed by his inclusion of pandering to a lowest common denominator of reader: already mentioned is the character's name being "Hero Protagonist", in addition he goes into a bit too much lurid detail during a main character rape with pretty demeaning sexual name, and the climax of Snow Crash is literally a description of the abstract visual effects one would see if Snow Crash were a VFX heavy feature film. Diamond Age is more mature, but the Primer has 'super book' capabilities closer to the Matrix Download of Knowledge to enable more excitement in his narrative. Great ideas, but a bit too comic book in execution.

I always thought both of those books would make excellent graphic novel or anime adaptations.

Beyond what you have pointed out, this list of tropes helps remind us of how weak some of the characters were as well as details that seemed unnecessary or out-of-placec.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/SnowCrash

I agree, I don't think the purpose of sci-fi is to predict the future. The future is just impossible to predict due to the myriad factors, variables, unknown unknowns, and second-order+ degree effects an action can have.

The purpose of sci-fi IMO is moreso to:

1. Provide an entertaining story/narrative with technology as the main focus of the world and characters' actions

2. Define a set of concepts to help you think about technology and its possible effects on humans and the world

3. Nudge people to think about what kind of future they would want or not want and how they can use or control technology to achieve that

Here's Ken Liu talking about the purpose of sci-fi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5knkpmxXu-k

I do think predictions are an unavoidable side-effect of writing science fiction, but those predictions are almost always in service to those purposes you listed. Stephenson must think nanotech book AI is more plausible as a form idealized childhood education than say, magic fairies. But in the end he relies on our suspension of disbelief to get on past that to the big questions of nurture vs nature and the quality of human intelligence.

Yeah, I'm annoyed by writers equating "any computer that speaks like a real person" to "predicting ChatGPT". My four year old wanted a robot to clean up her LEGOs. Did she predict iRobot/Roomba?

I would be more impressed by a scenario where, e.g., a writer predicts email, and then the side effects that (1) you have to have an email to create accounts for things, and (2) mail is constantly clogged by junk mail.

Reminds me of the joke: "I invented the laptop when I opened a book turned 90° at the age of four."

Written end-to-end electronic communications was obvious going back to at least the 70s (and arguably much longer). What was aruably a lot less obvious that email/chat would become almost ubiquitous and increasingly a prerequisite for fully participating in society. (Including on the go.)

Particularly when talking computers are an extremely common trope in scifi, and had been for at least three decades before Stephenson wrote The Diamond Age, as for that matter had primitive chatbots.

The aspects of the setup for the Primer I remember (handcrafted by an individual for a specific end, reliant on human voices for narration, far-future advanced technology all around) don't feel at all like "predicting ChatGPT" either.

> They are written as stories, with technology serving narrative above all else.

Greg Egan’s stories are almost completely the opposite, with characters and plot only there to explore the science and technology.

Yah I was thinking of Diaspora a bit when I included the word "few" lol. Although even in that case Egan is willing to hand-wave away technology in one place if it is the most narratively convenient way to move the story around to some other technological or philisophical conundrum he's after in particular (like how the computer technology of a Polis is basically just magic) or if it makes the story more accessible to a human audience (like how the "gestalt" sense is usually written as straightforward human-style vision even if it is ostensibly some distant derivative there of). If we do start uploading our brains into computers I don't think I'm going to give Greg Egan credit for "predicting" it, but he did take good advantage of that trope to explore some really cool ideas.

IML the point of sci-fi is to ask interesting questions. Very rarely is that question "what is the absolutly most plausible thing that could happen next century?”.

Diaspora was a bit of a grab bag, he re-used elements from some of his short stories including basically the whole of “The Planck Dive” and “Wang’s Carpets”. But the main theme, as far as I can tell, was how far can you change a persons mind and still have them be the ‘same’ person.

Just a nitpick - The main character in Snow Crash is named Hiro, not Hero.

I have yet to come across an SF novel that is as fun as the first 2/3 of Snow Crash. Recommendations?

In terms of well-written fun I would rank "Murderbot Diaries" very highly, alongside any of the John Scalzi books I've read. For similar levels of ridiculous (and trying-not-to-be-but-kinda-still sexist) look no further than "Off to Be the Wizard". That one is best if you recruit a few programmer buddies to also read it, so you can all compare each other's resulting self-insert fan fiction. I'll also occasionally reread the "Synchronicity Wars" series if I'm feeling ill and want something sorta kooky.