The 90s Sci-Fi Novel That Shaped The Internet, No One Can Get Rid Of It

Posted by Jonathan Klotz | Published 1 second ago

From the beginning, science fiction has been the domain of futurists, gifted creators who weave stories not about the world today but about the world of tomorrow. Star Trek’s impact on today’s technology is well documented at this point, but lost among today’s Internet users is how the 90s novel envisioned the future of the World Wide Web. Snow Crashby Neal Stephenson, popular internet slang used today, the Metaverse of Facebook, Xbox, Google Earth, and Wikipedia, making it one of the most important cyberpunk books of all time.

The Basics of Cyberpunk

Snow Crash you follow Hiro, your typical cyberpunk criminal who makes a living as a delivery driver, and you can add Doordash and UberEats to the list of modern technologies that exist, with a disturbing degree of accuracy, in Stephenson’s story. After discovering the “Snow Crash” virus, which manifests itself as visible static in the Metaverse, not a Facebook experiment, Stephenson actually named his avatar world the Metaverse in 1992; he has embarked on a journey involving Sumer, conspiracy, big corporations, and the power of language.

The novel is dense, and Stephenson’s writing style can take some getting used to, though Snow Crash is considered the defining novel of cyberpunk for very good reason. It’s part of the language he uses, and today words like Metaverse are familiar, but he also popularized the use of “avatar” to describe someone’s character in the virtual world. Today, we think nothing of calling digital characters avatars, and the use of convertible “Smartwheels” foresaw a future full of random smart technology, like a toaster.

In fact, most of the appeal of Snow Crash it is how Stephenson imagines the future as a capitalist hellscape. That’s typical of the different media cyberpunk settings that predate the novel, since Blade Runner again The Shadowrun to Cyberpunk (top table game adapted as Cyberpunk 2077) and contemporary novels, Marvel’s 2099 comics. The difference, however, is how accurately Stephenson predicts the Internet of 2024, to the extent that he places a value on public knowledge.

Seeing Today’s Future

The Central Intelligence Corporation (CIC), formed when the CIA and the Library of Congress merged, runs a library, a private collection of information that people are paid to contribute to, and in fact, this is a very common style of wiki. of many online databases today, from Wikipedia to Fandom. Another piece of CIC technology is “Earth,” a digital representation of the planet that Google experts even cite as an influence on the development of Google Earth. Snow Crash’s The Metaverse, although a mystery today in a world with smartphones, helped people imagine a connected 3D digital world, combining good and evil, which eventually led to Second LifeMetaverse, and Xbox Live (Microsoft executive J. Allard considers this novel essential reading.)

Neal Stephenson’s vision of the future has become so disturbingly accurate that he has started a second career as a futurist, consulting for the same kind of big corporations that actually ruled the world. Snow Crash. Not all of his technology became reality, however. We’re still waiting for handheld guns and robot dogs, but Boston Dynamics seems to have a good handle on the latter.

Snow Crash it may have envisioned and helped shape the modern internet, but perhaps because of the novel’s heavy reliance on language, it has yet to be adapted by any studio. The first attempt to bring the novel to life was in 1996, but that did not leave the pre-production. In 2017, Amazon wanted to make it a Prime Video broadcast series, but again, nothing came of it, and the latest attempt, by HBO, was abandoned in 2021.

Many Have Tried, No One Has Changed the Story

Cyberpunk novels are like their retro-futuristic steampunk counterparts, which are, of course, named as a tongue-in-cheek response to their futuristic brethren, by saying, Snow Crashso wildly inventive and creative that it’s hard for Hollywood to do them justice. Blade Runner it’s still one of the best in the genre, but even that is a cult classic and not a blockbuster, making the Matrix franchise the most successful of the genre. Netflix’s Modified Carbon it’s a modern, big-budget cyberpunk series based on Richard K. Morgan’s fantastic novel, but even that had enough juice for one amazing season before budget problems brought the second season to its knees.

It’s over 30 years old, though Snow Crash it still works today, perhaps even more so given that you can order from a modern Delivernator while streaming music on your phone while reading about a futuristic dystopia. The Sumerian subplot, while relevant to the story and something I found interesting, may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s still worth your time. Of course, the problem with reading Stephenson’s fast-paced sci-fi classic is that you’ll look around and see that we’re living in that futuristic dystopia right now.