I’ll cut to the chase—I didn’t like this book very much. I think the author is incredibly talented and like a lot of his more recent novels, but this one kept missing for me. It is cited with reverence by a certain class of aging computer-savvy hacker-adjacents, but for a “beloved classic of the genre,” it sure is heavy with casual slurs and a real woof moment with its 15-year-old-girl-has-sex-with-adult-man plot point. I’m not sure how the extreme satire doesn’t dent the image of Snow Crash’s Metaverse as prescient holy text in a world before google parent-company Alphabet based their whole pitch deck on Hiro’s gargoyle-lite always-online surveillance gear, but here we are.

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