By Jonathan Klotz | Updated
From its inception, science fiction has been the domain of futurists, gifted creators who weave stories that are not about the world of today, but about the world of tomorrow. Star Trek’s influence on today’s technology is well-documented at this point, but what a ’90s novel imagined the future World Wide Web would be unknown to today’s internet users is unknown. Snow accidentby Neal Stephenson, popular internet slang used today, Facebook’s Metaverse, Xbox, Google Earth and even Wikipedia, making it one of the most important cyberpunk books of all time.
A founding text of cyberpunk
Snow accident follows Hiro, your standard cyberpunk hacker making ends meet as a delivery driver, and you can add Doordash and UberEats to the list of present-day technologies that exist in Stephenson’s story with a disturbing level of accuracy. After receiving the “Snow Crash” virus, which manifests itself as visible static in the Metaverse rather than the Facebook experiment, Stephenson actually named his virtual world of avatars the Metaverse in 1992. He is drawn into a journey that includes Sumeria, conspiracies, megacorporations and the power of language.
The novel is dense and Stephenson’s writing style can take some getting used to, but Snow accident is considered the defining cyberpunk novel for good reason. This is partly due to the language he uses, with terms like “metaverse” being common today, but he also popularized the use of “avatar” to describe a person’s character in the virtual world. These days we don’t believe in calling digital characters avatars, and the use of adaptable “smartwheels” envisioned a future full of smart technologies like a toaster.
In fact, most of the appeal of Snow accident lies in how Stephenson imagined the future as a capitalist hellscape. This is standard for the cyberpunk settings of various media that predate the novel Blade Runner And Shadow Run To Cyberpunk (the table game that was adapted as Cyberpunk 2077) and even the contemporary novels, Marvel’s comics of 2099. The difference, however, is how Stephenson accurately predicted the Internet of 2024, right down to putting a price on public information.
Imagining the future of today
The Central Intelligence Corporation (CIC), formed by the merger of the CIA and the Library of Congress, runs the Library, a private collection of information that people are paid to contribute, and in practice this is the widely used wiki- Style of most online databases today, from Wikipedia to Fandom. Another piece of CIC technology is “Earth,” a digital representation of the planet that Google engineers even cited as an influence on the development of Google Earth. Snow accident Although somewhat quaint today in a world with smartphones, Metaverse helped people imagine a connected 3D digital world, including the good and the bad, which ultimately led to this Second lifethe Metaverse and Xbox Live (Microsoft executive J. Allard considered the novel required reading.)
Neal Stephenson’s vision of the future has become so disturbingly accurate that he has embarked on a second career as a futurist, consulting with the same kind of megacorporations that in reality ruled the world Snow accident. However, not all of his technology has become real. We’re still waiting for portable railguns and the robot dogs, but Boston Dynamics seems to have the latter well in hand.
Snow accident may have conceived and shaped the modern internet, but perhaps because the novel relies so heavily on language, it has yet to be adapted by any studio. The first attempt to bring the novel to life occurred in 1996, but that attempt never progressed beyond pre-production. In 2017, Amazon wanted to turn it into a streaming series for Prime Video, but again, nothing came of it, and HBO’s most recent attempt was canceled in 2021.
Many have tried, but no one has adapted the story
Cyberpunk novels are similar to their retro-futuristic steampunk counterparts, which were named as a tongue-in-cheek response to their futuristic siblings, insofar as they are Snow accidentso incredibly imaginative and creative that it’s difficult for Hollywood to do them justice. Blade Runner is still one of the best in the genre, but even that is a cult classic rather than a blockbuster, making the Matrix franchise the most successful in the genre. Netflixs Altered carbon is a big-budget modern cyberpunk series based on a fantastic novel by Richard K. Morgan, but even that only lasted for one fantastic season before budget issues derailed the second season.
It’s over 30 years old, though Snow accident is still relevant today, perhaps even more so when you consider that you can order from a modern delivery man while streaming music to your phone and reading about a futuristic dystopia at the same time. The Sumerian subplot, while relevant to the story and something I found fascinating, may not be for everyone, but it’s still worth the time. Of course, the problem with reading Stephenson’s instant sci-fi classic is that you look around and realize that we’re living in this futuristic dystopia right now.