Snow Crash summary

Shiny goggles project a brilliantly-lit boulevard in front of Hiro Protagonist’s eyes. His computer is rendering this image of a virtual reality: the Metaverse.

Real-life Hiro is broke, living in a 20-by-30 U-Stor-It in Inglewood, California. But in the Metaverse, he’s royalty. Having bought an early development license in the Metaverse, he’s got a house on the busiest part of the Street –⁠ the Metaverse equivalent of Broadway or the Champs-Elysee.

Here in the Metaverse, people are represented by avatars –⁠ audiovisual bodies. Your avatar can look however you want: beautiful, ugly, or like a giant talking vegetable. But Hiro just looks like Hiro: cappuccino-colored skin, almond-shaped eyes, dreadlocks, and matching swords.

Right now he’s headed for The Black Sun, an exclusive club coded to prevent unauthorized entry. Outside the entrance, one avatar catches his attention – an unusually tall man with long hair, a forehead tattoo, and a suspicious grin.

“You want to try some Snow Crash?” the avatar asks Hiro, proffering a hypercard –⁠ a business card representing a chunk of data. It sounds like he’s offering Hiro a drug, but that doesn’t make sense – you can’t get high by looking at bits of data. Right?

In any case, Hiro knows enough not to touch a hypercard offered by a strange avatar, and he turns inside the club.

There, he runs into his ex-girlfriend, Juanita Marquez. She also hands him a hypercard, this one labeled with the word BABEL. She says it’s loaded with video on L. Bob Rife, the oil and finance executive. Before leaving, she warns Hiro not to mess with Snow Crash.

Later, Hiro encounters Da5id, the owner of The Black Sun. He shows Hiro a hypercard he got from an avatar outside –⁠ Snow Crash. With a little encouragement from Hiro, Da5id tears the hypercard in half, activating it.

For a second, nothing happens. But then a naked female avatar appears on the table holding a pair of tubes. She leans forward and whispers something into Da5id’s ear. His face becomes dazed and expressionless, and then the avatar reveals a scroll. Hiro glances at it briefly, seeing a wall of static –⁠ a “snow crash” that indicates a system malfunction.

Da5id shrugs it off, but Hiro knows Da5id’s optic nerve was just exposed to maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information. And what did the avatar whisper in Da5id’s ear? “Just a bunch of babble,” Da5id says.

Then, as they continue to talk, Da5id’s voice starts to sound funny –⁠ white noise creeps into his audio. And then his avatar suddenly transforms into a jittering cloud of pixels. It flashes back and forth from color to black and white, throwing out jagged lines that extend to the walls of the club.

Computer programs known as daemons head toward them and eject the glitching Da5id from his own establishment.

ANALYSIS

Okay, I know what you’re wondering –⁠ what kind of name is “Hiro Protagonist?” It’s clearly an ironic, tongue-in-cheek choice for the main character of a novel. But Stephenson makes that choice for more than just comedic purposes. It’s also a hint at the novel’s meta-awareness.

The way that characters use names and name things, shows the power of language. Think about it:⁠ having the hero of the novel literally named Hiro Protagonist actually pushes us further toward thinking of him in that way. The power of language, as you’ll soon see, is a major ongoing theme in the novel.

As for the storyline of the first section, we get acquainted with the Metaverse –⁠ one of the concepts for which Snow Crash is especially famous. The goggles that Hiro uses to access the Metaverse are a lot like modern-day virtual-reality headsets. And we all know the concept of avatars – Stephenson invented it.

The internet as we know it is already a kind of Metaverse, and certain tech founders want to make it even more like the one in Snow Crash. Just take the most obvious example of Mark Zuckerberg, who renamed his company Meta: a direct reference to the Metaverse.

But just appreciate for a moment that Stephenson’s Metaverse is from 1992, when our own idea of the internet was still in its infancy. It’s not envisioned as a perfect world that enables everyone to be whatever they want. There’s still a very real hierarchy in Stephenson’s Metaverse. Corporations own large pieces of it and the higher-ups at The Black Sun decide who’s allowed in and who doesn’t make the cut. But in a more hopeful sense, it does privilege certain people who have less in the real world –⁠ primarily hackers like Hiro.