Questions (Some of these are taken from last week, since we did not discuss the novel at all then):

1) Is the Cold War a factor in Snow Crash? If the arms race is not Stephenson's primary preoccupation, what is?

2) What does the American landscape look like in the future?

3) How is government represented? How are corporations represented?

4) What is the quality of life for the average American in Snow Crash?

5) How does Stephenson represent the future of computer technology? Are his visions of virtual reality, data processing, and hackers realistic?

6) Which aspects of the novel's setting do you find most plausible? Which do you find least plausible?

7) Stephenson's novel is famous for its representation of the Metaverse. What do you think of Stephenson's Metaverse?

7) The novel's protagonist is named Hiro Protagonist. What is the significance of his name?

8) Think about Snow Crash in relation to Fahrenheit 451. Both novels present dystopian visions of a technologically mediated future. How are they similar? How are they different? How do their differences reflect their dates of publication? What does a comparison of these two novels reveal about Americans' changing attitudes toward technology?

9) Could Stephenson have had Bradbury's Mechanical Hound in mind when he created the Rat Things? How are the two concepts similar? How are they different?

10) Access to knowledge and information has been carefully controlled in other dystopian novels that we have read. Who regulates knowledge and information in Snow Crash?

11) To what extent does Stephenson's novel reflect contemporary concerns about biological and computer viruses?

12) What role does religion play in Snow Crash?

Passages

Beneath this image, it is possible to see Hiro's eyes, which look Asian. They are from his mother, who is Korean by way of Nippon, The rest of him looks more like his father, who was African by way of Texas by way of the Army -- back in the days before it got split up into a number of competing organizations such as General Jim's Defense System and Admiral Bob's National Security. (20-21)

[Hiro is] broke and unemployed. And a few short weeks ago, his tenure as a pizza deliverer -- the only pointless dead-end job he really enjoys -- came to an end. Since then, he's been putting a lot more emphasis on his auxiliary backup job: freelance stringer for the CIC, the Central Intelligence Corporation of Langley, Virginia.

The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.

He uploads it to the CIC database -- the Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word "congress" means. And even the word "library" is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering. (22)

Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It. (24)

Stephenson describes the Street in the Metaverse on pages 24 and 25. The passage is too long to include here, but we might discuss it in class tomorrow.

This driver's resigned to his fate, doesn't care, doesn't hassle her. He takes her as far as the entrance to the next Burbclave, which is a White Columns. Very southern, traditional, one of the Apartheid Burbclaves. Big ornate sign above the main gate: WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. NON-CAUCASIANS MUST BE PROCESSED.

She's got a White Columns visa. Y.T. has a visa to everywhere. It's right there on her chest, a little bar code. A laser scans it as she careens toward the entrance and the immigration gate swings open for her. (32)

Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these. (36)

The Hoosegow looks like a nice new one. Y.T. has seen hotels that were worse places to sleep. Its logo sign, a saguaro cactus with a black cowboy hat resting on top of it at a jaunty angle, is brand-new and clean.

"No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto . . .

The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward,t o where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the land of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. (191)

Ng isn't there.

Or maybe he is.

Where the driver's seat ought to be, there is a sort of neoprene pouch about the size of a garbage can suspended from the ceiling by a web of straps, shock cords, tubes, wires, fiber-optic cables, and hydraulic lines. . . (225)

"Please excuse my appearance," he says, after a couple of awkward minutes, "My helicopter caught fire during the evacuation of Saigon in 1974 -- a stray tracer from ground forces." (226)

So. She was right. The Rat Things are made from dog parts.

"That's cruel," she says.

"This brand of sentimentalism is very predictable," Ng says.

"To take a dog out of his body -- keep him in a hutch all the time.

"When the Rat Thing, as you call it, is in his hutch, do you know what he's doing?"

"Licking his electric nuts?"

"Chasing Frisbees through the surf. Forever. Eating steaks that grow on trees, Lying beside the fire in a hunting lodge. . .

"What about when he's out of the hutch, running around doing errands for you?"

"Can't you imagine how liberating it is for a pit-bull terrier to be capable of running seven hundred miles an hour?" (248)

Tonight there is a lot of barking from a place far away. When he listens to this barking, Fido knows that a whole pack of nice doggies is very excited about something. A lot of bad men are trying to hurt a nice girl. This has made the doggies very angry and excited. In order to protect the nice girl, they are hurting some of the bad men.

Which is as it should be.

Fido does not come out of his house. When he first heard the barking, he became excited. He likes nice girls, and it makes him especially upset when bad men try to hurt them. Once there was a nice girl who loved him and was good to him. That was before, when he lived in a scary place and he was always hungry and many people were bad to him. But the nice girl loved him and was good to him. Fido loves the nice girl very much.

But he can tell from the barking of the other doggies that the nice girl is safe now. So he goes back to sleep. (249)