About The Annotated Snow Crash

Snow Crash is one one of my favourite books - one of those that I’ve kept coming back to over the years, and one that has made it into the privileged position of being one of my comfort books. One that I can read for sheer pleasure. Part of that pleasure has got to do with the sheer vision that Stephenson presents in the book - right from the first page, all the way through to the book’s ending, in Stephenson’s inimitable style.

As a linguistics geek, as a compsci geek, and as an SF geek, Snow Crash is pure crack to me. From his vision of the Metaverse (curiously lacking hundreds of flying, exploding penises) to RadikS smart spokewheels to the cute Rat Thing, each single page is packed with ideas - something that authors such as Stross and Doctorow are doing right now, too.

So it was on my last re-reading of Snow Crash that, upon being struck by how much Stephenson got right - as well as what little, and how, he got things wrong - I thought it was high time there was an annotated Snow Crash - from the beginning, right through to the end, and all commented-up, too. So here it is. The Annotated Snow Crash.