Snow Crash, Page 50

  Marco Kaltofen, as usual, functioned in the same quick, encyclopedic way as the Librarian when I had questions about certain whys and wheres of the toxic-waste business. Richard Green, my agent in L.A., gave me some help with the geography of that town.

  Bruck Pollock read the galleys attentively, but with blistering speed, and made several useful suggestions. He was the first and certainly not the last to point out that BIOS actually stands for “Basic Input/Output System,” not “Built-in Operating System” as I have it here (and as it ought to be); but I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun, so this part of the book is unchanged.

  The idea of a “virtual reality” such as the Metaverse is by now widespread in the computer-graphics community and is being implemented in a number of different ways. The particular vision of the Metaverse as expressed in this novel originated from idle discussion between me and Jaime (Captain Bandwidth) Taaffe—which does not imply that blame for any of the unrealistic or tawdry aspects of the Metaverse should be placed on anyone but me. The words “avatar” (in the sense used here) and “Metaverse” are my inventions, which I came up with when I decided that existing words (such as “virtual reality”) were simply too awkward to use.

  In thinking about how the Metaverse might be constructed, I was influenced by the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which is a book that explains the philosophy behind the Macintosh. Again, this point is made only to acknowledge the beneficial influence of the people who compiled said document, not to link these poor innocents with its results.

  In a nice twist, which I include only because it is pleasingly self-referential, I became intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Macintosh during the early phases of the doomed and maniacal graphic-novel project when it became clear that the only way to make the Mac do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept, rendering most of that work useless from a practical viewpoint.

  It should be pointed out that when I wrote the Babel material, I was standing on the shoulders of many, many historians and archaeologists who actually did the research; most of the words spoken by the Librarian originated with these people and I have tried to make the Librarian give credit where due, verbally footnoting his comments like a good scholar, which I am not.

  Finally, after the first publication of Snow Crash I learned that the term “avatar” has actually been in use for a number of years as part of a virtual reality system called Habitat, developed by F. Randall Farmer and Chip Morningstar. The system runs on Commodore 64 computers, and though it has all but died out in the U.S., is still popular in Japan. In addition to avatars, Habitat includes many of the basic features of the Metaverse as described in this book.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NEAL STEPHENSON issues from a clan of rootless, itinerant hard-science and engineering professors (mostly Pac 10, Big 10, and Big 8 with the occasional wild strain of Ivy. He began his higher education as a physics major, then switched to geography when it appeared that this would enable him to scam more free time on his university's mainframe computer. When he graduated and discovered, to his perplexity, that there were no jobs for inexperienced physicist-geographers, he began to look into alternative pursuits such as working on cars, unimaginably stupid agricultural labor, and writing novels. His first novel, The Big U, was published in 1984 and vanished without a trace. His second novel, Zodiac: the Eco-thriller, came out in 1988 and quickly developed a cult following among water-pollution-control engineers. It was also enjoyed, though rarely bought, by many radical environmentalists. Snow Crash was written in the years 1988 through 1991 as the author listened to a great deal of loud, relentless, depressing music. The Diamond Age was his last novel.

  Mr. Stephenson now resides in a comfortable home in the western hemisphere and spends all of his time trying to retrofit an office into its generally dark, unlevel, and asbestos-laden basement so that he can attempt to write more novels. Despite the tremendous amounts of time he devotes to writing, playing with computers, listening to speed metal, Rollerblading, and pounding nails, he is a flawless husband, parent, neighbor, and all-around human being.

  Praise for Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH

  “[Snow Crash has] a magic-realist intensity; [Stephenson] captures the nuance and the rhythm of the new world so perfectly that one almost thinks that it is already here. . . . Snow Crash is like a Thomas Pynchon novel with the brakes removed.”

  —Washington Post

  “Snow Crash may be revelation: the all-too-near future masterly conceived; the apotheosis of the information age married to the ongoing fragmentation of society.”

  —San Francisco Bay Guardian

  “Stylish noir extrapolation becomes gloriously witty social satire . . . savor Stephenson's delicious prose and cheerfully impudent wit. Cyberpunk isn't dead—it has just (belatedly) developed a sense of humor.”

  —Locus

  “Snow Crash takes on a whole slew of nasty contemporary trends and extrapolates them hilariously into a pessimistic and unlikely near future. . . . this one book to chill out with this summer.”

  —Mondo 2000

  “Hip, surreal, distressingly funny . . . Neal Stephenson is a crafty plotter and a wry writer. . . . [Snow Crash is] great fun, both loopy and dense, a tootsie roll of a book—chewy center and all.”

  —The Des Moines Register

  “A fantastic, slam-bang-overdrive, supersurrealistic, comic-spooky whirl through a tomorrow that is already happening. Neal Stephenson is intelligent, perceptive, hip, and will become a major force in American writing.”

  —Timothy Leary

  “Beyond its exhilarating hipness, beyond its sheer fun, Snow Crash features a satiric sensibility as sharp and cunning as the katana sword wielded by its hacker protagonist. My mouth got sore from smiling. I feel sorry for anyone who undertakes to produce an epic virtual-reality comedy in the wake of this novel; easier to write an original metaphysical sea adventure centered on a whale hunt. Stephenson has consumed the territory.”

  —James Morrow,

  author of Only Begotten Daughter

  “Fast, dense, deep, funny. Neuromancer meets Vineland. The best book I've read this year.”

  —Rudy Rucker,

  author of The Hollow Earth and Wetware

  “A heady, surrealistic pastiche of the not-so-distant future. Satiric SF at its best . . . highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “[Stephenson's] imaginative juxtaposition of ancient and futuristic detail could make this a cult favorite.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Stephenson proves himself a capable and cunning chauffeur, particularly if you don't mind taking a few creative roadblocks and unexpected detours along the way.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  SNOW CRASH

  A Bantam Book

  Bantam Spectra hardcover and trade paperback editions / June 1992

  Bantam Spectra mass market edition / May 1993

  Bantam Spectra trade paperback reissue / September 2003

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random house, Inc.

  New York, New York

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for

  permission to reprint a drawing from

  The Origin of Consciousness in the

  Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by

  Julian Jaynes. Copyright @ 1976 by

  Julian Jaynes. Reprinted by permission of

  Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1992 by Neal Stephenson.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-45453

  No part of this book may be reproducedor transmitted in any form or by any means, el
ectronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the writtn permission of he publisher, except where permittted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.

  Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  eISBN: 978-0-553-89819-4

  v3.0