THE 30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH NEW, NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED MATERIAL
After the Internet, what came next?
Enter the Metaverse - cyberspace home to avatars and software daemons, where anything and just about everything goes. Newly available on the Street - the Metaverse's main drag - is Snow Crash. A cyberdrug that reduces avatars in the digital world to dust, but also infects users in real life, leaving them in a vegetative state.
This is bad news for Hiro, a freelance hacker and the Metaverse's best swordfighter, and mouthy skateboard courier Y. T. . Together, investigating the Infocalypse, they trace back the roots of language itself to an ancient Sumerian priesthood and find they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.
In this special edition of the remarkably prescient modern classic, Neal Stephenson explores
linguistics, computer science, politics and philosophy in the form of a break-neck adventure into the fast-approaching yet eerily recognizable future.
'Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the twenty-first century' William Gibson
'Brilliantly realized' New York Times Book Review
'Like a Pynchon novel with the brakes removed' Washington Post
'A remarkably prescient vision of today's tech landscape' Vanity Fair