OFF TOPIC Snow Crash [was Re: Hello World]

[Steven D'Aprano]

alex23 wrote:

> On 24/12/2014 2:20 AM, Grant Edwards wrote:
>> And even _with_ all the technical jibber-jabber, none of it explained
>> or justified the whole "writing a virus to infect the brain through
>> the optic nerve" thing which might just have well been magick and
>> witches.
> 
> While I love SNOW CRASH, I do think it'd fundamentally flawed. The worst
> for me is that in a fictional universe with a VR system capable of
> displaying anything, the crux of the book revolves around a couple of
> characters having a long, long discussion about Sumerian history.
> 
> A: "<blah blah blah blah blah Sumeria>"
> B: "And then what?"
> A: "<blah blah blah blah....>"
> B: etc


Keep in mind the limitations of the media. The novel is written word, so
there are only a limited number of ways of getting background information
to the reader. In this case, having one character (an AI) tell another
character (the protagonist) what he needs to know is arguably the
least-worst way.

The many pages of info-dumping is one of the lesser parts of the book. I
wonder what Stephenson's motive for writing it as dialog was, because in
other parts of the book he demonstrated great skill in imparting background
information to the reader without dry info-dumps (e.g. the Rat Things).

At least it is information that is *not* common knowledge in-universe. Old
pulp SF used to be filled with cheesy dialog like this:

   Attractive but stupid female: "Professor, I know you've told me 
       before, but how does the microwave oven work again?"
   Avuncular male authority figure: "Well my dear, as you know all
       foods contain water molecules. The oven uses radio-frequency
       subatomic radiation, know as 'microwaves', specially tuned to
       excite the oxygen-to-hydrogen molecular bonds in water 
       molecules. As you know, heat is just the action of excited 
       molecular bonds, so this has the effect of beaming heat 
       energy deep into the food so that it cooks from the inside
       out without burning.

and then the microwave oven is not used for anything more exciting than
making a cup of tea for the rest of the book.

In the case of Snow Crash, I think we need to keep in mind when it was
written. In 1990, the idea that you might *carry on a conversation* with
your computer still seemed (1) plausible to SF readers, who expected strong
AI and robots with Asimov's Three Laws to be just around the corner, and
(2) the widespread public Internet, or even use of computers, was still
pretty rare. The idea that you could only get information out of a computer
by typing, or pointing, would have struck readers in 1994 as terribly
unrealistic. The other interface, the holographic interface so beloved of
recent SF television and movies where you push screens around in space,
hadn't been invented yet, and isn't terribly good for getting information
to the reader since they can't actually see what is on the screen.


> It's been at least a decade since I read it, but wasn't that also the
> explanation for how the virus worked?

Deep in the brain, well underneath the level of modern languages and
consciousness, there is a deeper "machine language" of the brain. If you
can write instructions in this machine language, you can control people's
brains. Back in the distant past, the Sumerians learned how to do this via
spoken language, but few people speak Sumerian any more, hence there are
two versions of Snow Crash: one is a drug plus virus. The drug is to
encourage people to inject themselves, which then allows the virus to get
into their brain. The other is an animated bitmap, which contains "machine
code" for the human brain, and is injected via the optic nerve (i.e. when a
hacker sees it).






-- 
Steven