Snow Crash Cyberpunk

The eleventh week comes to us with sounds wires, keyboards clicking, and electrical currents flowing. In this installation of our literature course we’re discussing the realm of ‘Cyberpunk’. Not to be confused with ‘Steampunk’, its early nineteenth century-retro-future-conflicted cousin, Cyberpunk deals with incorporating themes into the work that we have been witnessing become reality in the past few decades. Movies like Blade Runner, The Matrix, and anime hits like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, are the reasons why Cyberpunk was put on the map is one of the more popular types of science fiction out today.

This week, aside from the classic Blade Runner, we were assigned to check out the novel Snow Crash Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. After going through the story of Snow Crash I keep questioning why this hasn’t been turned into a movie yet. Inspired by Sumerian mythology, Stephenson brings the futuristic story of a main character named Hiro, a hacker and swordfighter who finds himself uncovering the truths about a mysterious virus called ‘snow crash’ which was not only affecting the metaverse cyber world, but also the real world he lived in. Being that Sumerian language is civilizations original dialect, Stephenson, puts forth in the story the idea that this ancient language is a building block of what we have now. And through the manipulation of this language, relating to how hackers created new viruses, people could be affected and controlled to do as the will of the person behind it all chose. That is why through the plot Hiro struggles to discover and put an end to Bob Rife’s work, which had involved the Sumerian language in order to create an epidemic both in the metaverse and the real world, giving Rife control over people.

Although it could be deemed a bit clichéd with the saturation of cyberpunk works in recent years, I think Snow Crash is a great candidate to base a movie on, or even at least a well made animated series or graphic novel. The whole idea of the metaverse and the theory of an eventual mixing of virtual and physical reality I think is a great theme, that through the exploration of our entrapment inside the future of what is technology we also become more enlightened and begin to appreciate our reality and learn that no matter how deeply connected humanity becomes to the virtual world, the spiritual self is the most important character of all.