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Snow Crash: How Science Fiction Author Neal Stephenson Predicted the Metaverse…in 1992!

Matt Karamazov
5 min readJun 17, 2022
Image: Pixabay

Snow Crash is the book where Neal Stephenson coined the term “metaverse”!

As far as I know, there’s no Snow Crash movie, but there easily could be. It’s a wild reimagining of American life and society (with some truly messed up twists), but it’s also instantly recognizable as America, if that makes sense?

I mean, in the America of Snow Crash, the Mafia runs this nationwide pizza chain; people live mostly in gated communities called “burbclaves” with their own police forces; there’s this giant floating raft (I guess all rafts float, duh) filled with gangster refugees waiting to land on the West Coast; underground concerts that escalate rather quickly; not to mention this crazy computer-simulation-world where people buy land that doesn’t really exist and move around on vehicles that could never exist.

Sound familiar?

Anyway, in the book, “Snow Crash” is this virus that fries the brain of any hacker that looks directly at its source code, even though if you don’t know what you’re looking at it doesn’t harm you. Insert ancient Sumerian linguistics storyline here, etc.

There’s a whole bunch of other wild shit that happens and that I won’t be able to accurately convey in just a few short sentences, but…

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Matt Karamazov
Matt Karamazov

Written by Matt Karamazov

Literacy Advocate 📖 Full-Time Book Influencer: Recommended Reading List (1,300+ Books) ⤵️ https://thereadinglife.beehiiv.com/c/readinglist

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