The selection from my book review...
posted by Reacher Eriee at 12:45 PM
Saturday, May 05, 2007
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2 Comments:
Snow crash takes place in a slightly altered soon-future; the book was published in 1992 so it was a little further in the future back then. The book falls firmly with in the sub-genre of Cyber-punk and may even be considered one of the genre’s defining works. The world of Snow Crash is a dystopian world, akin to Blade Runner. Governing bodies seem to have fallen to the wayside leaving the gated burb-clave as semi-autonomous states-by-franchise. Everything has been franchised from jail to home and most importantly for the story, religion; Specifically Pentecostal Christianity.
The importance of the franchised church, “Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates” comes from the benefactor of the neo-Christianity one L. Bob Rife. Rife is the media-despot of the world, controlling all the trunks and branches of all the fiber lines that feed television and the Meta-verse. Rife has used his immense fortune to fund archeological digs in the middle-east and has uncovered an ancient secret (now I sound like a movie trailer).
The thing uncovered is the main thing the book is about, information. Rife has uncovered information that there was at one time a sort of meta-language. It is later defined as the brain’s bit-code. As I have taken several high-level computer science classes since the last time that I read the book I have a better understanding of the importance of this find. In essence ancient Sumerian was a way to connect directly to the basal parts of the human brain, much like the use of binary to computers.
I like this concept of the direct connection, the meta-launguage, to the brain. Being able to speak a something an in essence "program" someone's brain is a frightening prospect. But sometimes it's the frightening prospects that sound the coolest.
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