Snow Crash Background

Snow Crash Background

Published in 1992, Snow Crash was written by Neal Stephenson and is a science fiction novel that involves a lot of history, archaeology, religion, and cryptography.

Stephenson titled this book “Snow Crash” because the earliest Apple Macs had software that would occasionally fail. When the computer crashed, the screen would look like a broken TV set, something that is termed a “snow crash.”

In Snow Crash, the programming language of the brainstem is the Sumerian language, and all the different characters are personifications of components of a computer and technology, like a computer virus, a defense program, the different computer languages used, and more. Stephenson uses the different gods and goddesses to create and narrate a modern story that is related to the Tower of Babel but in the computer world.

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