Snow Crash Book Cover

Snow Crash


A Science Fiction Novel


Subgenres & Tropes:

  • Cyberpunk,
  • Dystopian
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This book is for you if you're into...

  • Corporate dystopias where franchises run entire city-states
  • Virtual reality hacking with real world consequences
  • Pizza delivery with samurai swords and marauding rivals

From Little Stack

The megacity of Greater Los Angeles is more of a city-state, but one owned by a corporation rather than run by a government. Called “Franchulates”, they’re what you’d get if a company like Walmart or McDonalds owned a city and had their own private army to keep the peace and enforce law. As expected, this structure of governance-by-corporation has created a paradise for criminals and the lawless, and even allowed local “police forces” to let their baser human instincts run amok. It’s a fascinating-and grim look at what might happen if corporate greed was ever allowed to run unchecked. 

Publisher Description

Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions.

Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary.

But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state).

Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He’ll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.

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