Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai swordsman & pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash & his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television & a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausibleFrom the opening sentence of this genre-defining cyberpunk novel, the listener is plunged into the not-too-distant future. Here, the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States is revealed to be a tangled web of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet is all-powerful. In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. So when his best friend freaks out on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, it's Hiro to the rescue. This is mind-altering, 21st-century adventure that interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to glimpses of a postmodern society on the verge of collapse -- a porthole into a future so bizarre it just may be possible.
Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author, was born on October 31, 1959 in Maryland. He graduated from Boston University in 1981 with a B.A. in Geography with a minor in physics. His first novel, The Big U, was published in 1984. It received little attention and stayed out of print until Stephenson allowed it to be reprinted in 2001. His second novel was Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller was published in 1988, but it was his novel Snow Crash (1992) that brought him popularity. It fused memetics, computer viruses, and other high-tech themes with Sumerian mythology. Neal Stephenson has won several awards: Hugo for Best Novel for The Diamond Age (1996), the Arthur C. Clark for Best Novel for Quicksilver (2004), and the Prometheus Award for Best Novel for The System of the World (2005). He recently completed the The Baroque Cycle Trilogy, a series of historical novels. It consists of eight books and was originally published in three volumes. He currently resides in Seattle, Washington with his family. Stephenson also writes under the pseudonym Stephen Bury.