We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

meme culture

I ... hmm. I had a lot of feelings about this book and most of them are bad. This is the very first cyberpunk novel I've read and while I really loved the settings and the concepts, the execution in Snow Crash left me cold. Casual racism and sexism abound and given that this was written in the early 90s by a white dude, I can't say I was surprised (just resigned to disappointment).

I quite liked Y.T., the fifteen year old working partner to the protagonist, Hiro Protagonist (yes, really), but the way Stephenson wrote her storyline is just Awful. I've read through a few reviews of this and not a single one has mentioned the frankly appalling sexual relationship she has with the dangerous 30-something antagonist Raven. The aforementioned -isms had already brought my rating down, but that situation killed the novel for me. The experience of Snow Crash has made me very wary of trying the genre again.