Written by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash came out in 1992 and quickly established itself as a cyberpunk classic. Much like Neuromancer, I felt it worked more as an exploration of ideas rather than as a novel. Despite the World Wide Web only being a few years old at the time of publishing, Neal Stephenson had an intuitive grasp on how technology could progress and change life and society. Never taking itself too seriously, the book’s satirical edge allowed Stephenson the license to stretch plausibility as far as he liked, but what might have seemed outlandish back in 1992 seems credible today.

The story takes place in a world where hyperinflation and economic collapse has weakened governments, leaving corporations and private individuals as the dominant powers, controlling their own sovereign territories around the world. The widespread economic hardship has resulted in a global refugee crisis. The USA has lost most of its domestic manufacturing ability, with a significant part of the economy relying on the door-to-door delivery of food, particularly pizza, by individuals who are coordinated and tracked through software operated by private enterprise.

People in this world retreat into the Internet’s successor, the Metaverse, which resembles a combination of virtual reality with a massively multiplayer online game. Many users depend too much on social interactions through their digital avatars instead of real life. They often use alternative electronic currencies in encrypted online transactions instead of the highly devalued official currencies. Information in general has value, and just about everything is tracked and the data hoarded, while news and the media is controlled and monopolised by the story’s antagonist, the Texan billionaire, L. Bob Rife.

Rife is deeply unpleasant. Arrogant, narcissistic and ever-hungry for more power, he seeks the absolute control of others. He speaks of people as “biomass”, fuelling his media industry by continually consuming content to keep the system going. Media doesn’t serve the people, the people serve media instead, all of which serves Rife by means of his monopoly on it.

Other characters in the book simply get the job done of moving the story along. They do enough just to explore all the ideas that Stephenson wanted to get out. While Neuromancer leans on its aesthetics, Snow Crash’s strength comes from intertwining themes like anthropology, language and technology. Originally conceived as a computer-generated graphic novel, I don’t think Stephenson spent much time on polishing the writing, but instead wanted to challenge readers with his imagination.

He did not manage to predict how much our lives would centre around mobile phones and the software upon them. Nor did he foresee the dominance of “walled garden” platforms, like social networks that lock users in. Those omissions are forgivable.

I first read through Snow Crash back in 2022. It impressed me by how much Stephenson managed to predict. Now in 2026, looking at it again, our lives seem even closer to the book’s dystopia in just four years ago. I don’t think anyone really believed we would find reality resembling fictional cyberpunk dystopias any time soon, and yet here we are. It just seemed a lot more glamorous and exciting in print and film.