Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson , published in Like many of Stephenson's novels, its themes include history, linguistics , anthropology , archaeology , religion, computer science, politics, cryptography , memetics , and philosophy.
In his essay " In the Beginning Was the Command Line ", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap , the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television setβa 'snow crash ' ".
Clarke Award in In the 21st century, an unspecified number of years after a worldwide economic collapse, Los Angeles is no longer part of the United States since the federal government has ceded most of its power and territory to private organizations and entrepreneurs.
Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts, while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign gated housing developments.
Lee's Greater Hong Kong", or the corporatized American Mafia , or various residential burbclaves quasi-sovereign gated communities. In this future, American institutions are far different from those in the actual United States at the time the book was published; for example, a for-profit organization, the CIC, has evolved from the CIA 's merger with the Library of Congress.
