Snow Crash

Content Ratings

Moderate Romance

Hiro has a brief past romantic relationship, and a suggestive relationship between a mob boss and a teenage courier Y.T. involves implied sexual coercion; the scene is not graphically described but its implications are disturbing.

Moderate Themes

The novel explores the dissolution of governmental authority, corporate feudalism, religious and linguistic control of human minds, and exploitation of minors in a criminal economic system.

Moderate Violence

Action sequences involving katana combat, high-speed motorcycle chases, and the Mafia's enforcement arm feature frequent and occasionally graphic violence; a character is impaled and others are killed in brutal ways.

Synopsis

In a near-future America where the federal government has collapsed and corporations rule franchised city-states, pizza delivery driver and hacker Hiro Protagonist investigates a new drug called Snow Crash that can crash the human mind like software, tracing its origins to a Sumerian linguistic virus with apocalyptic implications. Fast, funny, and intellectually dazzling, the novel blends linguistics, mythology, and cyberpunk action. A wildly inventive and influential satire of capitalism, technology, and media.