Snow Crash: A Novel

This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”

‘Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile work….[Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole.’

“Egypt was a civilization of stone. They made their art and architecture of stone, so it lasts forever. But you can’t write on stone. So they invented papyrus and wrote on that. But papyrus is perishable. So even though their art and architecture have survived, their written records—their data—have largely disappeared.” “What about all those hierog

“It’s as though ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were invented by the writer of the Adam and Eve legend to explain why people get sick—why they have physical and mental viruses. So when Eve—or Asherah—got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she was introducing the concept of good and evil into the world—introducing the metavirus, whic

a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed.

When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.

“Okay, so both Enki and Asherah were figures who had in some sense defeated chaos. And your point is that this defeat of chaos, the separation of the static, unified world into a binary system, is identified with creation.”

“Inanna is the person that Juanita’s obsessed with.” “Yes, sir. She is hailed as a savior because ‘she brought the perfect execution of the me.’ ” “Execution? Like executing a computer program?” “Yes. Apparently, they are like algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to the society. Some of them have to do with the workings of pries

A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don’t believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech—the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub,