Reader Responce 3

I am already a third of the way done with Snow Crash and when I am reading it I find it hard to even put the book down. There are some things that are still hard for me to understand, but I found myself becoming understanding of the concept of the Metaverse and what it actually involves. Sometimes I find it challenging to familiarize reality from the virtual world in this book. Especially with the events that occur and the characters involved. For instance, I know that Hiro, Juanita, and Da5id are real characters, but it took me a while to understand Y.T, which I now believe to be a real person and not a created avatar.

“The Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants nothing to do with it.” (pg64) Metaverse is to complex of a second life that is not likely to occur in our reality today, but it was ever to be created I feel it would do no good for people. I feel that not only would it distort the way people talk to each other, but distort peoples lives all together. For instance, “if you are ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful.” (pg35) What is that doing to people? It just creates a false perception of reality.

Also with the Metaverse I believe that Metaverse could negatively affect the uses of it, especially with some of the features that it involves. For one, it encourages violence and drugs. The term “snow crash” is created as a type of drug through the virtual world. Instead of an actual drug in reality snow crash is created as a computerized bug. As well as the violence, in which Hiro takes on a Nipponese businessman in a sword fight and finishes by slashing his body into pieces.

The first third of this novel is actually very captivating and the fact that there is so much thrown at you at one time and you don’t always know what’s going on, is what makes it so intriguing. Every time I pick up the novel, its hard to put it down because you always want to know what is going to come next, or want to figure something out that happened previously in the novel.