'Snow Crash' Is a Cyberpunk Classic

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is one of the most popular sci-fi books of all time, and together with William Gibson's Neuromancer it stands as a foundational text of the cyberpunk movement. Science fiction author Anthony Ha was blown away by Snow Crash when he first read it back in the late '90s. "This was a period when there were some clunky representations of virtual reality in movies and TV," Ha says in Episode 487 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "So it wasn't that Snow Crash was the first time I encountered that kind of iconography, but it was the first time it actually seemed cool." Snow Crash tells the story of Hiro Protagonist, a katana-wielding hacker who jumps back and forth between dystopian Los Angeles and a virtual world called the Metaverse.