You can’t argue with a main character named Hiro Protagonist who delivers pizza for the Mafia in a chapter one that has him racing a fifteen minute delivery countdown with actual stakes, that’s the book announcing exactly what kind of ride it’s going to be. Stephenson built a version of virtual reality in 1992 that a lot of people who work on the internet now will tell you actually shaped how they thought about building it, which is a strange kind of achievement for a novel to have, being right about the future on purpose or by accident.

The corporate franchise nation stuff is still the funniest part of the book, burbclaves and franchulates and a US government reduced to one more corporation among many, all of it played completely straight. Where I started losing steam was the religion as literal virus material in the back third, the neurolinguistic hacking, Sumerian mythology, ancient brainstem code angle, which a lot of people love and I understand why, but for me it went on longer than the idea could support. I’d have traded some of that lecture for more time with Y.T. on her skateboard, who’s doing more interesting kinetic work in half the page count.

It hasn’t aged perfectly, some of the “futuristic” texture reads a little dated now the way any thirty year old prediction about tech will, but the sentence level writing is still sharp enough to carry it past that. Four stars. I get why people become Stephenson obsessives off this one book alone, even with the back third dragging.