Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's other novels it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy.
The book presents the Sumerian language as a firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program which he called a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).
Snow Crash was nominated for both the British Science Fiction Award in 1993,2] and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994.[3] TIME ranked Snow Crash [🏷️#84 on the Top 100 Novels of All Time.
I read Snow Crash for the first time while in Thailand in 2017. 📝John Zdanowski later told me that the novel was what inspired, and cautioned, the founders of 📝Second Life.
References
- Snow Crash, wikipedia.org