The Original Definition of the Metaverse: Neal Stephenson's Triumphant Snow Crash

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

When you've been given the name Hiro Protagonist, you're typecast from the day your birth certificate was completed. Luckily for our hero Hiro, however, he fits the name quite nicely: he's a world-class swordsman when wielding the katana his father left him, not to mention being a world-class hacker. On that last point, he's one of the original founders of the virtual-reality world known as the Metaverse — which means he can get into its most famous virtual nightclub, the Black Sun, any time he wants. In real life, Hiro's found that freelance hacking jobs are sparse and swordplay doesn't pay at all, so he's employed as a deliveryman for the Mafia. A pizza deliveryman...

A partnership of convenience is formed when Y. T., Lolita-esque blonde skateboarding "Kourier," saves Hiro's bacon by delivering his last-ever pizza (last ever 'cause his car was at that time sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool). They'll partner 50:50 to deal in information, the only real currency in an age where trillion-dollar bills ("Meeses") are most useful when shredded for kitty litter, and most worldwide franchises print "local" money that's far more stable than the poor ol' greenback.

Neal Stephenson's "Reamde": The Fantasy Trilogy Grows Up

Reamde - Neal Stephenson

By now, I suppose you've figured out the format for The Great Fantasy (---)logy. It used to always be "Trilogy" in homage to LOTR, but I think some authors are now up to more than twenty volumes per "story." Anyway, the standard set of tropes is a battle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil, some sort of "fellowship" that invariably splinters, an arduous journey (usually across mountains) and a talisman that must be rescued/destroyed/captured so that Evil can be held at bay – at least until the next series begins. Oh, and there's one more convention: medieval weaponry. It wouldn't do to have this particular saga's version of Frodo picked off by a sniper who's hiding behind a boulder high on the slopes of this particular saga's version of  the Mountains of Mordor. Yeah: that's fantasy.

Repopulating the Race from Seven Eves: Neal Stephenson Goes Post-Apocalyptic

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson

You want to love Seveneves. You do. You want to love it because, well, Neal Stephenson wrote it and it’s a massive volume filled with big characters and massive (as well as micro) technology and huge ideas that are described in careful, glittering detail. You want to love it because it’s about as big a novel as they come, post-apocalyptic speculative fiction that pares the human race down to the bare minimum and then keeps on going. Most of all, you want to love it because it’s big, big, big!

But that just might be the main reason it’s so hard to love…

Something – no one will ever know what, we assume – shattered the moon into seven giant pieces. It looked awfully darned cool at first, until a couple of big domes realized that those big pieces would continue to bang into each other, chipping off ever-smaller chunks until millions of bits the size of Toyotas began raining down on Earth – and once that happened, it would be all over but the shouting. The hurry-up plan developed to save the human race? Ship a few thousand of them into space, accompanied by as many defining artifacts of humanity as possible and carrying the seeds (genetic material) necessary to start over: a Noah’s Ark, 21st-century style, built around Izzy: the International Space Station complex.