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.

The Footage Shall Reveal...

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

The generation born in the 1970s and '80s has benefited from a revolution in the way our world functions; a sea change of the magnitude of steam power, Ford's assembly line, or the refutation of the heliocentric universe. Never before has information spread at such velocity. Consider "dancing baby" and "all your base are belong to us," phenomena that circumnavigated the globe at the speed of thought. To our grandparents, fashion and commerce were local: the corner bakery, the town tailor and milliner, a grocer served by local farms and gardens. Today, however, children the world over identify the icons of our age regardless of their native alphabet; they recognize the swoosh and the golden arches and the red and white soda can at a distance of a thousand paces.

Gibson blends technology, politics and espionage in a cyberpunk melange

Spook Country - William Gibson

That William Gibson is about as geeky as the average suburban housewife probably comes as a surprise to most familiar with Gibson. He is, after all, the man who coined “cyberspace” two decades ago in Neuromancer, the first book ever to win all three science fiction awards (Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K Dick). Yet Gibson freely admits that he’s no more in tune with what’s inside his monitor or his keyboard than you or I. That’s pretty much on a par with learning that A-Rod has never heard of Cooperstown or that Norm Abram can’t tell walnut paneling from wood-grain wallpaper.