Over the last year or so, I’ve been revisiting books that were influential both to tabletop RPGs I’m playing and to genres I really enjoy. Snow Crash belongs a little bit to both lists. I originally came through it as an influence to a game I enjoy, but the cyberpunk genre has come to be one I really enjoy.

Its publication in 1992 puts it a little later in the cyberpunk canon than books like Neuromancer.

It tells the story of hacker turned pizza delivery boy for the mafia Hiro Protagonist and the eponymous virus that can jump from computers to humans.

There’s a concept that floats around in some online Fandom communities of the “suck fairy,” referring to those times we revisit favorite media from when we were younger and we’ve changed in ways that our appreciation of the media has been changed by the experience for the worse. We notice things that blew past us, or treatment of certain groups that we just took for granted doesn’t sit the same with us. For me, there are some pretty big chunks of Snow Crash that have been visited by the suck fairy since I first read it.

I first read Snow Crash as a 22-year-old law student on the recommendation of my buddy Ed who now writes at Throat Punch Games. I was starting to run the Shadowrun Missions program at our local gaming store and hadn’t really dived into cyberpunk outside the short stories in the book and some films like Blade Runner and The Matrix. This book drew me in and sparked an interest that led me to other books and other media and influenced some of the in-jokes we made at our Shadowrun table.

It’s been a little over a decade since I first read the book, but I went into a reread as I was preparing to run Cyberpunk Red. A lot of things have changed since I was a first semester law student who had just moved away from home, both for my life and a lot of stuff becoming more apparent in society generally.

To begin with, there’s this throughline between sex and violence that recurs throughout the book but never quite gets to the point of feeling like an intentional theme. Our secondary protagonist, not to be confused with Protagonist, is Y.T., a 15-year-old girl who is absolutely blasé when talking about the measures she’s taken in the event she’s raped while working as a courier. I’d probably chalk this up to just a ’90s men-writing-women thing of using the threat of sexual violence to point out how dystopian the setting is if it weren’t for the equally jaded way Y.T. discusses her relationship with Roadkill, her much older boyfriend who is called by phone but otherwise does not appear in this book; discusses that maybe she’d like to climb in the pizza car with Hiro; and the on-screen relationship she forms with Raven, one of the main antagonists. In between readings, I remembered Y.T. as this awesome street-skating courier, and she absolutely is, but things like being a dad definitely make the 15-year-old girl who solves problems by showing skin hit a little different. I don’t know that a book with Y.T. as written here would necessarily become a classic of its genre released today.

Nor is the tie between sex and violence kept only to our secondary protagonist. Hiro comes into possession of a massive machine gun during the course of the book. He, unlike its previous owner, reads the instruction manual and learns that the gun has special straps to hook onto your pelvis to absorb recoil. So uh, that’s a whole gun-phallus trope. And also made the entire next scene stick The Time Warp from Rocky Horror Picture Show in my head.

Then there are sections that with my newly minted Bachelor’s in Linguistics really piqued my interest on my first read but stink of colonialism and racism a little over a decade later. This is basically the history of Sumer and Enki and Asherah that forms the background to how the Snow Crash virus came to be. There’s a whole section about how Sumerians mostly didn’t have conscious thought, which was left for these specific educated neurolinguistic hackers. Then parallels get drawn to the book’s modern time where you have hackers who build the things and then the Clints and Brandys of the metaverse who mindlessly consume what the hackers create. Then there’s this whole temple of a hacker and creative bar, The Black Sun, where that division is underlined.

This “didn’t have the words to enable conscious thought” really strikes me of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis taken to an extreme. Like, the peasants lack the words and experience to describe abstract things so they must not have had a rich internal life. It just smacks of “natives didn’t have words to describe sailing ships so they literally couldn’t see the Quinta, the Pinto, and the Santa Maria approaching.” It’s a hypothesis that just bugs me because of the sheer condescending way it views civilizations that are seen as more primitive or lesser. Like Western Europe didn’t have to come up with words for these big ships as they were made.

So sexualized violence, especially involving a child, and a colonial attitude toward ancient Sumeria made portions of the book hit me differently on the second read. But there are definitely both bones and some meat on them where I still see what drew me in on the first read. Like there is still a tense plot of Hiro trying to track down the Snow Crash virus for Juanita. There is still the plot of Y.T. getting in good with the Mafia for helping Hiro and working with them parallel to Hiro’s work to track down the new drugs that are coming into their territory. There’s still the epic battle between Hiro and Raven, with the revelations that come to them during it.

As a friend of mine put it, “it’s a problematic favorite.” There is absolutely a solid cyberpunk noir adventure story here, it just has a good deal of side stories thrown on that core that can detract moment to moment. In the end, I’m still glad I took the time to reread it, even if I no longer have that half remembered idealistic version of it in my head. There’s definitely a lot here that I can mine for when I get back to running Cyberpunk games.