MLOP 20: Snow Crash

Welcome to Mona Lisa Overpod, the show that asks the question "What is cyberpunk?" On each episode, hosts Ka1iban and author Lyda Morehouse dive into the genre that helped define sci-fi fiction in the '80s and break down the themes which remain relevant to our lives in the 21st century. Pull on your mirrorshades, jack into the matrix, and start your run with us today! Was Snow Crash the annunciation of a new era of the cyberpunk genre or its epitaph? Upon its release in 1992, Neal Stephenson's third novel entered a literary world that had grown tired of the pessimistic speculations of tech noir fiction. The public was ready for tales of a future that promised hope and adventure, a little "high life" to go with the "high tech". Snow Crash has been lauded by contemporary critics (and tech CEOs) as a visionary, biting satire of consumerism and cyberpunk tropes in equal measure. But is Stephenson's tale of pizza-delivering hackers a postcyberpunk, postmodernist masterpiece, or is it just a bunch of babble? In this episode, we discuss the environment into which Snow Crash was born, its comic origins, the contiguity of cyberpunk and satire, Stephenson's evolving career, postcyberpunk, the book's eerie prescience, civilization as a virus, the book's influence on our current world, and a "culture medium for a medium culture." We also talk about the Seattle of the Midwest, missing the "meme", baby luaus, doing your own research, repeating bad information, A Irony, Ed Meece bucks, commentainment, status symbol books, boomer hackers and zoomer slackers, hipster sword fights, loving a crapsack world, subverting the "punk", notes of libertarianism, "Sushi K, Tran, and the Rat Things: The Spinoff", AskJeeves+, Wikipedia OMEGA, "skipping the memo", and only reading the second part of Snow Crash?! I love Y.T.! uh...like a little sister... The new edition of Lyda's book, Ressurection Code, is out now! https://wizardstowerpress.com/books-2/books-by-lyda-morehouse/resurrection-code/ Join Kaliban on Twitch weekdays at 12pm for the Cyber Lunch Hour! http://twitch.tv/justenoughtrope Put Just Enough Trope merch on your body! http://justenoughtrope.threadless.com MLOP is a part of the Just Enough Trope podcast network. Check out our other shows about your favorite pop culture topics and join our Discord! http://www.twitter.com/monalisaoverpod http://www.justenoughtrope.com http://www.instagram.com/monalisaoverpod https://discord.gg/7E6wUayq Buy us a coffee on Ko-Fi! https://ko-fi.com/justenoughtrope