I was lucky enough to have it as part of my college literature course. I had a choice of Greek classics or SciFi and, though I'm missing a TON of Greek classic context these days I do not regret reading ANY of the scifi books! IMO it's a pity I couldn't take both!
There's a lot of content in the book that reads differently years later. It's extremely easy to criticize outside of the situations present in the book.
Fiction is a good a place to consider alternate worlds, situations outside of the norm, and people with circumstances you'll never (or hope to never) encounter yourself. That makes it a great place to refine morals and reach a deeper understanding of why things might be good or bad.
I mean idk when you read it, but like the author said I've seen this language be absorbed so I can't take it in as fresh innovative stuff. I was born after the novel came out so obviously was decades old when I read it.
I did read both when they came out (in paperback anyway). But I know what you mean. Friends who had not read The Lord of the Rings but saw the films can be excused for thinking the story was "derivative".
I find it's easier to get in a time period with visuals compared to a book, but it is a forgivable thing for later generations to 'not get' either way. I certainly don't know all the musicians who influenced the musicians that influenced me.
I think Snow Crash is an interesting book but I can see how people could be turned off by it. It kind of straddles a weird line where parts of it almost read like parody or an attempt to troll the audience but at the same time it explores serious concepts.
It kind of screams at you "look how absurd this is" but then plays it straight and explores the ideas seriously.
There's no "almost" about it. It's a very self-conscious parody of a cyberpunk dystopia (among other things) and it makes that very blunt. Far as I can tell, the point of that whole pizza delivery scene at the beginning is to firmly establish in the reader's mind that this is not "serious business". I mean, cmon:
"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it–we're talking trade balances here–once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
