Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Book report: Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson Snow Crash contains at least 7,000 clever ideas, any one of which could form the basis of a personal philosophy, a system of government, a business plan, a religion, a video game, an action movie, a floor wax, or a dessert topping. How can an author include so many ideas within the plot of a novel? Well, he can’t: they stick out of the actual story like Post-It notes on book pages. Neal Stephenson has never heard of the writer’s motto “Show, don’t tell”, so instead you get “conversations” that consist of character X asking, “What do you know about Sumerian mythology?”, to which character Y responds with a 6-page encyclopedia entry. In other parts of the book, the author can’t even be bothered with that meager illusion of story-telling, and simply presents large slabs of information directly to the reader, without bothering the actual characters, who presumably have other things to do. Oddly, there are characters in this book. The hero,