Snow Crash

Hiro Protagonist, "Last of the freelance hackers and Greatest swordfighter in the world," currently a pizza delivery man for the Mafia (tm), becomes embroiled in an epic cyberpunk adventure spanning physical and real worlds, from the "burbclaves" to ancient Sumeria. Hackers, cyborgs, swords, nukes, railguns, and chaos ensue.

It's a classic of cyberpunk, rife with absurd satire and prescient of the early avater-driven use of the emerging Internet. It is widely quoted, from "they'll listen to Reason" to the famous "baddest motherfucker" aside:

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."

What did we think of it?

Fun, but not amazingly written. Snow Crash is tedious at times, and while very quotable, does not hold up quite as well as one might expect. It relies too much on long explanation of the plot at the end, and very little of what the characters do actually matters. It's a fun book, to be sure, and a lynchpin of cyber-geek culture's beginnings, but do not expect to be blown away, no matter how cool Reason may be.