Snow Crash

Snow Crash is a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Like many of Stephenson's novels, its themes include history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy. Stephenson has said that the title of the novel is his term for a software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer, writing, "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash'." Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes's book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of the main influences on Snow Crash. Snow Crash was nominated for the British Science Fiction Award in 1993 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994.