February: Fiasco by Stanisław Lem
March: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse #1) by Dennis Taylor
Discuss Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson in the comments below.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein was published in 1966:
The book popularized the acronym TANSTAAFL ("There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"), and helped popularize the constructed language Loglan, which is used in the story for precise human-computer interaction. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations credits this novel with the first printed appearance of the phrase "There's no free lunch", although the phrase and its abbreviation considerably predate the novel.
The virtual assistant Mycroft is named after a computer system from the novel.
Previously: Announcement post • Mars, Ho! • Foundation • The Three-Body Problem
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday January 07 2019, @01:27AM (3 children)
I got on to Snow Crash after Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (which I absolutely loved). I enjoyed Snow Crash, but not quite as much as Cryptonomicon.
It's always entertaining seeing different authors' takes on the ubiquitous VR world that we will all live in sometime in the future. Some good ideas in the book, and an intriguing plot.
My main problem with the plot, however, was:
Interested to hear what others think.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Monday January 07 2019, @07:38AM
Wasn't that after they'd decoded it and thus could neuter it to some degree?
Now it's been many years since I read Snow Crash, so I could be off base here...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @04:04PM (1 child)
She already knew the language from her Babylonian studies, and so could control the neurolinguistic virus.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday January 07 2019, @11:38PM
Thanks - that rings a bell.
I'm still not buying it though. Just because you know how a virus works, that doesn't mean you can't be infected.