Hi there, and welcome back to the Hugo is There podcast. I'm your host, Seth Heasley, and this is a Seth's Pick episode. This time about Snow Crash, the Neil Stevenson 1992 novel that wasn't actually nominated for a bunch of awards, but is kind of considered a cyberpunk classic by a lot of people. And so that's why I put it on my list of books that I would like to cover at some point. And Leah Borden reached out to me and said she'd love to cover it. So hi, Leah. Thanks for joining me. Hi, Seth.
Now, with this kind of episode, sometimes I tap somebody and say, hey, will you cover this book with me? And so the why this book kind of question doesn't really come into things. But in this case, you reached out and wanted to cover it because you saw it on the list. So can you tell me? A little bit about yourself, and then we can kind of move in to talk about why this book.
Well, I live in St. Louis with my family, and I'm an aspiring data scientist. I've got a master's degree in computer science. This was way after the time of this book. And I've been a Hugo voter since 2015 when John Scalzi said it's extremely important that you vote. But this book came into my life before that. mostly when it came out, when the literary fiction world was excited about it. And I love this book because it had such an open appeal to myth.
more than any notions that it had about the internet. Because I think you know why people thought the metaverse was cool. at the time was, um, it was, it was an opportunity for self creation. And, um, You see that more or less with people who've made their lives in the metaverse over the course of the book. But, I mean, 30 years later, it's an entirely different book, which I guess we'll talk about some more. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Because when did you first read this book?
1992-ish. You did? Okay, so right after it came out. Right after it came out, yeah. Okay, perfect. And for me, this is a first-time read for me. I haven't read a lot of Stevenson. I think I read The Diamond Age for this podcast. And then I've also read The Rise and Fall of Dodo, but that was a co-write, so I don't know how much of it was actually.
stevenson writing it and how much it was his co-author author yeah i read i read cryptonomicon and i read the baroque cycle and i and i read i read anathema and seven eves But I haven't done anything, you know, of anything he's written after. Okay. That's still a lot more exposure to Stevenson and his writing than I have. Yeah.
But, I mean, you know, once he gets the Diamond Age, you know, he's, I mean, he knows much more, you know, what kind of writer he wants to be. And I think the award voters figured this out. because um i realized you know because of this that i never actually read neuromancer and um And if that is what you think cyberpunk is, then a lot of the things in Snow Crash are going to seem cartoonish, especially, you know, the violence is going to be much more cartoonish.
than what's in Neuromancer near the end. Yeah. So I think this is one of the books, one of the kind of books that it's really hard to have any kind of non-spoiler discussion. And so everybody consider yourself warned. We're going to talk about kind of everything. But I do think it's one of those books too, that just because we're spoiling it doesn't necessarily spoil it because it's more about the way the characters interact. It's more about kind of Neil Stevenson's very particular style.
And so don't be afraid to listen and then decide to go read the book later. Okay. So let's just talk about sort of overall thoughts about this one. And we've already gotten a little bit of yours. I'll say, you know, I'm not sure how much I vibe with Stevenson. What I find is... His work definitely rewards a reread because sometimes he throws so much crap at you that it's hard to keep track of the parts that are important. And I definitely felt that in The Diamond Age.
where it starts off with this whole scene about this guy getting a skull gun. And I was like, what are we even doing here? And he's a very minor character. And it kind of, Snow Crash started the same way with me where, you know, hero protagonist, the Deliverator, which cracked me up. is delivering pizzas. And I was having a hard time figuring out what am I supposed to connect to here? And so...
I worked my way through it kind of reading between I have the e-book and I have the audio book and kind of shifting back and forth between them. And if you had asked me two weeks ago, what did you think of the book? I would have gone, eh, I don't know. It was fine, I suppose.
But then you and I kind of went back and forth on trying to schedule this, and I realized, oh, I've got some extra time. So I went back and listened to the whole audiobook again and really enjoyed it on the second time. Okay. So it is kind of a two-time read for me, but it's two times in a month. Yeah. So for you, well, no, let's kind of get back to that later. I think we should kind of dive into what the book is about. Yeah. Yeah. just to see if we can entice people to...
Do you want to tackle that? Do you want me to? Yeah, I'll tackle that. Sure. Go for it. Okay. Almost the first. Well, the first thing that we see, you know, is hero protagonist is a pizza is a deliverator. He delivers pizzas and he's a hacker. And he's delivering pizzas in a world where the U.S. government is just one enclave claiming... claiming power in what used to be the Los Angeles metropolitan area. And you have the mafia with their own enclave. You have burb claves.
You have Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, which is a mafia enclave of its own. And you have the metaverse, which at least used to be a place where hackers hung out. But it's grown now that there's something called the street, which goes around about halfway around the space that's allocated to it.
It's a commercial zone with every kind of virtual reality stimulus you can name. And someone is trying to... has knocked out hero protagonist's friend and former employer, day five admirer, five instead of a V. has used a virtual reality avatar to walk up to him and show him a scroll and put him into a state of unconsciousness. And Hero has to find out how to save all the rest of the hackers.
from becoming victim to this. And there's a murder relatively early of someone who's already figured this out. and is able to give information to a librarian in the metaverse who would be an AI assistant nowadays. um so that um so that that hero can more or less um Go back to ancient Sumer to figure out what has gone on. The villain, once again cartoonish, is a very wealthy evangelical from Texas, where L. Bob Reif Bible College has been doing all the excavations in Sumer.
In order to find the document that will put all the hackers in this thrall with the Nam Shubhavanki. And he's using the raft. which is a completely anarchic conglomeration of refugees from the third world. in order to distract whoever's in power so that he can do this. And so the second half of the book is, you know, essentially a very wild pursuit. in order to take the Namsha Bivenki from L. Bob Reif, the villain. Right.
Okay. Yeah, that's pretty good without getting into too much of the nitty gritty details. I think that's a good kind of presentation of it. And the setting of it, as you kind of hinted with the metaverse, it's certainly cyberpunk, right? Yeah. The reality of the United States that's not really a thing anymore, the federal government exists, but it's just one of many kind of semi-autonomous states. You mentioned Mr. Li's Greater Hong Kong, which is not part of Hong Kong at all.
Right, right. Narcolumnia, which I felt like, is that offensive? And then all the burb claves as well. And each of these places might have a mercenary troop who's their security, right? places that are guarded by these dog hybrid things called rat things. Right. And, and yeah, like you, just because you have access to one burb slave doesn't mean that you're going to be welcome in another place. And so at the very beginning, you have
Hiro, he pulls up, he's working for Cosa Nostra Pizza, and he pulls up and there's a fire at the pizzeria, which leaves him with 12 minutes to deliver this pizza. And he's got it all planned out. He knows exactly how to do it. He knows the exact route he needs to do. And then he tries. to drive through this burb clave and realizes, oh, things have changed, and he crashes. And he gets lucky that...
Yes, I left her out, but I didn't know how to put her in without a lot of spoilers. Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard to nail down, even though his name is hero protagonist. It's sort of a dueling protagonist thing. Yeah, yeah. A lot of the plot moves forward because of YT. Yeah. heroes over on the side just listening to the librarian. Yeah. And she's a fascinating character. I really loved YT. And YT stands for Yours Truly, but everybody always accidentally pronounces it Whitey.
And she skates around and harpoons vehicles with this magnetic harpoon they just call a poon. And the skateboard that she has, you know, I used to skateboard as a kid. And if you hit the tiniest little rock, you are on your face. Her skateboard has these special wheels that can basically go over any terrain at all. And that's such a cool technology. Not quite a hoverboard, but effectively does the work of what a hoverboard might do. she is, uh, 15 years old and, uh,
Well, that's just not going to be problematic at all. No, no, of course not. But YT, she comes in and she's harpooned Hero. And so when he's about to fail his delivery, she says, I can deliver it for you. So she delivers it, which draws the favorable eye of Uncle Enzo, who's a mob boss, who turns out to be a really good dude, which is kind of fascinating.
And that's one thing I will say in the book. The characters are pretty well drawn, and there's several really likable characters, or the ones that you're not supposed to like, they're kind of loathsome. Yes. You also hinted at the snow crash of the title, right? It has to do with this virus that somebody gives David in the metaverse, and it crashes his terminal, but it also seems to crash his brain. It's like it overwrote his master boot record on his brain.
I think more than what's been written over in the root sector in his brain is his ability to be a hacker has been written over. Yes, because the goal is to undo the Tower of Babel, to have one word correspond to one real thing, one concept in the world. And what a hacker does. is to find something new in the abstract structure of a programming language or of a program that no one ever saw before.
That was the thing about Neuromancer that the Chinese program was suddenly doing all the work for them. And I mean, were they really hackers anymore? Right. Or were they just coming along for the ride? Yeah. And that's kind of the two sides of the snow crash, right? Where there's Snow Crash is specifically targeted at the hackers, right, to hurt them because they have the ability to kind of understand.
I guess binary code. And so they're shown this bitmap and that crashes them. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the other side of it is, is L Bob Rife has kind of. discovered that this ancient Sumerian language gives him control over people, where he's able to affect them with this neuro-linguistic virus. And that was all really, really interesting and the whole, like you said, reversing Babel. where Hero literally just talks to the Expositron 2000, otherwise known as the Librarian.
talking about glossolalia and xenoglossia and the gift of tongues and the day of Pentecost in the Bible. And it's really interesting. Yeah. And, I mean, you know, Neil Stephenson said, I mean, essentially Neil Stephenson said, you know, any errors are... essentially my responsibility but i don't think i don't think you know the scott um i i think you know he's um he absorbed in the library of congress about as much as anyone knows even today about this
There's definitely tie-ins with contemporary culture. I mean, you have a lot of at least pseudo-Christian groups who are sponsoring archaeological digs. And there was just something in the news the other day about they've discovered new structures under the pyramids in Egypt, which is fascinating. I don't think that was a Christian group doing that. But you have a lot of groups of Christian and Jewish and others. in the Holy Land, doing archaeological work. And all the exposition...
I wanted to be bored with it, and I couldn't be because it was really fascinating. I think there was something that stuck out to you about when the librarian was kind of getting a breakdown of... the different sects of Judaism in the first century. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is, this is the email that I sent you. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I mean, I have got sufficient religion since the second time I read this book that this absolutely graded on me. It makes sense entirely for who the characters are.
um, that, you know, Juanita says, um, who, who's the love interest in this book that, um, you know, Judaism was, was an attempt at rational religion at the time of the Deuteronomist, but then it devolved into empty legalism. And, um, But what's happening is not empty, and it's centered on the temple and the priests. But what I think the state of scholarship is about this is that the Sadducees... And the Pharisees collaborated in running the temple.
And, you know, the Pharisees are not exactly the rabbinic Judaism, but rabbinic Judaism claims dissent from them. And the descriptions... of the temple and what went on there is, you know, the Pharisaical interpretation of it. But it's probably as close as, but it's. But there is some conflict between the Sadducees and the Pharisees about... you know, what the high priest does in Yom Kippur. And, you know, the account that comes down to is the Pharisees end up winning.
But, I mean, the reason that the Pharisees end up winning is that, you know, this temple and the priests are really all the Sadducees had. I mean, the Pharisees had the ability to hack that the Sadducees did not. And that's why you have any kind of viable Judaism nowadays. Right, right, and destroy – that survived the destruction of the temple.
Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I think it's fair to say that some of the stuff that the librarian says is oversimplified, right? Right. Right. Yes. It's not a scholarly paper. Not really. No, it's not a scholarly paper. But I mean... But I don't think the librarian said it. I think, you know, it's Juanita and Hero interpreting what the librarian said. And I mean, clearly, you know, Hero wants to agree with Juanita as much as possible. Yeah. Well, and Juanita is kind of a,
not post-Christian. I think she calls herself a Christian, but- Yeah, yeah, she's a Catholic, yeah. has moved into a new kind of Christianity that rejects the resurrection, right? Which is kind of a central tenet of Christianity. Yes, yes. Pretty important. If there's one character that I feel is not as developed as the others, it is Juanita to me. Yeah, and that's... Part of the change in the book, you know, that Juanita was responsible for the faces.
in the metaverse and was able, well, at least in the one, in the one, in the one club where, where they're all meeting and, and that she was able not to throw brute force at it. And you thought that Neil Stevenson was really going to go a great deal to relate this idea to everything else in the book. But it seems to have fallen flat the second time around. Yeah. So Elbab, you kind of also kind of have the way you have dual protagonists, you almost have dual antagonists.
Yes. You have L. Bob Reif, who's the man. kind of who thinks he's running everything. And then you have Raven, who kind of works for him, but not really. Not really. No, no. Raven has his own motivation altogether. Yeah, and he's like this ultimate alley-oop badass who kills people with these glass weapons.
I'm not sure how they're durable enough to work for some of those things, but we'll leave that aside. But there's really interesting kind of – it's kind of convenient that Hero and Raven have this connected history of their fathers from World War II. Yes, yes. And clearly, you know, Cryptonomicon is the World War II saga, you know, that lets Stevenson develop this a lot more. Okay. A lot more. Yeah, yeah.
Um, where, um, that's, that's got nothing to do with the Aleutian islands though. Um, it's, um, it's, it's centered, you know, on, um, on the American code breakers. And Enoch Root, who has evidently lived an extremely long time at the center. transfers to the Baroque cycle, or at least someone who has the same name. Oh, okay. Interesting. So L. Bob Reif, at some point, he's kind of giving a – I can't remember if it was L. Bob Reif or it was whoever the pastor was who was kind of under him.
where it's almost like, are you familiar with the show Severance? Yes, yes, it's a great show. I have not seen any of the second season, but it is a great show. Okay, it continues to be a great show in the second season. But he almost wants severance because he talks about his programmers. He's complaining about the programmers get to take their knowledge home with them.
And he wants to control that. And that's one of the reasons that he's doing the things he's doing. So I guess YT really does kind of drive the plot because she ends up on the raft. And connected with Raven. And this is where some of the problematic stuff comes in. If you want to have a character who's going to be an object of sexual desire in your book, you can just make her 18. You don't have to make her 15. And so some of that stuff is really, really weird.
So, I mean, I know that ages of consent are basically... arbitrary but we have one that we're comfortable with in the United States yes yes And unfortunately, I think that's an artifact of its time. I will say one of the things every now and then when kind of thinking about making... notes for a book. I Google some things, words that I was unfamiliar with.
And with this one, if you, uh, if you want to go down an unpleasant click hole, um, Google dentata because, um, yeah, yeah. That was interesting. Yes, and that is absolutely problematic, you know, that that's an extremely important plot point. Yes. Yes. But, you know, I would never say that she becomes a damsel in distress at all. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I mean, you know, you have Raven giving her the thumbs up because she saved herself, you know?
with a lot of sheer nerve in order to do it. And yes. Well, and one of the things that I really like is that a key decision that she makes to be kind to one of the rat things. Yes, yes. And at some risk, right? Because it's basically a wild animal, but sort of a programmed wild animal. And she saves its life, right? Gets it back to its home so that it can survive. And it always thinks of her as the nice lady.
And his name is Fido. And he's a very good boy. Very good boy. And so he comes in at the end and is the one to actually take down L. Bob Reif, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. um and you know that that that that that could relate you know to one eat in the faces you know that this was you know a a random act of kindness by someone who loved dogs And that survived all the robotic brute force that was done to that dog's brain.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just sort of, you know, you have the imprint of YT's face. on the rat thing probe, she might not recognize him ever. Yeah. Even, yeah, yeah. You know, basically the interesting thing about kind of what I've said about YT driving the plot is that Hero kind of ends up getting orders from Uncle Enzo to go in and help extract YT.
And Uncle Enzo goes in with him as well. And that's one of the- Right. But I mean, Juanita's on that boat too. So I mean, he's got every reason to do it. Absolutely. Yeah. And so, yeah, he has more than one reason to go in. And I will say one of the things in the first read... And I've had a hard time with this in the past with some cyberpunk, is remembering when characters are in the virtual world and when they're in the real world. And so the whole confrontation between Hero and Raven...
On my first reading, I thought it was in the real world, but it's really in the virtual world. And then in the real world, Raven is confronted by Uncle Enzo. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean, that was not hard to tell apart because, I mean, you know, heroes... I mean, Hero's job there is to prevent Raven from showing the scroll to the hackers at the benefit for David with a five. And so you have these virtual reality presentations that would never happen in the real world.
It just got mixed up in my brain. It got mixed up in your brain. It's okay. And Stevenson kind of goes... fair distance to sort of do a little world building about how the metaverse works, because it talks about how he has a hero get confronted by somebody who wants to test his mettle against supposedly the greatest swordsman in the metaverse. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And so you have that very bloodless fight that ends up with the guy's arms cut off and his head cut off. And then the metaverse kind of cleans itself up. but it takes some time. And so that person is kicked out of the metaverse as long as his corpse is still there. Yeah. And that matters extremely because Hero knows enough about the plumbing that he can stop Raven from coming back.
Yeah, because I think Hero programmed the janitorial or the cleanup crew. That's right. Yes, yes, yes. There's a lot of slang in the book, right, where you kind of have to infer that. A bimbo box is, I guess, a minivan? I guess so, too. And this is not the kind of book where you have a 10-page glossary at the end. No, no, it's not. No, it's not. And the refugees, which are part of the flotilla with the raft.
They're referred to as refuse. And so, you know, when you say it out loud, you're like, were you trying to make us say refuse? Like trash? Yes. I mean, but there's, you know, the wretched refuse of your team. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and certainly, certainly this way these days in the United States with the attitude towards a significant portion of our population towards asylum seekers and other migrants, you know, that.
I feel like there are people who would latch onto that kind of terminology. Right, right. And... I mean, that's, you know, that's how the book has changed. You know what I mean? You have, you know, people in power who have no idea if there's any such thing as an asylum claim, who would wish, you know, that that would go away. And the idea that the United States is being invaded by a gang, people who have learned – serious gang behavior. I mean, that's a very precise parallel.
But obviously, you know, when Reif chooses to give them an order, they're going to obey him. Yes, because he's kind of hacked their brains, right? Yes, he has hacked all of their brains, yes. And, you know, in terms of a megalomaniac kind of… ideas of having control over everything. The whole plot that he has is pretty smart, that he realized. We need to control this namchug of Enki, right? Keep it in its envelope or whatever it is, because that's the vulnerability that we have.
Now, I don't know why they wouldn't maybe destroy it. I guess it was under lock and key. You know, it was hidden away. But, you know, that gives Hero a MacGuffin to go after. Right, right. Because once he has that, then he can have the librarian read out the Sumerian, and that's essentially the antivirus. Right, right. Exactly. Vaccine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and certainly if there's any such thing as, I mean, you could probably ship it back.
almost you know ship it back to babylonia right yeah i mean you know the whatever you know the iraqi national museum is is functioning as the iraqi national museum in this world which there may not be Yeah, yeah. I mean, that gets into a whole discussion of museums and where the provenance of the items that they have, like lots of stuff at the British Museum in particular. Exactly, yes. Should we still have this here in Britain?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was, I was following the story, the Ben and bronze is a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's some fun that, that Neil Stephen has with language where at some point when hero is on his journey. to the raft. He has to get there over the ocean, on the sea, and he falls in with this group of people. who I think are pirates of some kind. Yeah. And one of them, one of them comments, the people that they're trying to essentially board, you know, or.
or deal with, they'll listen to reason. And then it turns out that reason is the name of his super deadly depleted uranium machine gun. Cartoon violence. What can I say? Very much. Yeah. And the book does have a lot of fun action sequences, where the geography of everything is actually pretty well laid out, where you know what's actually going on, which I appreciate.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, that's the thing, you know, that that is at least a recognizable thing in our world, you know, you can get it right, you know. very easily just as you know you would extract um you could extrapolate from the internet at that time for the metaverse and you know have have people recognize that
um, that, that, that this could, this could actually happen. Yeah. But, but, but I mean, you know, clearly, clearly, you know, the Pacific coast, you know, that's your part of the world and you know, whether he got, you know, whether, whether he was accurate about the travel times or any, or anything that he sees, I would not know. Yeah, I mean, everybody travels a little faster than I think we're actually able to. But yeah, I'm actually, I'm from Alaska originally. And so even some of the...
There was one point where it talked about Raven Cook Inlet in Alaska and then drifting out to Kodiak, and I thought, I don't think that's possible. Okay. All right. So I didn't know that. Yeah. The cooking that is basically right. It comes all the way up to Anchorage, basically. Okay. And yeah, I'm sure you can get to Kodiak if you have the right vessel. But just to drift out to it, I think that would take weeks. Okay.
But I don't know. And also the cooking that there's some, the tides are quite extreme where there's just mud flats out there when the tides are out. And not that I'm recommending people walk on them because people actually die doing that because they get stuck. And then the tide comes back in and, uh, and it's a real hazard. So in the audio book, um, at some point he talked the, one of the characters is talking about. some Alaskan burb clave or something called Kenai Kodiak.
Yeah. Yeah. You're right. Right. He pronounced it can I, and, and I thought, okay, this is. Nobody asks somebody from Alaska about that. Right. Because it is Kenai. Yeah, it's a really interesting book. And you'd mentioned that one of the factors of – on your reread with it hitting differently was just, you know, politics have changed. I think you said that
in terms of your religious background has changed as well. Or not background, maybe, but expression. Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah. But did you enjoy it as much? I guess that I was sad, you know, that this had sort of been reduced to the level of prose. I mean, especially, you know, since...
You know, I've been exposed to writers, you know, who have a much more, you know, directly literary pro style. I mean, I think William Gibson is one of those people. And Susanna Clark is one of those people. Probably Ursula Vernon slash T. Kingfisher is. And, you know, for all these people, you know, even in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the myth is not an info dump, you know. You're walking around inside the myth.
And they all have sufficient genius, you know, in describing setting that you can do that. Where almost, you know, the setting is its own character. Yeah. And it interacts, you know, with their characters in its own right. Well, I think I've kind of run towards the end of my notes, and we've talked kind of randomly about lots of the different stuff that happens in the book. But maybe we should move into sort of final thoughts.
Do I have any final thoughts? I think this is still worth reading, you know, 30 years later and not, you know, just... Not just, you know, to know what the metaverse was when someone first imagined it. You're going to be terrifically entertained by it. It's going to be idea-centric the way The Best SF is idea-centric. You're going to have very well-drawn individual characters in that. For a book that's, you know, maybe 400 pages long, it's going to move.
um and um You're probably going to think about, you know, the kind of world building, you know, that each of us does, you know, as an individual person, trying to make sense of things. How tempting, you know, it is to be controlled by someone who offers transcendence, how it does not have to be that way. Yeah. I mean, no one who is all a sympathetic character lets it be that way. I agree. Yeah, I mean, I would echo a lot about
of what you said is that there's really exciting portions of this book. There's really interesting concepts that are brought up. And the characters are fun. I think if hero protagonist isn't the most amazing main character, YT is there to kind of fill the gap. Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's a very balanced split between who the main character is. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff.
I'm a little surprised that it wasn't a more honored book, given its reputation as the years have gone by. Right, right. But I mean, you know, as a... As I said, I mean, you know, William Gibson's cast such a shadow over the whole field to the people who vote on this and Bruce Sterling probably, you know, people who are. who take the subject matter much more seriously. Yeah, it was nominated for the Clark Award and the British Science Fiction Award. Right, right. And nothing else.
Yeah. And I mean, as I think I emailed you, I mean, you know, it was. It was up against Vorkos again both of the years that it could have been nominated. So it was never going to win a Hugo. But that it was not nominated, I was stunned by that.
Yeah, that was surprising. But it's one of those ones that because of its reputation, that's kind of why it found its way onto my list, just because people had said, well, you should read Snow Crash. Right. Oh, okay. Okay. I didn't know. I thought you had experience with this book before. No, no, it was brand new to me. And it was one of the ones that I think one of the inciting incidents for starting this podcast was I came across one of those
Buzzfeed lists, you know, how many of these famous science fiction books have you read? And I remember thinking, I thought I would have read more of those. But, you know, now I've read a lot more of them. I actually wrote them on the list. And Snow Crash was certainly one of them. Okay. So yeah, it was kind of an easy one to put on my Seth's picks list. And so I want to thank you, Leo, for picking it and for coming on the podcast to talk about it.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Jose Saramago is clearly a better Seth's Pit than this book. I mean, even without having read it yet, but I mean, you know, first of all, Le Guin's going to give it a good review. No more need to be said. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But this was definitely worth covering, and I'm glad that I've read it. And I was glad that kind of in our scheduling difficulty, I had some extra time so that I could review it and just let it sink in a little more.
And maybe that's just a thing with Stevenson and me. I need to give it more than one shot. Yeah. All right. Well, Leah, thank you again so much for doing this. Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Leah. It's a really interesting book.
And it was fun to get to cover that. It's also a book that's kind of random. And so I feel like the conversation was a little bit random, but that's just, that's, I think the way a discussion of snow crash is going to go unless you want to be really regimented about things. And I never want that. I do want to let everybody know that I'm going to be in Seattle for Worldcon. I will be attending.
So I would love to meet with people there. By this time, you will have seen that this podcast was shortlisted again for the Hugo Award for Best Fancast. So thank you so much for everybody who nominated the podcast. And so I appreciate your votes if you're a voter as well. If last Worldcon was any indication,
I will probably be offered a space to do a live podcast recording. I'd kind of like to do something, just not totally sure what I want to do. So if you're somebody who would be interested in doing something like that and participating, send me your ideas and I will consider them. I don't have that many ideas of my own. But mostly, I just want to meet up with people that I've met through the podcast. And if you're out there and you have never sent me any pings or anything...
let me know you're going to be at Worldcon and we can meet up. Unless, of course, the point was you didn't send me any pings because you want to keep the parasocial relationship exactly as it is, and that's fine too. Of course, you can sign up to support the podcast if you'd like to on Patreon or on Buy Me A Coffee. You can share episodes with your social media, follow me on the various platforms, and we can interact that way. Or not. All right.
Thanks, everybody, for listening, and I'll talk to you next time. Bye. The theme music for the Hugo's There podcast was composed and performed by Tim Cuskey.