Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
This book takes place in a near future time (I'd guess around 2020, but I don't think the book says precisely). One of the two main characters is... get this... Hiro Protagonist (try pronouncing it: ya' know, the main character in a story?). Despite that little extravagancy, this really is an impressive story. It sets up a lot of the disorganized nation-state existence present in another of his books, The Diamond Age. Sovreign territories are set up on franchise systems, allowing people to move to a completely new place, but feel quite at home because it's just another piece of the same country. The technology is similar to real technology at the time of the writing, but advanced in a few ways that won't shake somebody familiar with current technology.
One of the recurring technologies is the Metaverse; a 3D perspective internet protocol. He gets a few things wrong (like misunderstanding where the difficulty lies in a large number of users rendering the same scene), but considering he wrote this in 1992, before any good 3D internet protocol actually existed, I'd say he did quite well.
The long-range plot of the book involves (but I won't specify how lest I ruin the plot) the concept of a metavirus; a virus of such sophisticiation that it can infect any sort of computing hardware, including those human minds that have learned the basic necessities to comprehend it (ie programmers). He never mentions it in the story, but this provides an interesting hypothesis for a reason why the Drake equation varies so with the lack of observations of extraterrestrial radio sources. If such viruses are propogating in the information streams between far-flung civilizations, it would be improbable for any to last very long without becoming infected and thus ceasing their development (if not killing them outright).
It's got a nice fast-paced storyline that still takes time out here and there for world-building (which I love). The vilains are pretty believable as are the heroes, in my opinion.
I give this a 9/10
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