I'd Make a Sweet Hacker

As dorky as I am, I don't read much of what I consider to be "traditional" science-fiction. I must prefer the fantasy end of the spectrum to something that is mostly about, say, rocketships or robots or technology. That caveat aside, I loved Snow Crash. Stephenson is one of those sci-fi/fantasy writers who are being rebranded as "speculative fiction" and moved to the proverbial front of the store (i.e. being marketed to readers in general, as opposed to geeky, pimpally mes).

Snow Crash is told from the dual perspecitves of Hiro Protagonist, a samurai-sword wielding super hacker, and Y.T., a skateboarding "Kourier", or super duper delivery girl. It's set in the not too distant future, where America has been splintered into various franchises, each with its own currency, residencies, and law (you can be a citizen of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, the neo-nazi New South Africa, the Uncle Enzo run Mafia, and hook your RV up to the Buy n' Fly to drive for you, pay for a bathroom, a jail cell, etc., all in the same strip mall). You can also (from you PC or a phonebooth) log in to the Metaverse, which is basically the internet where you can walk aorund, own a house, go to a bar, etc. Hiro, one of the lead architects of the meta verse, witnesses his friend Da5id, basically the most famous hacker in the world, be exposed to a new designer drug called Snow Crash, which shuts Da5id's computer and brain down simultaneously. Snow Crash users tend to speak in tongues, which leads Hiro (with the help of former girlfriend Juanita) to discover that what it actually is is a nam-shub, an ancient Sumarian magic that changes the brain's language center the way a hacker changes computer code. What starts as an exploration of this fantastic future world turns into a quest by the few (Hiro, Y.T., Mr. Enzo, Juanita) to take down a vast conspiracy that involves the church, the Inuits, the franchise United States of America, and millions of refugees who have lashed their rafts to an aircarrier. To try to explain the whole plot (the main villian is a former eskimo who has wired a nuclear bomb to his pacemaker) would be silly and unfair...if you have any interest in modern science fiction, read it.