Black Chariots of Pepperoni Fire

A footnote concerning the mysteries of Enoch and Neal Stephenson

One day in in the summer of 1992 I was idly scanning a display table at North Berkeley’s Black Oak Books and stumbled upon a new novel by Neal Stephenson titled Snowcrash. At the recommendation of my father I had read and greatly enjoyed Stephenson’s previous novel, Zodiac: An Eco-Thriller. The blurb on the back of this book called it a cross between William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which was basically the equivalent of shoving a giant and irresistible BUY ME NOW button into my face.

I read that book as if propelled by a tsunami. The last lines were still echoing in my head when I called the books editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian (where I had been freelancing movie reviews) and begged for the opportunity to review it. She offered me fifty bucks, I accepted…. And my career as a chronicler of cyberspace began, a solid year before I first got hip to the actual Internet. My love of science fiction turned me into a technology reporter via Neal Stephenson’s midwifery.

In retrospect, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into:

Lest one dismiss cyberpunk as pure techno-nerd escapism, it is crucial to realize that fundamental to the conception is the idea that society is breaking down, that governments have become powerless in the face of transcendent international corporations locked in furious struggle to control technological advances. Cyperpunkdom means anti-utopia. Hi-tech weapons lead to hi-tech violence; poverty of information means serfdom; manipulation and exploitation of everyone by everyone is the name of the game.

And this was during the halcyon days of President George Herbert Walker Bush! Look how far we’ve come!