Parenthood and Present

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach.

Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got. (Chapter 36, page 271-272)

"Their arguing–the same argument we're having now–was their downfall. The Nipponese caught up with them on a road just outside of Nagasaki... He raised the sword up above my father's head."

"It made a high ringing sound in the air," Raven says, "that hurt my father's ears."

"But it never came down."

"My father saw your father's skeleton kneeling in front of him. That was the last thing he ever saw." (Chapter 66, page 447-448)

tags: America, adversaries, historical context, legacies of war, the nuclear deterrent, parallelism


Seth has addressed the concept around human cpu, and the relation between binary and language in a better way than I could. Instead I will focus on the interactions between Raven and Hiro based on their fathers' shared past as POWs in Japan during World War II and the story they share in their final confrontation in the Metaverse. In many ways Snow Crash is about the conflict between Hiroaki "Hiro Protagonist"  and Dimitri "Raven" Ravinoff. Hiro and Raven are sort of shadow counterparts. Their shared background of mistreatment is integral in understanding the conflict of Snow Crash and what it means to our present.


Hiro straddles the racial boundary for two groups of people who were historically mistreated by the White racial majority of the United States. His father was black, the people who were brought over as slaves and are still mistreated by the bigoted racial supremacist burbclave of New South Africa. His mother was "Korean by way of Nippon" and his choice to identify with his Asian heritage, specifically with the culture of Japan or Nippon, recalls the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. One racially insensitive individual asks him, "Are you a lazy shiftless watermelon-eating black-ass nigger, or a sneaky little v.d.-infected gook?" (301). Hiro is both and neither, he is cross-cultural yet fundamentally American. Even after the fall of the government and its marginalization into the so called Feds that Y.T.'s mom worked for, Hiro functions as a representative of the cultural melting pot that defined the nation that was and still exists in the novel in some form.


In defining Hiro as cross-cultural, Black-Asian, we are really determining what is truly American. The end of the white-dominated culture is looming on the horizon. In fact, according to a recent article from the NY Times the number of multiracial children in the United States grew to 4.2 million according to the U.S. census[1]. The destruction of the U.S. as a metaphysical entity does not impede this metaphor of Hiro as representing a new kind of U.S. citizen. We only have to look at Raven to see that the U.S. still persists in a sense beyond its decimation as a political entity. For Raven lives for getting revenge on America, which he extends to not only a political organization but an entity embodying a set of ideals still present in the fragmented society of burbclaves, franchulates, and Mafia-run pizzerias.

Raven still harbors a grudge for the United States after his father was nuked not once but twice by them. This shapes his self-described "life long ambition," for as he says it "I used to have this plan– I was going to nuke America" (378). And in some ways Hiro and his final confrontation surrounds an attempt to "nuke" the power elite of society– the hackers. He makes this explicit right before Hiro executes him in the Metaverse saying, "[I] Realized my lifelong ambition" (456). Through his attempt to decimate the minds of the elite members of their futuristic society Raven is effectively getting his revenge on all of the forces of oppression that hampered his father and himself. His position as an Aleut harpooner, puts him in the position of an ethnic group that was mistreated and marginalized by colonial desires including having the government text nuclear weapons on their lands. Raven therefore represents a force with a grudge, legitimate yet leading to dangerous ends, against the established power structure of society and utilizes this technology only in so far as to cause the downfall of the whole establishment.

Raven proves to be "the baddest motherfucker in the world" and represents an ideal that Hiro cannot hope to match (271). The physical nuke that Raven carries in his sidecar makes him a literal nuclear power, which proves the deciding factor in their difference, meaning Hiro cannot hope to touch him without activating a city-buster. So instead Hiro attempts to live within his limitations. In so doing he achieves a virtual victory over Raven, while simultaneously stopping him from destroying the new cultural aristocracy by way of a Snow Crash nuke in the Metaverse. Thus it is ironic that this nuke never comes into direct play and the "nuke" he uses on what constitutes America is not one in the real world but instead the Snow Crash bomb.

Though by no means a post-racial society, the fragmented state of the United States of America is by no means a dystopia that deserves ruining by forces such as L. Bob Rife and Raven using the Asherah virus and Snow Crash to decimate and control the population. Hiro defends the right for the remnants of America to do the "four things we do better than anyone else

• music
• movies
• microcode (software)
• high-speed pizza delivery" (2).

"Nova" and Historical Consciousness

Samuel Delany’s novel "Nova" is packed with political, social and cultural insights that appear timeless; the human beings of the 32nd century have achieved enormous philosophical and technological progress, but they interact with one another in a way that is still recognizable and comprehensible by the human beings of today. Delany paints a portrait of history that, in the words of Kyrin (The Black Cockatoo’s pseudo-historian and the narrator of much of the novel) is “a great web that spreads across the galaxy, as far as man.” (174) For Kyrin, the history of his era cannot be taken as a linear progression, with direct notions of cause and effect, beginning and end: it must be seen as a fabric, with ripples whose initial cause is often difficult to ascertain. This non-teleological view of history helps Kyrin justify the writing of a novel, in an age where novels are viewed as hopelessly obsolete. Even in an era where sensory syrynxes can convincingly replicate realities and tell stories, a medium from ancient past continues to offer an important means of constructing meaning.

Kyrin’s commentary provides Delany with a means of justifying the anachronisms and ancient allusions that pervade the text. Much of the story’s plot is derived from the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. The race for Illyrion is crafted from fragments of English pirate novels and other glamorous narratives of colonialist exploration. The blind prophet Dan seems to be a blatant reference to the blind prophet Tiresius, who makes multiple appearances in Homer, Sophocles and Dante. Even the format of Delany’s historical commentary seems drawn from elsewhere: Kyrin’s certain disconcerting similarities to the historical commentary that pervades books III and IV of “War and Peace.” When described in this manner, Nova seems like no more than an amalgamation of others’ ideas. As experienced, Nova presents itself as an incredibly original text, seamlessly fusing tropes from the past and commentary on the present with a narrative set in the world of the future.

The universe of Nova is one where faster than light travel is possible, but humans still believe in tarot card readings: after Mouse denounces the credibility of Tarot, Kyrin tells him that “…the idea that all these symbols, filtered down through five thousand years of mythology, are basically meaningless and have no bearing on man’s mind and actions, strikes a little bell of nihilism ringing.” (123) To Kyrin, the weight of tradition is something that should not be absolutely authoritative, but should never be ignored entirely; concepts that are long-lived have lasted for a reason.

The major thematic elements of the novel, when combined with Kyrin’s explicit explanations of 32nd century historiography, helps convince the reader that ideas that may seem dated often have enduring meaning. Even novels, which Kyrin characterizes as “…always a historical projection of its own time” (128), can produce traditions that echo throughout space. Within Nova, Delany underlines the importance of both science fiction and ancient history: the past and future are often not far from the present.

The Time Machine: A Product of its Times?

Although the creators of works of fiction pride themselves on originality, they do not work in a cultural vacuum, as their works are inevitably influenced by the literary paradigm within which they operate. In particular, the historical context surrounding a work of fiction has a significant influence on the content its creators choose to present, as the different versions of the Time Machine show. Wells’ original text was published in 1895, at a time when England’s accelerating industrialization had led to its emergence as an global economic power, and consequently allowing capitalism to gain acceptance as an economic and political ideology. Being an avowed socialist, Wells uses his text to draw out the potential negative consequences of capitalism, namely that segregation based on economic class might eventually lead to the evolution of two different types of humans and the dysfunctional society he describes – social commentary which Wells’ contemporary audience, surrounded by the ongoing debate between opposing political ideologies, would surely have been able to recognize.

By contrast, the adapters of the 1960 Time Machine film were working under the spectre of the looming Vietnam war and the Cuban missile crisis, so it is hardly surprising that themes such as the inevitability of human conflict and the appropriating of advancing technology for military purposes are raised in the film. Leaving behind the present in which George’s friends urge him to use his talent for inventing to serve the country in the ongoing Boer Wars, George travels into the future, only to find war whenever he stops: in 1917 during World War I, in 1940 during a World War II bombing of his neighborhood, and in a futuristic 1966, suggesting that conflict will always exist in human societies. The instruments of war depicted in the film also reflect our tendencies to use advanced technology to destroy rather than to create, as George finds that the war in 1940 is fought with zeppelins and bombers, while nuclear missiles and “atomic satellites” are used in 1966. Such themes would certainly have resonated with the audience of 1960, when the US and the Soviet Union were pursuing nuclear rearmament and there was a very real possibility that their hostile relations might erupt into war.

One other theme which the Time Machine films appear to address is that there will always exist human desires which our scientific advancements and technology simply cannot fulfill. In the 1960 film adaptation, George travels into the future in search of information about advanced technology to carry back to his time, which he hopes will help him to spread the message of peace; in the 2002 remake, Alexander invents his time machine to travel back in time and prevent his girlfriend from dying. Neither of the time travelers find what they are looking for through the use of their inventions, although for different narrative reasons. While George’s arrival in middle of the various wars could conceivably be attributed to mere chance (at least from his perspective, and not that of the film director’s), Alexander learns near the end of the film that as the death of his girlfriend was what drove him to invent the time machine, saving her would cause a time paradox, and thus would never be possible. Expressed as a necessary consequence of a physical law, this paradox simply serves to drives home the point that there will always be desires scientific advancements cannot fulfill, given the limitless nature of human wants.