Snow Crash is a fascinating cyberpunk classic with great world building but a plot that does not live up to the same enthusiasticism.
We're mostly following Hiro and Y.T. in their lives as they get entangled in a few threads. The story takes its sweet time to kick off the plot, which basically doesn't boil down to anything more than stopping a bad guy who wants to take over the world. The unique strengths of Snow Crash lie somewhere else.
Most importantly, Neal presents an amazingly intricate and fleshed out world of semi-dystopian cyberpunk. The novel was still brimming with cool ideas, and that is almost thirty years after it was first published. I can only imagine how fascinating this must have been back in nineteen ninety-two.
What I enjoyed most about this book, were its chapters where Hiro was discussing with his Librarian daemon about ancient civilizations. This included creation myths of Sumerian culture, their influence on later civilizations, possible conspiracies surrounding the bible. These chapters (27, 28, 30, 33) precisely hook into what I was already interested in recently, after my investigations into historical cultures and their food. Then, in chapter 56 and 57, Hiro gives a nice summary of his interpretation of what is going on in the world. He traces the full history of informational viruses with biological components, and how they kickstarted human civilization. To ultimately survive throughout time, despite monotheistic and pluralistic counter-tendencies, as the cult of Asherah. Neal manages to mention just enough historically plausible things onto which he can extrapolate his fictional theories and interpretations.
Neal was also the one to coin the term Metaverse, in Snow Crash. In the novel, it refers to the collective virtual space accessed through terminals that project a high-quality virtual reality on your goggles. He is also the one who popularised the term avatar to mean online virtual body. The Metaverse contains many references to real world computing culture, but adding plenty of fictional elements to it, which makes it a very rich illusion while reading.
In conclusion, I would definitely recommend to read this nine-hundred+ page novel, to experience the fantasy of cyberpunk from one of its most influential sources.