Confronting Dystopia: The Power of Cognition in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and the Diamond Age

Recuperating Dystopia-Thinking Big Among the RuinsRuined cities, broken institutions, and ecological, technological, political, and economic collapses mark nearly all texts labeled "dystopic fiction." While the term dystopia is relatively unstable and fluid, the literal translation from the Greek as "not-good-place" is a useful start. For this essay, I will define dystopic fiction as any text that depicts the lead-up-to and/or after-effects of global cataclysms or the onset of totalitarianism in such a way as to offer little or no hope for humanity's short- or long-term survival. Examples of such dystopic texts that foster or advance such a definition include George Orwell's 1984 (1948), Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (DADoES 1968), and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). Although one could argue that both Orwell and McCarthy offer the slightest of hopes that Oceania's citizens will, one day, revolt against Big Brother and/or that the Boy will find solace with the stranger he meets after his father's death, neither outcome is in any way assured. And, certainly, few would want to visit Orwell's "Oceania," Dick's Los Angeles, or McCarthy's American wasteland as these are certainly "not-good-places," but dystopic fictions often go further to reveal futures we may well be creating today through disastrous environmental policies, continued threats of global thermonuclear or biological warfare, and the expansion of cybernetic technologies into the sentient.Neal Stephenson's novels, from The Big U (1984) to Seveneves (2015), are often labeled "dystopic" because they do often feature these kinds of calamities, but such marketing offers little use-value for understanding his significant contributions to contemporary science fiction. Stephenson's novels and public statements break with this loose definition of the dystopic at nearly every turn by offering scenarios where human creativity and cognition offer real hope against such potential disasters. As Fredric Jameson articulates in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1994) are better termed "anti-Utopias" as they reject what Jameson calls "grand Utopian idea of wish-the abolition of property, the complementarity of desires, non-alienated labor, the equality of the sexes" (145). Instead, Stephenson's early works often privilege such values as the accumulation of private property, unfettered capitalism, Victorian colonialism, and often rigidly defined gender roles, but both novels ultimately suggest that non-alienated labor, especially creative engineering and design work, is a potential salvation.Because his breakthrough novel Snow Crash details an America divided between those living in storage units and those who can afford to hide themselves inside privately secured housing developments controlled by oftenracist "Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Enterprises" or "FOQNEs," it is easy to see why readers, critics, and booksellers group it with 1984, DADoES, and other works that forecast the end of liberal democracies. However, Snow Crash ends with the computer hackers triumphant against the despotic forces that would enslave them. Despite similarly apocalyptic settings in Stephenson's other works, including a grossly polluted Boston in Zodiac (1988); a Shanghai divided into magisterial, terraformed properties of delight and wonder for the rich and powerful and miserable slums in The Diamond Age; and the doomed surface of the Earth after the Moon's sudden destruction in Seveneves, Snow Crash resists classification as a dystopia. Truly, each of Stephenson's settings is either the result of a societal system crash that has destroyed the economic, political, social, and other institutions or one in which the present is careering towards such a crash that may or may not come to pass in the novel. But in each work, his protagonists build a cognitive response to ameliorate the present discomforts or prevent, take advantage of, or simply try to survive an impending catastrophe. …