I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk, dystopian novel Snow Crash.
It treads a precarious line between literary and popular fiction, although it generally ends up more on the literary side (it's hard not to when some of your characters actually speak using in-text citation from Mesopotamian scholars). I'm not really sure how to distill the plot and do it justice, but it's essentially the story of a cyberpunk Renaissance man (computer genius, expert swordsman, and Mafia-employed pizza dude) trying to prevent a computer virus named Snow Crash from destroying what's left of an already nightmarish, post-American world
The story takes some very clever and provocative turns, and I don't feel comfortable pointing them out lest I spoil the book for you (although considering that it's almost 20 years old, I shouldn't feel bad about it). Suffice to say that it makes some very interesting observations regarding how computer programming and linguistic semiotics intersect. It also has some fascinating conspiracy theories about ancient civilization.
This is also where the book set up some red flags that led me to post about it on this blog. For a cyberpunk novel, the text is intriguingly friendly towards theism. One of the main characters, Juanita, is a self-proclaimed Catholic who stands out in contrast to a vastly atheist or at least agnostic (or perhaps just apathetic) hacker culture. This made her a more sympathetic character for me, even though she is a divorcee who hardly seems to put too much stock into the moral aspects of her faith. Unfortunately, we later learn that her Catholicism is really just cafeteria Catholicism. Her research into ancient cultures has led her to see the obvious lies of the Church -- Christ clearly had no physical resurrection and the pope is a man-made institution that was forced upon Christ's earliest followers.
I'm not exactly sure what's left of Catholicism to make her Catholic--I don't recall her voicing any opinions on the Eucharist. It almost starts sounding like a cooler, better written version of a Dan Brown novel. Don't think that Protestantism fairs any better though. In Stephenson's fictional universe, Protestants (Pentecostals in particular) take the wrap for reducing post-American religion to a pre-rational (or post-rational) numbness and zombie-like state.
While I'm not going to complain too much about how he depicts some of the more radical versions of Protestantism, I was a little disappointed that his book had to go after the pope. It seemed like an unnecessary move that didn't really advance the story and really only served to reinforce the kinds of technocrat stereotypes that the novel seemed to be breaking.
It also seemed like a missed opportunity. Here's a spoiler...the novel suggests that it might be possible for the human brain to be infected with a data virus, the same way a computer can. The novel even goes so far as to suggest the possibility that the data could be delivered through as vary means as pictures, sounds, or even radio waves. He calls this a "metavirus" that "infects" a brain and causes the infected person to then reproduce means by which others can be infected. In other words, there might be invisible or hidden means by which signals in the cosmos could trigger thoughts in a human brain. It's a bit like some mutant hybrid between a theory of the Ideological State Apparatus and astrology. While Stephenson's characters argue that that papacy and resurrection were fabrications that were imposed on the Gospels during revision (a very Marxist approach), his characters could have used the allegedly imposed text as evidence of metavirus. After all, one of the strongest biblical defenses of the papacy is when Peter identifies Christ as the Messiah. Christ tells Peter that he did not learn this from any man -- rather, he's been inspired by God. Sounds like a Divinely-generated metavirus to me.
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