What Inspired Second Life?
Just like your favorite movie… Second Life was inspired by a book too (sorry).
Published in 1992, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson told the story the Metaverse, a virtual world where humans are represented as avatars (sound familiar?). In the book, users gain access to this world from private or public terminals (there is a stigma attached to those who access in this manner). In typical dystopian fashion, the world showcased in the book is filled with organized crime, violence, drugs, and a loss of personal privacy… but there are heros that transcend from the physical to the virtual world.
I found out about the book while researching Second Life last fall for my professor at Syracuse and ordered it on Amazon for next to nothing after I realized that this book started it all.
Stephenson explained the title of the novel in his 1999 essay In the Beginning…was the Command Line as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that “when the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set — a ‘snow crash’” -Wikipedia
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in virtual realities. It’s fast paced, techy, and filled with geeky jokes (yes!).
If you have a SL account, you can read a SL edition (first 4o pages) there. Stephenson even signed off on it according to this article.
