Snow Crash
Stephenson coined the term "Metaverse" and created a pizza-delivery samurai named Hiro Protagonist who moves through a corporate-feudal America that looks increasingly familiar. Published in 1992. Dense, funny, prophetic.
Momentum drains from the second half and the plot never resolves into a payoff, which the harshest readers call a bait-and-switch that dazzles early and delivers nothing. Hiro is competence without effort, a “juvenile nerd power fantasy” of a hacker-swordsman, and a critic flags the “uninhabited blandness of the characters.” The Sumerian material arrives as long question-and-answer with a reference program, info-dumping that stops the story cold, a book that “would have benefitted from a more rigorous attention to the basics.” The “casual racism so pervasive in descriptions of most ethnic characters” gets named as a real flaw rather than a period quirk, including by readers who liked it. And the relationship between the underage courier and an adult antagonist sits there unexamined.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
