Hiro Protagonist is the hero and protagonist of this novel. He is a deliverer of pizzas, a hacker, a music promoter, and an expert swordfighter, who fights most of his battles inside the Metaverse - a virtual reality world with its own rules and laws.
The United States government has collapsed, and hyperinflation has devalued its currency a trillion-fold. In California, each suburb is now its own autonomous nation. Hiro helped create the Metaverse, where he discovers a new virus that infects both computers and people. After some research, he realizes that the virus is an ancient one - predating computers by thousands of years and that it attacks the human brain in the same way a computer virus attacks the files and memory of a machine. This virus is so ancient that it may have inspired the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
Hiro encounters a religious cult, artificial intelligences, crime lords from various factions and nations, a rebellious teenager, and a psychotic Aleut.
I loved the way that Stephenson combined linguistics, history, cybercrime, and characters. He tells the entire story in the present tense, which gives it a sense of immediacy. Stephenson includes satire of commercialism and capitalism. Most of the suburb-states are controlled by corporations. The church exists for the personal financial benefit of its founder and is bankrolled by a telecommunications tycoon. And he includes a hilarious description of the bureaucratic regulations on the use of toilet paper.
The book is not without its faults. After an exciting start, it fails to maintain that same energy throughout the novel and the ending felt a bit rushed. Some of the characters could use a bit more development. Y.T. and Juanita - the most important female characters - were at least as intriguing as Hiro, but we did not get to know them as well as I would have liked.
A potential flaw is that this book contains several extended scenes in which Hiro or an Artificial Intelligence explain world history and background information in great detail. Usually, I prefer to learn things in a novel as the action unfolds, rather than having someone explain it to me; but I found their lectures interesting and illuminating - especially as they compared and contrasted the stories from various religions. And the author offsets these monologues/soliloquies with many scenes of intense action. Hiro and Raven the Aleut are the two badassest people on the planet - Hiro with his sword and Raven with his harpoon, so their battles tend to be epic.
This was not the first cyberpunk novel published, but it established Stephenson as a master of the genre.