Snow Crash (Stephenson, 1992)
loreops cultureprogramming
Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel, which coined metaverse and popularised avatar in their current senses, and whose plot turns on a virus that infects both computers and human brains through a deep linguistic substrate.
It is the more technically literate of the two founding cyberpunk novels and the funnier one - the protagonist is a pizza-delivering hacker literally named Hiro Protagonist. Its ideas seeded a startling amount of real infrastructure: virtual-world design from Second Life onward, corporate metaverse projects three decades later, and the book was famously required reading among early engineers at several large technology companies. The central conceit - that language itself can be an exploit - reads better every year that prompt injection exists.
Also known as: neal stephenson, metaverse, avatar, hiro protagonist