Imagine that you are making a smoothie—an idea smoothie, to be exact. Oh, and you're going to need the biggest brain blender you can conjure, because we're going to be cramming a whole lot of ideas into this one.

First pour in some hackers and skateboard punks; next, a few dashes of detective work and World War II history. Sprinkle in some Sumerian mythology, Catholicism and other flavors of Christianity, and a bit Aleut culture, then toss in a couple of motorcycles, guns, and tech trinkets. Jostle the ingredients to make room for a few more: virtual reality, global conspiracies, memetics, linguistics, and dystopia.

Nope, that's not enough dystopia. Pour in a lot more…even a little more…Okay, there you go.

Welcome to Snow Crash, which takes the above-mentioned ideas (along with many more), whirls them all together, and produces a fast-pasted, irreverent romp through a future that's just around the corner. And we do mean just around the corner—because while some of the inventions seem a tad far-fetched (cybernetic guard dogs, really?), it's hard not to see parallels to our own world in the corporate world, security-patrolled suburban enclaves, and uneven distribution of wealth that fill this book.

In case you hadn't guessed yet, Neal Stephenson wrote a wicked—and wickedly entertaining—book when he published Snow Crash way back in 1992. That why it's one of Time's Top 100 Novels, as well as one of the classics of cyberpunk. Really, there's no reason not to read it…unless, of course, you buy the book's main premise, that ideas can hack your brain. Then you might want to proceed with caution.

Snow Crash is about the beginning and end of civilization as we know it. And if that’s not a reason to care then, um, we're not really sure what is.

Allow us to elaborate, though. When the main characters go all Sherlock-Holmes on us, they discover that civilization basically began in ancient Sumerian times when a priest named Enki found a way to hack the human brain. See in ancient times, people all spoke the same language and were a bit like automatons—read: easy to control—and Enki's discovery allowed for independent thought, which in turn lead to the rise of humanity as we know it.

What, pray tell, did Enki use to facilitate this shift? Language. Yep, that's it, language, a.k.a. our ability to communicate using words and sentences and stuff. Snow Crash advances the idea that in ancient times, all languages tended to converge, and Sumerian was the language du jour.

Enki, being a forward-thinking dude, engineered a language apocalypse (which went down in history as the fall of the Tower of Babel) that caused human languages to diverge rather than converge. Spoken Sumerian died out—though it's still possible to read it if you majored in Nerd—and the human brain was majorly kicked in the pants, causing it to reject the linguistic programming that made the Sumerians robotically obedient. People had to become creative in order to solve problems, rather than relying on instructions from the local priest-king.

In the current era of Snow Crash, some people—religious fanatics, wildly rich businessmen, and their ilk—want to return to those days when people were more like sheeple. And they've got enough money to make it happen. So what's to stop them? You're going to have to read on to find out, but we'll leave you with this: Language holds a whole lot of power in this book. You might even say civilization is at stake.