How Snow Crash Changed the Future of Mapping

For anyone who has ever read the 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson called Snow Crash, it is easy to appreciate how closely real life can sometimes imitates art. Never mind the parallels between Stephenson's "Metaverse" and the popular online game "Second Life" - that's a blog discussion for another day. I want to focus instead on examining how closely today's Google Earth and Microsoft's Bing Map (formerly Virtual Earth) emulate the "Earth" application in Snow Crash". Consider the following excerpt from Chapter 13 of the book: