The first half or so of Snow Crash is a great entry point if the recipient already read some cyberpunk and thought "this has something interesting but also has a stick up its arse, it's about time someone ripped the piss out of it" - and I say this as a fan of Gibsonian prose excess.

The only problem is this puts the recipient in a too-cynical, too-stylistically-demanding mode for the rest of Stephenson.

- Posted on my Ono-Sendai Rig, from some kind of Zone, while experiencing Hacker News as some kind of geometric hallucination, under a sky the colour of a television switched off...