terminals in Reality, using them carries a social stigma among Metaverse denizens, in part because of the poor visual representations of themselves as low-quality avatars. Status in the Metaverse is a function of two things: access to restricted environments such as the Black Sun, an exclusive Metaverse club, and technical understanding, often demonstrated by the sophistication of one's avatar. Characteristic technologies Various technologies are employed in this fictional world and help define it. Among these are: Metaverse Stephenson's "Metaverse" appears to its users as an urban environment, developed along a single hundred-meter-wide road, the Street, that runs around the entire 65,536 km (216 km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet. The virtual real estate is owned by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, a fictional part of the real life Association for Computing Machinery, and is available to be bought and buildings developed thereupon. Access to the metaverse is through L. Bob Rife's global fiber-optic network, which grew from a collection of small cable television franchises into a global telecommunications monopoly and superseded the traditional telephone system. Users of the Metaverse gain access to it through personal terminals that project a high-quality virtual reality display onto goggles worn by the user, or from low-quality public terminals in booths (with the penalty of presenting a grainy black-and-white appearance). Stephenson also describes a subculture of people choosing to remain continuously connected to the Metaverse by wearing portable terminals, goggles and other equipment; they are nicknamed "gargoyles" due to their grotesque appearance. The users of the Metaverse experience it from a first-person perspective. Within the Metaverse, individual users appear as avatars of any form, with the sole restriction of height, "to prevent people from walking around a mile high". Transport within the Metaverse is limited to analogs of reality by foot or vehicle, such as the monorail that runs the entire length of the Street, stopping at 256 Express Ports, located evenly at 256 km intervals, and Local Ports, one kilometer apart. Distributed republics Distributed republics are loosely connected state-like entities dispersed across the world. The concept was reused by Stephenson in The Diamond Age. Literary significance and criticism Snow Crash established Stephenson as a major science fiction writer of the 1990s. The book appeared on Time magazine's list of 100 all-time best English-language novels written since 1923. Some critics have considered it a parody of cyberpunk and mentioned its satiric or