According to a page that can be found on the official website of Sotheby’s, the original manuscript of Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the novel that is credited with coining the phrase “metaverse,” will be put up for sale. The auction is a part of a series dubbed “Infocalypse” that will take place on February 23. The series will feature both physical and digital goods linked to the well-known novel.
Lot 2 of the series contains the original manuscript that was written. It is “wrapped in original Xerox 4200 Paper,” it is sealed with masking tape, and it has “corrections and notations throughout written in blue ink by Neal Stephenson in his hand.” Additionally, the author has inscribed the title of the book on the spine of the book using a sharpie marker.
In addition, there is a “updated typesetting document” up for auction in Lot 4 of the sale. This is a later version that was revised and supplemented by the author with extra handwritten notations and alterations.
Other real-world items are also being sold at auction as part of this series. These include the original painting that was used as the cover art for the 1993 mass-market paperback edition of the book; a leather jacket that was going to be used in a video promotion for the graphic novel; slides that were used for the concept of the graphic novel; and a real sword that was inspired by the one that the book’s protagonist wielded.
In addition to these tangible artifacts, the series will also include non-fiction tales (NFTs) of digital art that were created in response to the graphic book idea that came before Snow Crash.
The dystopian novel Snow Crash was first released in 1992 and takes place in a world where the majority of people reside in cramped storage facilities. The main character, Hiro, is a pizza delivery worker who needs to battle robbers in order to deliver pizzas to customers. The story chronicles his adventures. Hiro doesn’t have much of a social life since he spends all of his free time in a virtual world known as “the Metaverse,” which is a place where people go to get away from the stress of ordinary life. The inhabitants of the Metaverse, however, are transformed into “nothing more than a jittering cloud of negative digital karma” due to a computer virus. The journey that Hiro takes through the book to discover a cure for the virus is the driving force behind the story’s action.
According to the Washington Post, the book has racked up sales of more than one million copies on the continent of North America alone. Since the publication of the book, enthusiasts of virtual reality have been increasingly using Stephenson’s term “metaverse” to describe the developing virtual world that is being created by virtual reality technology. In recent years, the term has become a buzzword that is frequently searched for online.
The growth of the metaverse has provided some people with new job prospects and has contributed to the transformation of Web3 gaming.