Snow Crash Metaverse Manuscript and NFT up for auction
The sale will also include a one-of-a-kind tachi sword (est. $120,000 – 140,000), made by the award-winning Wētā Workshop, best known for its craftsmanship on the films Lord of the Rings, King Kong, Blade Runner 2049 and Avatar (the work also popularized the term ‘avatar’ to describe a digital figure representing a specific person and was cited by director James Cameron as a primary inspiration for his blockbuster series of the same name).
In addition, there will be digital offerings, including an edition of dystrophic generative art, titled Infocalypse. These original digital artworks, created by artist Tony Sheeder in collaboration with Stephenson and artist and software developer Crispin Sterling, draw inspiration from Dioxin Posse, the graphic novel project that would later become Snow crash. The generative art sale will be held at Sotheby’s Metaverse, marking a full-circle moment for the man who coined the term.
The concept of Snow crash was originally conceived as a graphic novel that Stephenson created with artist and collaborator Tony Sheeder, but due to the high costs (they planned to shoot it as a movie first, then cut up stills to create the graphic novel), all som exists is a series of 35mm slides made by the couple to showcase the project. In another auction first, these slides, offered with their digital versions as a 1/1 NFT ($6,000 – $9,000), will be sold alongside the original painting by famed science fiction cover artist Bruce Jensen, used as the cover for the mass-market paperback edition of Snow crashpublished by Bantam Spectra in 1993 (est. $30,000 – 50,000).
Alongside the material related to the publication of the novel is a unique hand-forged tachi sword inspired by the weapon used by the novel’s protagonist, with an estimate of $120,000 – $180,000. Also offered is a leather jacket, created by Stephenson and Tony Sheeder for the character YT to wear in the original graphic novel concept for Snow crash, with the ‘Elmo’ logo used by her group, the Dioxin Posse, c. 1989.
At the same time as the auction is celebrated Snow crash is Infocalypse, blind mint issue of generative dystrophic digital art inspired by the ‘Elmo’ logo of the Dioxin Posse. Each digital artwork is uniquely generated based on a number of characteristics, and each buyer will be randomly assigned one of the thousands of available variants. The project was a collaboration between Stephenson, Tony Sheeder (the artist behind Dioxin Posse) and artist and software developer Sterling Crispin, to mark the 30th anniversary of the release of Snow crash. The limited edition NFT will be offered at a fixed price of $250 at Sotheby’s Metaverse.
“Half my life ago, with my head full of computer graphics and visions of a satirical cyberpunk future, I sat down to write Snow crash,” said Neal Stephenson. “Last year, on the 30th anniversary of the book’s publication, I pulled the old manuscript out of storage and looked at it for the first time since 1991. Covered with handwritten edits and sentence notes that have since been rendered obsolete by digital codes, it bridges the era in which video games and the Internet became ubiquitous in our lives.”
