Stephenson uses ironic, tongue in cheek humor to reveal his intention of commenting on current day society. The novel begins, “The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.” He uses genre words like “mission” and descriptions of his uniform being “black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air” to portray Hiro as highly important, sleek and dangerous. Yet there is a twist of humor when describing how a bullet would bounce off his uniform “like a wren hitting a patio door.” He is in someways making fun of the way science fiction, in particular, cyberpunk can take itself too seriously in depicting a dangerous and “cool” hero. Other signs of humor are in the description of the gun, as “the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry.” He reverses your assumptions about armor and weaponry, creating a humorous ironic effect. Stephenson plays with cliches and conventions more throughout the rest of the book, exposing them for engines of narrative. He strips them away to replace instead with more honest cartoonish depiction. As if to say, this is fiction and can therefore be unreal and pretty absurd, why pretend it isn’t. This mix of the gritty and lightheartedness is a very post-modern self awareness of fiction as an artifact. The caricaturization doesn’t conform to the realism often seen in the world building that occurs in science fiction. He is honest about using this future depiction of a dystopian world as subterfuge to comment on ordinary mass consumption, corporatization and the engines of capitalization to enslave society.
-Diana Zhu