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I'm reading the audiobook (just started after finishing Ready Player One) and choked on my dinner at min 1:24 at the following quote:

The opening screen of T-reign(sp?) was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this since he had heard that Google Earth in turn was based on an idea from some old science fiction novel

For those that haven't read it, 'some old science fiction novel' is Stephenson's Snow Crash.

I know that this is a stand alone novel, but I thought I'd start a thread for any other cross-references that others have picked up on, or just plain cool passages you want to share and/or comment on.

Hmm, considering the concept of a GIS (Geographic Information System) defined as "a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographically referenced data" has been in existence in an operational form since the 1960's, Google Earth being merely a well-known and well-used instance of a GIS, I hardly think Stephenson can be credited with inventing it or Google Earth.

I wasn't claiming that Stephensen invented GIS. The guys who developed GE have openly stated that they were influenced by Snow Crash in designing the UI on top of Keystone (the backbone software).
Stephenson wasn't the only author to ever write about GIS, but was certainly one of the first to articulate a solid vision of how GIS, non-geographic data, virtual worlds and UI would converge and be used.
That said, the purpose of the thread was to collect good bits and comment from the book, not get into arguments about attribution.

Ah, my apologies.

I think I can see why Lepton is becoming a name of note :)

Thanks for the pointer Lotek, actually forgot about Snow Crash being the likely reference.

I loved the self-reference the author used in that passage.

wouldn't be a Stephenson novel with out that kind of stuff...

I read Snow Crash right before starting Reamde. I laughed pretty hard at that joke. Perfectly subtle.

I'm joining this discussion a bit late, and I'm not responding to the request for additional links, but I feel like the main point hasn't been hit on the head yet. In the passage, Stephenson appropriately refers only to the opening screen, as well as "what you saw when you booted up Google Earth", and doesn't at all refer to the core GIS functions of either one at all. So doing, he did make a legitimate nod to something that's been pointed out for years. When Hiro said "earth", what he first saw, just as you first see in GE and again now in T'Rain, was a lovely but fairly useless 3d model of the entire earth floating in space, from whence you could descend to a more useful POV elevation of your choosing. That statup sequence is of course not part of the practical GIS functional model and can be credited to Stephenson. Whether he originated the idea or not, he's the reason we (and Google) know about it. :)