Snow Crash

I saw that Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) was on Time Magazine's list of best English-language novels written since 1923. Time's list and description can be accessed here. I read the entire book simply due to its early imaginings of a virtual globe. Here's the book's initial description of the software:

...a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes...It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns - all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.