[ethan]

[ QUOTE ]
Would you strongly recommend reading Snow Crash and Diamond Age prior to Cryptonomicon or do they not really interact?

[/ QUOTE ]

There's no interaction between the first two books you mention and the third. Or, for that matter, between the first two. But they require less committment to read and they're both excellent. They are more...cyberpunk. But there's going to be some suspension of disbelief in all of these books. Cryptonomicon basically abandoned the cyberpunk genre and went towards historical fiction.

So, SC/DA aren't connected to his later books, but I'd still recommend starting with them.