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Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

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Re: Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

#81

Post by euroclydon »

tptacek wrote: post #76
pault wrote: post #3

I'm afraid they'll leave out the most interesting parts of the book and make it a dumb action movie. For me, what makes the book great isn't the plot, it's the satire of american suburbia, globalization, and the weird tangents into sumerian mythology and NLP. I hate when they make movies out of my favorite books...

If you like weird tangents and biting satire of American suburban culture, try _Infinite Jest_. Both Stephenson and David Foster Wallace owe a debt to Thomas Pynchon, but Stephenson's relationship to Pynchon is unfortunately a lot like Dan Brown's (_The Da Vinci Code_) relationship to Umberto Eco (_Foucault's Pendulum_, another great hacker book): it's simultaneously superficial and exploitative, a kind of literary m…

I read hundreds of pages of Infinite Jest, on your recommendation, and while I did find certain scenes compelling, it finally dawned on me why I didn't like it: It's totally devoid of hope. Maybe I just didn't bring enough internal upbeatness to the table to enjoy IJ, but to me, the best part of reading a long novel, is enjoying the distillation of a big part of the authors life and getting to know them. I found DFW (in this book) just brought me down.

[EDIT: Maybe it didn't help that it was a Kindle book. I've read long books on Kindle, and it's gone fine when the books are mostly enjoyable and easy to follow throughout, but when they're not, it probably helps to have more physical clues as to where you are in the novel. IJ's chapter titles certainly didn't help me to know my way around the book either.]

Re: Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

#82

Post by neilk »

tptacek wrote: post #76
pault wrote: post #3

I'm afraid they'll leave out the most interesting parts of the book and make it a dumb action movie. For me, what makes the book great isn't the plot, it's the satire of american suburbia, globalization, and the weird tangents into sumerian mythology and NLP. I hate when they make movies out of my favorite books...

If you like weird tangents and biting satire of American suburban culture, try _Infinite Jest_. Both Stephenson and David Foster Wallace owe a debt to Thomas Pynchon, but Stephenson's relationship to Pynchon is unfortunately a lot like Dan Brown's (_The Da Vinci Code_) relationship to Umberto Eco (_Foucault's Pendulum_, another great hacker book): it's simultaneously superficial and exploitative, a kind of literary m…

> a kind of literary mountaintop-removal exercise

This metaphor is brilliant... hyperbolic with a sense of literary culture and heavy engineering at the same time. A little bit like something Neal Stephenson would write!

Re: Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

#83

Post by excuse-me »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #70
excuse-me wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all 60-70-80s SciFi is the adolescent fantasies of male badassitude of the author.

What? That's definitely not what late 60s - early 70s sci fi was all about. It would be hard to get much further from the truth, actually. That was a period of social introspection in sci fi, to almost too great an extent. Now, late 70s and 80s, maybe was about male badassitude. Some of it, anyway. But even then, there's a lot of deeper stuff in that era.

Sturgeon's law

Re: Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

#84

Post by excuse-me »

lukejduncan wrote: post #77
planetguy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand corrected on the latest one, which I haven't read. I've picked it up in the bookstore a few times but the combination of a thousand pages of thickness and a less-than--compelling blurb on the back ( wasn't this a Michael Douglas movie? ) have failed to convince me. Thanks for the anti-recommendation... a thousand-page book is a serious time commitment and there's a lot of other things I want to read. To be ho…

Oh man, The Diamond Age is my all time favorite and the book that drew me to Stephenson in the first place

It's not fiction BUT if you like NS on a good day you must read his history of telegraph cables (it's free online)

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

Re: Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

#85

Post by excuse-me »

adavies42 wrote: post #79
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree. Cyberpunk (or post-cyberpunk nostalgia) will work really well in animated or comic form. Its actually silly to see a guy in a three piece suit run around with a katana or a cyborg girl in a fishnet bodysuit shoot a machinegun at a group of robot assassins. Once you try to make it "gritty" and "real" you end up with clunkers like Hackers or Johnny Mnemonic. I guess you could point out stuff like the Mat…

what about something like _Kill Bill_ that's basically an animated movie that just happens to be live action? (i'm pretty sure it actually had both "a guy in a three piece suit run around with a katana" and "a cyborg girl in a fishnet bodysuit shoot a machinegun at a group of robot assassins".)

There must be coming a cross-over where live actors will be cheaper than animation and it will be easier to make Shrek17 as live than CGI

Re: Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

#86

Post by tptacek »

euroclydon wrote: post #81
tptacek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like weird tangents and biting satire of American suburban culture, try _Infinite Jest_. Both Stephenson and David Foster Wallace owe a debt to Thomas Pynchon, but Stephenson's relationship to Pynchon is unfortunately a lot like Dan Brown's (_The Da Vinci Code_) relationship to Umberto Eco (_Foucault's Pendulum_, another great hacker book): it's simultaneously superficial and exploitative, a kind of literary m…

I read hundreds of pages of Infinite Jest, on your recommendation, and while I did find certain scenes compelling, it finally dawned on me why I didn't like it: It's totally devoid of hope. Maybe I just didn't bring enough internal upbeatness to the table to enjoy IJ, but to me, the best part of reading a long novel, is enjoying the distillation of a big part of the authors life and getting to know them. I found DFW…

How far into it did you get? It's bleak throughout, but it gets less depressing when the plot starts picking up.

I found it much easier to read on an eReader than I did in paper, if only because the footnotes were easier to seek to.

Re: Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

#87

Post by tptacek »

Cushman wrote: post #51
jmduke wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Snow Crash is definitely action, and definitely dated (it's more alternate present than near future at this point), but if it's dumb I would sure like to see smart." I enjoyed reading Snow Crash, but I have to agree with the other posters -- it's a good story, not a great book. The prose is ...weak, to say the least, and it felt like science fiction for the sake of science fiction -- which is not to say that's bad i…

I wasn't trying to say it's a "smart book" per se; it's certainly an exercise in indulgent cyberpunk fan service, for better and for worse. Only that calling it a "dumb action movie" implies that the reader is not particularly aware of the state of action movies. Personally, I'm a DFW man.

If you want to double down on hyper-referential and symbol-laden and keep the guns and stuff from Stephenson, try getting through _Gravity's Rainbow_.

Re: Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

#88

Post by euroclydon »

tptacek wrote: post #86
euroclydon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read hundreds of pages of Infinite Jest, on your recommendation, and while I did find certain scenes compelling, it finally dawned on me why I didn't like it: It's totally devoid of hope. Maybe I just didn't bring enough internal upbeatness to the table to enjoy IJ, but to me, the best part of reading a long novel, is enjoying the distillation of a big part of the authors life and getting to know them. I found DFW…

How far into it did you get? It's bleak throughout, but it gets less depressing when the plot starts picking up. I found it much easier to read on an eReader than I did in paper, if only because the footnotes were easier to seek to.

I think the triple or quadruple agent dialogs on the mesa were what did me in.

Re: Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

#89

Post by dredmorbius »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #34
liamondrop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are portraying as negatives (meandering detours into entirely unnecessary, but hilarious, trivia; absurdly unlikely plot scenarios [since when is anything about Snowcrash a likely scenario?]; etc.) are probably what loom as the largest selling points for fans of Stephenson's work from Cryptonomicon onward. I don't think we buy the books for the "plausability" factor. Also, the books hardly take themselves se…

The Baroque Trilogy literally changed how I see the way the world works. Those endless detours are worth quite a lot.

The best textbook on modern banking and finance I've ever read.

Which, I realize, is a really damning endorsement of a novel, but I honestly found it fascinating. Once I chewed through enough (roughly half) of the first book to the point that it was engaging.

And yes, its exposition was itself an exploration of the baroque.

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