51–60 of 120 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disney has Mandalorian . Amazon has The Expanse and recently picked up Ringworld for a tv-series too. Another unnamed network is supposedly currently considering Red Rising series as well. Sci-Fi dystopia is hot right now.
Netflix has Altered Carbon and Black Mirror .
Wow, so exciting. This has got to be one of my favourite books of all time. The first time I read around the year 2000, I enjoyed but I essentially thought "That was neat, and funny, but man did he miss how things would turn out! haha". If you read it today, you might be shocked by how many things it has gotten right.
Watch them ruin it.
The book is a lot of fun, but it's also not a sacred text. It's a story about a pizza delivery driver who will be murdered if he delivers pizza too late and is also a hacker getting bound up in a story of Sumerian brain programmers run amok. (And somehow these brain programmers also can infect someone's blood?) For all of its foresight, the book is goofy and dated as hell. If it's going to come to screen there's no w…
“Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery”
While Snow Crash is one of the all time great sci fi novels, it famously has a huge plot hole: although Stephenson saw a lot of things about the future with remarkable accuracy, he did not foresee the ubiquity of the cell phone. A simple cell phone would have undercut the main plot. Now that we know what we know, how will they account for it?
While Snow Crash is one of the all time great sci fi novels, it famously has a huge plot hole: although Stephenson saw a lot of things about the future with remarkable accuracy, he did not foresee the ubiquity of the cell phone. A simple cell phone would have undercut the main plot. Now that we know what we know, how will they account for it?
I support any network taking on more Sci Fi. I'd give almost anything to see a proper Foundation series done by HBO. Or culture series, or a Dune series, or you name it. Imagine a gritty interpretation of Fire Upon The Deep done by Christopher Nolan. There's not nearly enough Sci Fi movies.
This book featured adversarial inputs to the human neural network long before deep learning was cool.
Epileptic seizures can be triggered, that's the only actual adversarial attack on the human neural network that I'm aware of that actually works, and is more common than you might think: https://www.epilepsysociety.org.uk/photosensitive-epilepsy
I'm glad to see this happen. Suspect that a network exec somewhere said: "Sci-fi! Dystopia! Rogue AI! Cyberpunk!" and then HBO went through the list of books meeting that criteria (copying the Game of Thrones formula) and picked a best-seller to make a screen play out of. The subject matter seems to fit quite well with the tech malaise we are feeling at the end of the 2010's.
While Snow Crash is one of the all time great sci fi novels, it famously has a huge plot hole: although Stephenson saw a lot of things about the future with remarkable accuracy, he did not foresee the ubiquity of the cell phone. A simple cell phone would have undercut the main plot. Now that we know what we know, how will they account for it?
Seinfeld is still funny even though cell phones would resolve most episodes in 5 minutes. Just make it an alternate future where some tech hasn't materialized because of corporate interests.