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I had the same feeling... We shouldn't be surprised if, after that, we see a Neuromancer series on Netflix or Amazon Prime (not Disney, pls God!).
Don't play with my emotions that way. There's been talk of adapting Neuromancer to screen for waaaay to long.
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Is Ringworld really dystopian? I mean the ring world civilization(s) did fall, but Known Space and the puppeteers were pretty much doing OK.
Sort of a problem with a lot of Niven's novels more generally, but they became travelogues to a large degree. I agree not especially dystopian (or interesting). I liked his short stories a lot more.
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?
Don't they have cell phones, though? I mean, YT is able to call Hiro from the Buy-n-fly?
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Sort of a problem with a lot of Niven's novels more generally, but they became travelogues to a large degree. I agree not especially dystopian (or interesting). I liked his short stories a lot more.
I always loved that about them. Not all sci-fi needs to crawl into its own navel and reveal the condition of Man. Sometimes it can just create and explore a fantastic universe.
Interesting, didn't know HBO was going to be doing online only shows now like Netflix, Apple and Amazon. Snowcrash is the book that inspired Philip to create Second Life. Then he moved on to create High Fidelity, but they are now pivoting more for virtual meetings and business use it looks. One thing I kinda don't like about the new virtual worlds, they are disconnected spaces while Second Life tried to have a sense…
I feel like they tried that before and a room full of literal flying penises ended that experiment just as quickly as it started.
I wonder how well this will work. While the book exists on several levels, it worked really well in the 90s as the logical, but absurd, conclusion to cyberpunk. The cyberpunk aesthetic feels very dated today though.
Uh oh, don't tell CD Projekt Red
However, while HBO's Watchmen is well timed because of the huge popularity of the MCU, there's not currently any similarly well-known cyberpunk body of fiction right now.
It will be interesting to see how they adapt it though. It's probably one of the more "ready for screen" books that Stephenson has written, but even there it relies heavily on internal-monologue and brute writing style more than it does on great plotting.
Of course if you are going by my theory of dystopian SF being the thing right now, The Diamond Age is probably a better fit, plus it's already populated with a few orgy scenes, which seems to be a plus for HBO. I suppose there are casting issues with the plot centering so much around a young girl though.
My fear with any Snowcrash adaptation is that it will feel like John Carter of Mars (or Warhammer Online [1]). John Carter was a groundbreaking novel, but its ideas became so adapted and universally understood that revisiting them in a movie felt ironically like derivative work. If I have to endure years of my non-cyberpunk friends talking about how Snowcrash feels like a rip-off of Ready Player One, then I will flip…
Despite the jokes, HBO tend to do a decent job of this stuff. Ignoring the shitshow that was GoT after season 4. The Wire, The Sopranos, Westworld... probably better in their hands than, say, Netflix.
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I had the same feeling... We shouldn't be surprised if, after that, we see a Neuromancer series on Netflix or Amazon Prime (not Disney, pls God!).
While were confessing our wishlists for books-to-tv: I'd love to see "Rendezvous With Rama" made into a series.