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On a related note, when is someone going to make The Moon is a Harsh Mistress into a movie?
When they can manage to fit a high school full of teenage vampires into the plot ?
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Yes - odd to think that once the idea of the military being outsourced to Haliburton, 3D city models on your phone/glasses and a cyberspace landgrab for new domain names was in the future.
I used to wonder when the cyberpunk future was going to happen. Then I realized it already has.
On another note, Ender's Game is coming out and Orson Scott Card fought hard to get the right actors and write the script. Oh how I can't wait for this....
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> Stephenson's later books are much better (though after Diamond Age they become too long to film anyway). I disagree - his most recent novel, REAMDE, is twice as long as it needs to be (and badly in need of a ruthless editor), takes itself far too seriously, is full of absurdly unlikely plot scenarios, and is in general almost totally unreadable.
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…
We're on the same page then, I agree with you. I really enjoyed Cryptonomicon. Diamond Age was interesting but tended to read like the script for an over-the-top sci-fi movie.
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I used to wonder when the cyberpunk future was going to happen. Then I realized it already has.
"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
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...
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 mountaintop-removal exercise.
Wallace isn't going to give you guns with with funny names or high-speed chases, but almost everything you say you like about _Snow Crash_ is abundantly scattered throughout _Jest_. Stephenson was also notorious for his thuddingly unsatisfying conclusions. Wallace solves that problem in way I think is very congenial to hackers. :)
It's a much longer book. And you're going to spend a lot more time decoding than you ever would in a Stephenson novel. But it's fun, and worth it.
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> Stephenson's later books are much better (though after Diamond Age they become too long to film anyway). I disagree - his most recent novel, REAMDE, is twice as long as it needs to be (and badly in need of a ruthless editor), takes itself far too seriously, is full of absurdly unlikely plot scenarios, and is in general almost totally unreadable.
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…
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"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.
I fell like Snow Crash would be much more successful as an animated movie. There's a lot of whimsical, somewhat silly stuff in there that works in a book and could work animated but doesn't translate well to live action.
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…
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...
So it's totally possible to make this a great movie (if you agree that Tarantino makes great movies, at least).