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 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.
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.]
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!
This guy wrote Attack the Block? I hate to say it, but I didn't get that movie. Was I supposed to identify with heroes that are petty street criminals in a gang who like to steal cell phones from innocent people?
Sorry, I have a really hard time with movies that glorify the stupidity of a bunch of kids that skip class and become young gangsters.
I'd generally agree but as a huge fan of The Diamond Age (which would arguably be easier to film) I hope it brings more people to reading Neal Stephenson.
I wanted to agree with you, but then I realized: Snow Crash is basically the Tarantino approach applied to cyberpunk. The violence and bad-assitude is way, way over the top, but has a cutting, satirical intelligence to it. Eventually your inner fanboy and your outer ironist are laughing simultaneously.
So it's totally possible to make this a great movie (if you agree that Tarantino makes great movies, at least).
Snow Crash is an interesting book, but a deeply flawed one. Stephenson's later books are much better (though after Diamond Age they become too long to film anyway).
It is a bit of a dumb action movie, in many ways. A guy with a sword takes on an entire flotilla, if I recall correctly. The coolest moment in the entire book involves somebody saying "I'm sure they'll listen to reason" and then pulling out an enormous gun labelled "REASON". So if the movie turns out to be full of dumb action sequences it'll only be consistent with the book.
Another major flaw of the book, as written, is that it has chapters upon chapters of exposition which are basically dialogue scenes between Hiro and the librarian program. Most of the actual overly complicated plot stuff winds up getting explained in these scenes.
The third problem with the book is a rather dated view of the future... or by now a rather dated view of the immediate past. Both Hiro and the other dude are reasonably young guys whose fathers fought in World War 2, which puts a fairly stringent limit on how late you can possibly set it (unless you play around with which war it was; I think the fact it was WW2 was fairly vital to the backstory though).
Anyway, I'm not against a Snow Crash movie at all, I'm just pointing out that it needs some serious work to be adapted, and that may wind up throwing out some of the bits that many people like best about it.
> The coolest moment in the entire book involves somebody saying "I'm sure they'll listen to reason" and then pulling out an enormous gun labelled "REASON"
It's actually quite a small gun, labeled "Ultima Ratio Regum", and the original owner (who delivers that line) dies when its software crashes. And if you think that was the coolest moment, I'm not sure what book you were reading... Did you miss the downhill skateboarding in an office building? The nuclear-powered cyborg security drone? Hiro deflects a spear with a katana. There's a man with his own nuclear deterrence strategy.
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.
> Did you miss the downhill skateboarding in an office building? The nuclear-powered cyborg security drone? Hiro deflects a spear with a katana. There's a man with his own nuclear deterrence strategy.
Seriously, all these things are like you asked a 90's teenage what would be "kickin' rad". I loved the book, but in many ways it was just Stephenson saying, "Check out all this cool shit I thought up".
Of course. One of the themes in the book is the adolescent fantasies of male badassitude which follow them well into adulthood, with a diminishing but ever-present sense of possibility.
Not to sound too pretentious, because it definitely presents those fantasies in a sincere way, but the book also satirizes the idea; Hiro, a consummate badass who literally carries samurai swords with him everywhere he goes, is constantly placed out of his element, relying on other people to save his bacon. He frequently reflects that what he sees as his own badassness is probably down to just dumb luck, as the frequent deaths of his companions who are objectively more badass than him demonstrate. He behaves like an action movie character, but it's a sham; somewhere at the back of his mind, he knows he doesn't actually have what it takes to play at this level (a realization literally embodied by Raven). In the end, he wins only because he was actually a pretty good hacker.
Again, I'll agree the book is not conceptually perfect nor brilliantly executed, but it does got a lot more going on than it seems.
One of the themes in the book is the adolescent fantasies of male badassitude which follow them well into adulthood, with a diminishing but ever-present sense of possibility.
Actually I'm not sure that is a theme. There's a brief meditation on the theme of adolescent badass fantasies, but it's only used as a way of introducing a new character who is an even more ridiculous adolescent badass fantasy than the ridiculous adolescent badass fantasies that we've met up to this point.
The passage you're talking about is specifically about the fact that Hiro feels a sense of relief from the fact that he will never be more badass than Raven. That's a very particular angle on the situation, and you can read it at least partially ironically, because in fact it doesn't stop Hiro from trying to be, well, a hero, and if anything causes him to be more badass in the future.
But the book is full of male characters who die because they are trying to be or think that they are badasses. Raven is held up as an an ironic sort of idol; he demonstrates how badass you actually have to be in order not to die, and it's a comically excessive amount. And yet he's the only one who seems not to be motivated by that desire at all; he's just trying to get something done.
I don't think it takes a particularly close reading to see this theme; you just need to be willing to entertain the possibility that it's not just adolescent fantasy.
"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 in of itself, but it lacks the thrust and weight of Vonnegut or Pynchon (both of whom I recommend reading if you want to see 'smart').
Really? I mean sure, on the scale of "everything written in the English language" it may not be top notch, but I think it's one of Stephenson's best crafted works. The allusive density and rhythm of the prose is delightful, and it's packed with juicy, gritty metaphors. Who could forget:
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters... You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Yeah, it may not be provocative, life-altering science fiction, but dammit, Snow Crash is good storytelling.
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.
Reading DFW is like being run over by a train of literature.
I mean that in the best way possible -- he's an amazing author and one of the most unique voices that we've been fortunate enough to receive. If you haven't read it, his Kenyon address is stunning: http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...
Your desktop computer was called a microcomputer in the era when normal computers filled rooms. Reason's a depleted uranium gatling gun which is man-portable... that's small. Hiro is counterattacked by guns of a similar type which are way bigger.[0]
Perhaps I should have specified "small for what it is", though.
> 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.
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.
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.
Some of them are. Some of them are truly pointless. Neal Stephenson apparently had a giant map of 18th century London on the wall of the room where he wrote it, and as such apparently feels compelled, on certain occasions when a character goes from one place to another, to name every street he passes on the way. That's not atmospheric or interesting, it's just filler.
I thought it was pretty readable, but painfully predictable and fairly unoriginal. It was pretty much Stephenson's writing style grafted onto a grocery store checkout line novel's plot.
REAMDE was a bit long, true, but I had a blast reading it anyway. For one thing, it's really fun — right now — to read a book which accurately portrays up-to-the moment garbage like social media, MMORPGs, and a bit about startup culture. Plus, much of the text is hilarious, especially Ivanov's lines.
I enjoyed it, though I'd agree that it comes off as a bit of a goofy spy novel in the end. My guess is that Stephenson overcompensated for the perception that his earlier novels had anti-climatic endings.
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 honest Cryptonomicon is the only NS book which I really and wholeheartedly recommend. Diamond Age and Anathem are definitely interesting and I'm glad I read them but they have their flaws, Snow Crash comes across as juvenile, and the Baroque Cycle is approximately five hundred pages of a fantastic book bound at random with twelve hundred pages of boring.
> To be honest Cryptonomicon is the only NS book which I really and wholeheartedly recommend.
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.
Diamond age is interesting, he almost gets to write actual characters. Snow Crash is an 80s heavy metal album made into a book. Cryptomincon is excellent.
The Baroque cycle - you have to like Baroque. All those gold filigrees and cherubs of a Baroque opera house don't compare to the elegant lines of a Gothic cathedral and these three books aren't a lean story.
Anathem - I have to read again to decide if it's simply too long or if there is a point.
Readme - I can only assume he got a massive tax bill or is channeling the spirit of Michael Chrichton on a bad day. The only thing that raises it above Tom Clancy is that his editor managed to cut out 1000pages of weapons specifications.
Relating this back to a recent blog post from Michael Abrash on how and why he got to where he is, the post starts thusly:
"It all started with Snow Crash.
If I hadn’t read it and fallen in love with the idea of the Metaverse, if it hadn’t made me realize how close networked 3D was to being a reality, if I hadn’t thought I can do that, and more importantly I want to do that, I’d never have embarked on the path that eventually wound up at Valve."
I would feel a lot better about it if it was being done by Christopher Nolan. Inception was proof that he doesn't let suits dumb down complex plots.
But you have to admit that the opening sequence will at least be awesome: a pizza delivery guy who works for the Mafia flying through an extremely dangerous libertarian dystopia.
Inception was a shaky plot wrapped in enough accidental complexity to make studio execs -- and audiences -- think they were watching something profound. I get a sense of Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker who desperately wants to be taken seriously, which is just the opposite of who we need for Snow Crash. Given his admittedly short body of work (Attack the Block, The Adventures of Tintin), Joe Cornish seems a great choice for handling the action and outragous weird stuff in Snow Crash.
More discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4114513 Jon6 points out that an audience today might not realize how cool this all was because (as ynniv puts it) they're seeing it in the future.
Considering that one of the cool toys in this story was the inspiration for Google Earth, yeah, most people might not be too impressed. I love the story (love most of Stephenson's works, quirks/"flaws" and all), but it was "20 minutes in the future" when it was released in 1992. Hopefully they'll keep the snarkiness towards capitalism and religion and won't do a whitewash on Hiro or Raven.
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.
IIRC the original quotation didn't have "yet", and Gibson has remarked that adding it misses the point; the idea that the future will ever be evenly distributed is naive.
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 Matrix or the recent Batman franchise, but those tend to be the exception not the rule, and to be frank, cater to an almost goth-level of drama and pathos.
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".)
Neal Stephenson is a master of the diatribe. In almost all of his books he takes the time to go into detail on some arcane subject. While I may not be a master after he is done I feel like one.
When it comes to a mainstream adaptation I wonder if they will retain the diatribes. It would be really interesting to see how an audience takes to his level of engagement in a specific subject.
Rev. Wayne's Pearly Gates is going to require some serious refactoring if the studio (and director) want to avoid legions of pissed off fundies protesting at local theaters.
I doubt a movie skewering pentecostalism would lead to legions of fundies protesting. Growing up southern baptist, as fundie as it gets, we too would make fun of pentecostals.
There's good and bad publicity, and while the line might be blurred for software startups, it's fairly clear for film studios. Pissing off the conservative crowd in North America comes with some consequences for an entertainment/media company.
Case in point: The Golden Compass. The studio was shooting for a $30 million dollar opening weekend. They grossed something like $8.8 mil. You might recall that leading up to the opening there was a lot discussion (and a few calls for protests) surrounding some of the material in the books.
Compare/contrast "The Chronicles of Narnia". Both movies had similar budgets and targeted the same audience. Chronicles wasn't burdened by a bunch of controversy and pulled in ~$20 mil on the opening weekend.
According to Rotten Tomatoes, both critics and audiences thought Chronicles was simply a better movie. Unless you think the critics were somehow swayed by protestors? Seems unlikely.
The Golden Compass screwed itself. Trying to appease the protest, they softened the message, thus losing fans of the book in favor of conservatives who were never going to see it anyway.
TO be fair adapting a book about the evil church with the studio forcing them not to mention the church. It's a bit like having Sony insisting that Pearl Harbor shouldn't mention the Japanese.
Those were movies targeted at least partially at the children/young adult audience. The Snow Crash movie is unlikely to be targeted at the same demographic.
On one hand, I'm excited that this is finally being made into a movie but on the other hand, IMO Snow Crash is one of those books which the movie has to faithfully reproduce much like the Lord of the Rings movies.
Not knowing much about Joe Cornish, I hope he is able to properly capture the outrageous, over the top parts of the story.
Why isn't Mr. Stephenson writing the script? Doesn't even look like he cares,...which makes me wonder if I should.
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....
Combine it with Time Enough for Love or The Cat Who Walks Through walls and you can have the immortal 30-40 year old looking people, wind the ages down a bit, voila: immortal, time travelling, teenager Lazarus Long encounters a relative and shags them during the struggle for the Moon's liberation from Earth.
...and now when you tell people you like Neal Stephenson, they'll say "Oh, I saw Snow Crash!", and you'll say "The book is better than the movie", and everyone will think you're a jerk.
