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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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 way the adaption doesn't either:

1) Update some of the goofier stuff (upsetting the fans)

2) Leave it all in, in all its 80s action movie glory. (Which won't look all that great in the modern zeitgeist.)

I'm already expecting people will be disappointed with whoever they cast for Hiro, for either being not Black enough (or too Black) or not Korean enough (or too Korean). Similarly, do they outfit Y.T. with a retrofuturist 80s interpretation of what it means to be a skater punk? Or do they update it to be a 2020s interpretation of what it means to be a future skater punk? There's no answers to these that satisfies everyone. Someone will inevitably say it was 'ruined' no matter what the show runner does.

I remember reading the opening few pages and chuckling out loud:

“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”

Any book that names is hero/protagonist Hiro Protagonist doesn't take itself too seriously. I think both the producers of this adaptation and the fans would be well served to do the same.

And don't forget that the female lead character is Yours Truly!

Eh, Stephenson likes puns. He did the same thing for Anathem, and I’d say that takes itself at least somewhat seriously.

Fully agreed, except that reading your comment made me realise that 'retrofuturist 80s interpretation' is exactly my picture of 'the future' now, and I was born in the 90s.

It's not that it's actually what I expect, it's just that if contemporary futuristic stuff's being made, I'm not watching it. But I have seen the Back to the Future trilogy, and 2010, and so on.

> Fully agreed, except that reading your comment made me realise that 'retrofuturist 80s interpretation' is exactly my picture of 'the future' now, and I was born in the 90s.

Did you see the Cybertruck? itshappening.jpg

Not all, but many wrecks of books include the authors imprimatur on the uplift to live actors. "yea, I know its hard to do a skeleton, lets make death be an actor with a black hood" is low bar. "No, the lead didn't get to sleep with the other lead in the book, but what the hell, put a sex scene in episode 3" is medium bar. "I changed the ending for you, if you need more changes just let me know for $" is high bar. Actually, they're all low bar.

Even Margaret Atwood says she willingly works with the production company to "make it work" on screen. Plot evaporates in an instant.

As you say, and I agree: its not a sacred text. Speaking of which, I think TV novela versions of sacred texts usually wind up where 'hail ceaser' went: a committee of wise men (and it always is men) arguing about whats sacred anyway..

I'm looking forward to it being a critical success and then to watch them search for other works by the author to videoize and either grab Cryptonomicon or, even better, the Baroque Cycle...

Actually, Seveneves would be a kind of amazing long running serial if they just ran a chunk of anthologies during the portion of history the book skips between stabilizing the asteroid and recolonizing earth.

I would love to see the last section of seveneves picked up as a TV series. There's so much to explore there.

If there's any channel that I'd trust with translating a book to TV, it's HBO.

So long as that book (and all sequels involved) have actually been written already.

Fair point, but in this case we're lucky that Snow Crash already has been written :)

They're AT&T/Warner/HBO now.

Don't get me wrong, I fucking love Snow Crash, but let's be honest with ourselves: it's basically a dopey Schwazenegger-esque action movie for the IQ 115 crowd, in book form. We're not talking about something with ton of depth or philosophical complexity. I think HBO can manage.

Philosophy-lite is the last two chapters of bibliomania isn't it?

Every Neal Stephenson book rehearses the same ethos. He's consistently asking "but what is consciousness, anyway" in the end.

> I think HBO can manage.

how many shows did you produce?

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