Attack the Block’s Joe Cornish To Direct Cyberpunk Classic Snow Crash

... and which is now building the goggle interface device (Project Glass) that Hiro Protagonist used to great effect.

Perhaps the Metaverse will be upon us soon. Will Google take over Second Life?

Stephenson comments on this in Reamde.

I was surprised that Snow Crash wasn't the main inspiration, I learned from Ken Jennings' "Maphead." Instead, Powers of Ten is, though Snow Crash is somewhat involved. See: http://www.realityprime.com/articles/notes-on-the-origin-of-...

As long as they have the scene where Hiro is piloting a boat through Rife's Raft using real-time satellite views in one eye, I'll be happy.

At one time I thought Marcus Chong would be ideal but he's too old now. Maybe one of Rae Dawn's kids? They're probably old enough.

As long as it's not Johnny flipping Depp, I'd be happy :)

(I agree with you btw).

Didn't realise that. I remember the Adam & Joe Show. That rocked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGkoBjn9U-c

It's obviously an accidental omission. But just to play Devil's advocate, not complete isn't the same as not correct. For example, in this case we could just as well be looking at an appositive[1], making the sentence a perfectly well-formed answer to, say, the question "Who's the main character?"

1. http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/appositive.htm

Looks like that hyphenated aside swallowed the verb.

I don't think there are many (any?) African-American/Korean actors out there.

That is a Snow Crash. A condition I saw frequently learning 68k asm on a Mac. It sometimes looked like that if video memory was overwritten.

DON'T LOOK AT THAT IMAGE!!!

I wondered this briefly as well, but can assure you that it is not. They resolve almost instantly for me, so I fortunately don't have to spend 10 minutes wondering if something is just noise.

I wouldn't get too excited...it's been in development hell pretty much since the book was published. God knows how many writers have actually had a go at it, but I'm willing to bet a dozen or so (usually when a director gets attached they re-write the script with their preferred screenwriter).

You end up with this situation where the studio has to release something, because they've spent so much money buying the options, paying for ump-teen rewrites, etc. Studios don't account this as a 'loss', since in theory they will make the money back when the film is released. There comes a point in development hell where you have to release something, because either a) your losses on the film are at a point where you can't keep rolling them over, or b) your options are going to expire - and if you're the studio executive who decides not to make the film and commit that loss to paper you can bet you won't be with the studio for much longer.

The best case is you end up with something like Watchmen (which had been in development for about 20 years and had half a dozen big name directors attached, like Gilliam and Aronofsky). The final result is a reasonable film, although one that doesn't really compare to the source material and is fairly quickly forgotten. The worst case is the film doesn't get made (although if you're passionate about the source material you might argue this was the best case all along).

This is a big simplification - in true Hollywood style, it's a lot more complex (Snow Crash actually bounced from Paramount to Disney and back again - the fact Disney was unable to do anything with it isn't really a good sign). What you can pretty much guarantee is that at the end of it you end up with a film that's average at best. It's a vicious cycle: say Joe Cornish writes a great script, but Paramount insist on some rewrites. Joe Cornish then has to drop out, because the rewrites cause the schedule to clash with another project. Another director comes on, and he insists on new rewrites to accomodate his style. Etc, etc etc.

If you explained why you found Snow Crash mediocre, this could be an interesting post. As it is, though, it essentially has no content. If you had posted it on Twitter or Facebook, it would be a little bit better, since your friends could put it in the context of what they know about you and your taste in books. As strangers on the Internet, though, what are we to take away from the fact that you found Snow Crash mediocre? Sorry for the meta post critique, and I hope you don't take this the wrong way.

Snow crash is a terrible book. It is, imho, a fantastic collection of vignettes with the same characters that are vaguely related. Some of them are simple decapitation scenes featuring beer and vr googles, while others are deeper questions about the value of pay toilets.

snow crash was impressive, to me, because of the sheer quantity of new concepts, tightly integrated. Stephenson created a plausible future that dealt with what people would deal with in all conceptual scales, from highfalutin cultural organization of government and religion all the way down to teenagers interests in food and clothing. I feel, he did a pretty great job of avoiding the mundane that's pretty much the same as today, while highlighting stuff that's different, like skate wheels.

Snowcrash is a cartoon, it is a caricature of a future with new stuff. It's not a good book, not like coherent like Vonnegut, or even Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, but it is indeed a window to the future. Neromancer was written on a typewriter, and snowcrash was written in flatland.

That's because you read it in the future.

Are there other cyberpunk books that you have read?