Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish
geek.com
geek.com
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.
The movie should not take away from the fact that books are brilliant.
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.
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.
My desktop computer is not hand-sized because I have a slim keyboard and mouse.
Perhaps I should have specified "small for what it is", though.
[0] Something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS , as I recall.
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".
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.
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.
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.
That was a period of social introspection in sci fi, to almost too great an extent.
Now, late 70s and 80s, maybe was about male badassitude. Some of it, anyway. But even then, there's a lot of deeper stuff in that era.
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').
Personally, I'm a DFW man.
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...
<rimshot>
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 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.
Also, the books hardly take themselves seriously.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.]
I found it much easier to read on an eReader than I did in paper, if only because the footnotes were easier to seek to.
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!
So it's totally possible to make this a great movie (if you agree that Tarantino makes great movies, at least).
"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."
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-w...
I'm not saying he'd be ideal to direct Snow Crash, but your criticisms of his work are unfounded.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/his_dark_materials_the_golde...
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chronicles_of_narnia_lion_wi...
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.
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....
Exciting new director - but a budget high enough that it will need the theme park and fast food tie-ins
A pitch which probably included phrases like, "it's the Matrix but with samurai swords and girls on skateboards"
.... and it will probably be in 3d .......