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.
I'm guessing this came about because Cornish had a movie that did quite well with the geek critics, if not the box office. So he probably got some meetings off that and they asked him what he wanted to do next. He said Snow Crash, they figured why not, it's just sitting there, and here we are. This is all conjecture on my part, but it seems likely.
Still, it's good to see it's floating to the surface again.
Snow Crash is quite a classic book. It was actually one of the books that got me interested in coding/hacking. Anyone here who hasn't read it should do so right away.
I'll be interested to see if Joe Cornish is able to pull off the technical aspects of the movie without it appearing too fake.
>>"Hiro Protagonist – that’s the character’s name – a computer hacker/samurai swordsman/pizza delivery driver who investigates and tries to stop the takeover of postmodern civilization."
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?"
Ok, I'll bite. No I have not read any other cyberpunk books, but necromancer was recommended to me. Anyway (unlike the implication from ynniv) I had no problem with the metaverse. Here are the issues I can think of at the moment
1. no character development
2. "hiro protagonist" 10/10 on the lame scale
3. no explanation for why delivering pizzas is so important. there is one paragraph that attempts to explain it but fails miserably.
4. the girl only serves as a plot vehicle and does so incredibly poorly
5. hiro's dad and raven's dad were captured together? absurd
6. love of the rat thing for the girl is disney-level goofy
7. the "magic spell" juanita reads at the end is a little too convenient
I did like the fighting scenes, though. There was one very good paragraph in the whole book -- the bit about how computers never seem to do the right thing and to get any modicum of productivity out of them the tools one uses must be transparent, meaning the user must have a deep understanding of their tools. That is a pretty deep insight that can be incorporated into daily life.
My suspicion is that the rat-thing was inserted after-the-fact to facilitate the book's ending. It's been a while since I read it, and I remember enjoying it, but the rat-thing always seemed like a cheat to me.
I'm not sure the book ever mentioned LCDs specifically? It was written in 1992 before LCDs became prevalent; perhaps he imagined some other (analog) technology being used instead.
It was very sad when I realized Gibson's great line "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." had been completely lost on me because I assumed he meant bright blue instead of gray.
That's my point. The title dates the story. It's supposed to take place in the near future, but for the title to make sense it will have to take place in the recent past.
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.
It's been a few years since I read it, but I remember Snow Crash being filled will about 100 pages of explanation about the development of language in Mesopotamia and the basis of the plot still didn't make any sense. I'm concerned how the movie is going to approach this in 2 hours.
I'm still waiting for the mini-series adaptation of The Diamond Age, which I preferred to Snow Crash, that has been "in the making" for something like five years now.
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.
That image makes sense in the context of the book. In particular, in the book skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from what otherwise looks like binary noise just by looking at it.
That's why I thought it should be an autostereogram. I hadn't tried to focus on one in 20 years, but I relearned it with a little practice. I couldn't get this image to resolve either, but I did feel like I was seeing something in there. I'm pretty sure it's not pure noise.
I've read the book, so I knew that it shouldn't be an autostereogram. But checking is kind of an automatic procedure when I see an image like that.
>In particular, in the book skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from what otherwise looks like binary noise just by looking at it.
Erm, that's not really what the image is a reference too. The noise is what the titular "snow crash" looks like when you use a particular digital "drug" (well not exactly a drug, but, spoilers you know). I don't recall anything about hackers being able to read binary code by looking at bitmaps, and I'm pretty sure that statement is contradicted by Hiro's skepticism that the binary code in the Snow Crash drug could actually have any effect on a human brain simply by entering the visual cortex.
So I didn't want to include too many spoilers, but one element of the book was the ability of hackers to intuit meaning from binary because of their level of familiarity with computer code. That is, show them a hex stream and they should be able to read the ascii it contains. That's not wholey unreasonable, I can look at the data I'm currently writing tools for and pick out the time by connecting 12 bits split up and spread over 84 bytes.
The book takes it to the point that binary images, static to non-hackers, to hackers contains meaning (though not consciously), permitting the information contained (subconcious memes/instructions) to be spread via images, rewriting their minds. The images to everyone else look like static or the "snow crash".
The whole thing lacks seriousness. A character named Hiro Protagonist is the protaganist of the adventure. It's filled with action/pulp goodness, not a serious treatise on the capabilities of interstellar memes and the effect of language on the human mind. Some magical incantation in a language no one in the present has ever heard, but that is apparently genetically programmed into our minds, permits anyone to be controlled by commands in the language. If that's allowed, why not let static convey it as well? And the language/commands returned in the form of signals from space?
What I actually found most interesting reading back over the book lately was the very 90's take on ethnic balkanization. I don't think that ever really came to pass in the way it was always assumed it was happening at the time, and I think a primary reason for that is the kind of rapidly-changing tech economythat was the backdrop for the story.
I'd be really curious to see how a present day retelling if the story would handle this disconnect.
Male Character .... Check
Female Character .. Check
Nuclear Weapon .... Check
=> James Bond with iPhones
We should just hide the minority report and stop this crime against literature from happening.
[Edit] Obviously I should elaborate a bit: Snow Crash is precisely the type of book, where it is really easy to make an disappointing movie. It has enough action scenes to fill 90 minutes without ever mentioning any of the interesting concepts of the book.
Fun fact: Snow Crash featured a software called 'Earth', a complete 3D view of the earth. Which inspired a company called Keyhole to write something like that. Which got later bought by Google and that product is now known as Google Earth.
no, they'll take over minecraft. Much better to take a ridiculously simple system where anyone can build anything, and grow it into the full 3d design system of second life.
One of the things that really attracted me was Snow Crash's very 90s idea that your plot of land in the Metaverse was run from your own computer. Of course, it didn't turn out that way and now everything is moving to the cloud.
Hey, the cloud is always online and my instances are mine. If I were running my website from my computer, it would be down every time I went into the subway.
Yeah, that was amusing and caused me to rewind the audiobook and verify what I'd just heard. Reamde "rips off" Google Earth, but that just basically ripped off "some sci-fi novel" anyway so it's okay. Kind of like the moment in the Ready Player One audiobook where Wil Wheaton reads about future Wil Wheaton being elected as basically co-president of the Internet.
There was a mostly-terrible interview with Stephenson on GoodReads where the one redeeming factor was getting to hear Neal's thoughts on Snow Crash these many years later:
That certainly would have been an interesting take on the
material, which some believe is essentially unfilmable.
Seriously? Snow Crash was supposed to be a comic book, that's why the intro is so strongly visual. The Street, the sword duel on motorcycles, the Burbclaves, the Loglo, etc etc.
Some of the deeper themes may be difficult to translate to a 120 minute movie, but that's not the same thing as unfilmable.
I really hope they manage to find someone with mixed African/Asian ancestry to play Hiro instead of whitewashing the character. It's not exactly a plot point, but it did give a sense that Protagonist was born ahead of his time.
Probably the most enjoyable time I've had reading a book. And here is my favorite quote:
>Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.
56 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadYou 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.
I'm guessing this came about because Cornish had a movie that did quite well with the geek critics, if not the box office. So he probably got some meetings off that and they asked him what he wanted to do next. He said Snow Crash, they figured why not, it's just sitting there, and here we are. This is all conjecture on my part, but it seems likely.
Still, it's good to see it's floating to the surface again.
Now, if Neuromancer would ever actually happen...
EDIT: Lorenzo Di Bonaventura signed on to produce Neuromancer last month. That's a big deal, it might really get made. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/seven-arts-and-prodigy-pict...
I'll be interested to see if Joe Cornish is able to pull off the technical aspects of the movie without it appearing too fake.
That is not a complete sentence.
1. http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/appositive.htm
1. no character development
2. "hiro protagonist" 10/10 on the lame scale
3. no explanation for why delivering pizzas is so important. there is one paragraph that attempts to explain it but fails miserably.
4. the girl only serves as a plot vehicle and does so incredibly poorly
5. hiro's dad and raven's dad were captured together? absurd
6. love of the rat thing for the girl is disney-level goofy
7. the "magic spell" juanita reads at the end is a little too convenient
I did like the fighting scenes, though. There was one very good paragraph in the whole book -- the bit about how computers never seem to do the right thing and to get any modicum of productivity out of them the tools one uses must be transparent, meaning the user must have a deep understanding of their tools. That is a pretty deep insight that can be incorporated into daily life.
Also, snow crash? LCDs don't do that.
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.
Obviously. I'm struggling to understand why this is a problem.
>In particular, in the book skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from what otherwise looks like binary noise just by looking at it.
Erm, that's not really what the image is a reference too. The noise is what the titular "snow crash" looks like when you use a particular digital "drug" (well not exactly a drug, but, spoilers you know). I don't recall anything about hackers being able to read binary code by looking at bitmaps, and I'm pretty sure that statement is contradicted by Hiro's skepticism that the binary code in the Snow Crash drug could actually have any effect on a human brain simply by entering the visual cortex.
The book takes it to the point that binary images, static to non-hackers, to hackers contains meaning (though not consciously), permitting the information contained (subconcious memes/instructions) to be spread via images, rewriting their minds. The images to everyone else look like static or the "snow crash".
The whole thing lacks seriousness. A character named Hiro Protagonist is the protaganist of the adventure. It's filled with action/pulp goodness, not a serious treatise on the capabilities of interstellar memes and the effect of language on the human mind. Some magical incantation in a language no one in the present has ever heard, but that is apparently genetically programmed into our minds, permits anyone to be controlled by commands in the language. If that's allowed, why not let static convey it as well? And the language/commands returned in the form of signals from space?
I'd be really curious to see how a present day retelling if the story would handle this disconnect.
Although spoilerwhen they talk about the phenome of the alien creatures, from a logical perspective it seems rather backwardsspoiler
[Edit] Obviously I should elaborate a bit: Snow Crash is precisely the type of book, where it is really easy to make an disappointing movie. It has enough action scenes to fill 90 minutes without ever mentioning any of the interesting concepts of the book.
Perhaps the Metaverse will be upon us soon. Will Google take over Second Life?
There was a mostly-terrible interview with Stephenson on GoodReads where the one redeeming factor was getting to hear Neal's thoughts on Snow Crash these many years later:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/video_chat/14
Some of the deeper themes may be difficult to translate to a 120 minute movie, but that's not the same thing as unfilmable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGkoBjn9U-c
(I agree with you btw).
>Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.