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They are filming it.

http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/snow-crash-movie-to-be-written-and-directed-by-joe-cornish-20120615/

I really hope they do a good job, but frankly I shouldnt keep my hopes up too high, Neal Stephenson's writing style is exotic and the contents wont really translate well to screen, so much would be lost, especially the sublime first chapter.

w00t!

Can't say I've ever heard of this book until just now.

very much looking forwards to this, I read this book a while ago and found it to be absolutely amazing.

Hopefully the movie isn't another Eragon, I'm going to be looking forwards to this

Coolyo294 wrote:Can't say I've ever heard of this book until just now.

Do yourself a favour and find a copy.

Orlanth wrote:They are filming it.

http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/snow-crash-movie-to-be-written-and-directed-by-joe-cornish-20120615/

I really hope they do a good job, but frankly I shouldnt keep my hopes up too high, Neal Stephenson's writing style is exotic and the contents wont really translate well to screen, so much would be lost, especially the sublime first chapter.

Full agreement. Since film-making in Hollywood is by committee even if the initial screenplay is good, after the suits get through with it, the adaptation will be awful. So hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

Yeah, I cannot imagine Stephenson's style translating at all well to film.

Sample short story, for the uninitiated:
http://www.vanemden.com/books/neals/jipi.html

Mannahnin wrote:Sample short story, for the uninitiated:
http://www.vanemden.com/books/neals/jipi.html

Got any more of those?

I have a copy of Neil Gaiman's Goliath, which is based on The Matrix and was written around the same time as the first movie. But I don't have any more free Stephenson online, sadly.

You liked?

Here is as much of the opening of Snow Crash that is fair to repeat on Dakka under fair review.

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like a gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books. When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway - might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aerostyled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity. The Deliverator never pulled his gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball hat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned in to a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get nothing but trouble from Deliverator. Since then Deliverator has kept the gun in glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstration.
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. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, gak happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact pat ches size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the feth 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 fething 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 microvave owens 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

The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperative skills." So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved - but no cooperativity either. Just a single principle: the Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can't you guys tell time?

Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And theyhad studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty and pursuit of whatever, it was fething inalienable. Sent psychologists out to these people's houses, gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn't respond without commiting a venial sin. The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's built-in RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down.

If thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Hedquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself - the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator's nightmare, the Capo and figurehead of CosaNostra, Incorporated - who will be on the phone to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer's yard in a jet helicopter an d apologize some more and give him a free trip to Italy - all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow, he owes the Mafia a favor. The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumours. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you had to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fething pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and kiss the feet of some sixteen-years-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea.

Well it looks like i'll be buying a new book on my Kindle then...

Joe "The Adam and Joe Show" Cornish. That's awesome.

Nerd boner.

Mannahnin wrote:Yeah, I cannot imagine Stephenson's style translating at all well to film.

There's also the issue of differentiating it from The Matrix, which will be the first comparison for most people; justified or not.

I think it will be challenging to convert (a lot will need to be chopped out, style differences, etc) but if done well would be awesome.

I enjoyed it a lot. Thought maybe there was a collection of short stoires like Asimov. Thanks for your time.

Someone needs to write up Snowcrash for Dakka's five star pick of the day.

I think I love Cryptonomicon even more (despite the kind of weak ending), but you are not wrong. Snow Crash is the more accessible volume; the one that gets people hooked.

Yeah, I do love Crypto and even Baroque. Did you see he has a sword fighting simulator kick starter?

I did not. I must see it.


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I have now. Looks cool, even though I don't do videogames. If I did, I would probably have already pledged.

128th_king wrote:very much looking forwards to this, I read this book a while ago and found it to be absolutely amazing.

Hopefully the movie isn't another Eragon, I'm going to be looking forwards to this

I didnt think Eragon was that bad...

I'm convinced he's only doing it so he can have the Hiro in the bar scene whenever he wants.

pretre wrote:Yeah, I do love Crypto and even Baroque. Did you see he has a sword fighting simulator kick starter?

The Kickstarter URL for those interested: Clang

While Snow Crash was the novel that hooked me, I also liked The Diamond Age and Anathem. I enjoyed Cryptonomicon, but not as much as the others. Haven't read the Baroque Cycle yet: trying to get that through the local library. Just finished book 1 of The Mongoliad although that's a group work, and not his alone. Interesting enough that I wanted more, but will have to wait until August for book 2.

Official Neal Stephenson website

I could not get into Anathem. Kept trying but gave up.

Well, I just threw down for the Kickstarter. I'm thinking about reupping my pledge though because they said if they hit 800k, they'll support Linux/OS X.

Wonder if they'll ever do Vurt by Jeff Noon. That would be very cool.

As to Snow Crash, huzzah for nasty surprises in motorcycle sidecars!

I love Ruckus and Reason!