6 ms·

I'm afraid they'll leave out the most interesting parts of the book and make it a dumb action movie. For me, what makes the book great isn't the plot, it's the

by pault 14y ago

I'm afraid they'll leave out the most interesting parts of the book and make it a dumb action movie. For me, what makes the book great isn't the plot, it's the satire of american suburbia, globalization, and the weird tangents into sumerian mythology and NLP. I hate when they make movies out of my favorite books...

marquis 14y ago
I'd generally agree but as a huge fan of The Diamond Age (which would arguably be easier to film) I hope it brings more people to reading Neal Stephenson.
bitwize 14y ago
You really think the writer of Attack the Block can't handle weird-ass tangents like in Snow Crash? :)
- illumin8 14y ago
  This guy wrote Attack the Block? I hate to say it, but I didn't get that movie. Was I supposed to identify with heroes that are petty street criminals in a gang who like to steal cell phones from innocent people? 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.
  - papalalu 14y ago
    you're right - you didn't get it.
xutopia 14y ago
Look at it from the other perspective. Lots of people will learn about this book because there is a movie about it. The movie should not take away from the fact that books are brilliant.
planetguy 14y ago
Snow Crash is an interesting book, but a deeply flawed one. Stephenson's later books are much better (though after Diamond Age they become too long to film anyway). 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.
- Cushman 14y ago
  > 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" 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.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    The barrel of Reason is small, but you're forgetting the suitcase-sized ammunition case and the isotope heatsink. My desktop computer is not hand-sized because I have a slim keyboard and mouse.
Turing_Machine 14y ago
Snow Crash was originally intended to be a graphic novel (see Stephenson's afterword). If that material still exists, it could work.
tptacek 14y ago
If you like weird tangents and biting satire of American suburban culture, try _Infinite Jest_. 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.
- euroclydon 14y ago
  I read hundreds of pages of Infinite Jest, on your recommendation, and while I did find certain scenes compelling, it finally dawned on me why I didn't like it: It's totally devoid of hope. Maybe I just didn't bring enough internal upbeatness to the table to enjoy IJ, but to me, the best part of reading a long novel, is enjoying the distillation of a big part of the authors life and getting to know them. I found DFW (in this book) just brought me down. [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.]
  - tptacek 14y ago
    How far into it did you get? It's bleak throughout, but it gets less depressing when the plot starts picking up. 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.
    - euroclydon 14y ago
neilk 14y ago
I wanted to agree with you, but then I realized: Snow Crash is basically the Tarantino approach applied to cyberpunk. The violence and bad-assitude is way, way over the top, but has a cutting, satirical intelligence to it. Eventually your inner fanboy and your outer ironist are laughing simultaneously. So it's totally possible to make this a great movie (if you agree that Tarantino makes great movies, at least).

by pault 14y ago

marquis 14y ago

I'd generally agree but as a huge fan of The Diamond Age (which would arguably be easier to film) I hope it brings more people to reading Neal Stephenson.

bitwize 14y ago

You really think the writer of Attack the Block can't handle weird-ass tangents like in Snow Crash? :)

illumin8 14y ago
This guy wrote Attack the Block? I hate to say it, but I didn't get that movie. Was I supposed to identify with heroes that are petty street criminals in a gang who like to steal cell phones from innocent people? 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.
- papalalu 14y ago
  you're right - you didn't get it.

xutopia 14y ago

Look at it from the other perspective. Lots of people will learn about this book because there is a movie about it. The movie should not take away from the fact that books are brilliant.

planetguy 14y ago

Snow Crash is an interesting book, but a deeply flawed one. Stephenson's later books are much better (though after Diamond Age they become too long to film anyway). 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.

Cushman 14y ago
> 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" 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.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  The barrel of Reason is small, but you're forgetting the suitcase-sized ammunition case and the isotope heatsink. My desktop computer is not hand-sized because I have a slim keyboard and mouse.

Turing_Machine 14y ago

Snow Crash was originally intended to be a graphic novel (see Stephenson's afterword). If that material still exists, it could work.

tptacek 14y ago

If you like weird tangents and biting satire of American suburban culture, try _Infinite Jest_. 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.

euroclydon 14y ago
I read hundreds of pages of Infinite Jest, on your recommendation, and while I did find certain scenes compelling, it finally dawned on me why I didn't like it: It's totally devoid of hope. Maybe I just didn't bring enough internal upbeatness to the table to enjoy IJ, but to me, the best part of reading a long novel, is enjoying the distillation of a big part of the authors life and getting to know them. I found DFW (in this book) just brought me down. [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.]
- tptacek 14y ago
  How far into it did you get? It's bleak throughout, but it gets less depressing when the plot starts picking up. 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.
  - euroclydon 14y ago

neilk 14y ago

I wanted to agree with you, but then I realized: Snow Crash is basically the Tarantino approach applied to cyberpunk. The violence and bad-assitude is way, way over the top, but has a cutting, satirical intelligence to it. Eventually your inner fanboy and your outer ironist are laughing simultaneously. So it's totally possible to make this a great movie (if you agree that Tarantino makes great movies, at least).