My fear with any Snowcrash adaptation is that it will feel like John Carter of Mars (or Warhammer Online [1]). John Carter was a groundbreaking novel, but its ideas became so adapted and universally understood that revisiting them in a movie felt ironically like derivative work.
If I have to endure years of my non-cyberpunk friends talking about how Snowcrash feels like a rip-off of Ready Player One, then I will flip tables.
But of course it's HBO so it'll have plenty of softcore porn embedded within the plot.
Despite the jokes, HBO tend to do a decent job of this stuff. Ignoring the shitshow that was GoT after season 4. The Wire, The Sopranos, Westworld... probably better in their hands than, say, Netflix.
I wish they’d spend more time on sub-plots, character development, etc. If HBO removes all the sex scenes, they could probably squeeze in an extra episode of actual content per season (I’m being slightly sarcastic).
They should really branch out into proper porn spinoffs considering how masterfully they mix story and titillation. The production value would be immense.
Game of Boners - Aiden Gillen returns to his brothel to make use of his Littlefinger namesake.
The Sopranals: Gandolfini enters Bada Bing! through the back door
etc. etc.
Which is to say, HBO actually seem to be quite tasteful with this while also being gratuitous.
I think it has enough stuff in it that it'll be just fine.
The Raft is still new 'territory' for most sci-fi, the closest we ever got was Waterworld with Kevin Costner.
Reason remains sufficiently insane as a weapon to this day (like Project Pluto). Raven is, however, a bit 'old' now and I think may need an upgrade.
Smartwheels are still out of reach and car surfing still is cool as hell.
RatThings are just on this side of lovable in a Cthulhu-esque sort of way, so I think it'll be good merchandizing (which, reading that back, really drives home the dystopic feel of 2020)
The metaverse is, yes, very old now. I'll be interested to see how they deal with it.
Uncle Enzo and L. Bob Rife scream out for parallels to Bezos and Gates. So, not really 'new' but still fertile ground.
All that said, the first chapter is literary genius and it would be extremely difficult mess up. All the build up to find that Hiro is a ... pizzaguy. So good.
I'm glad to see this happen. Suspect that a network exec somewhere said: "Sci-fi! Dystopia! Rogue AI! Cyberpunk!" and then HBO went through the list of books meeting that criteria (copying the Game of Thrones formula) and picked a best-seller to make a screen play out of. The subject matter seems to fit quite well with the tech malaise we are feeling at the end of the 2010's.
For the majority of the story, the fallen-empire setting of the ring is dystopian. Earth itself is a utopia, which bores the main character and is their motivation to explore the ring to begin with. So both?
Even if they don't follow the main plot, the ring presents a great backdrop for exploration and the freedom for some pretty interesting stories.
Sort of a problem with a lot of Niven's novels more generally, but they became travelogues to a large degree. I agree not especially dystopian (or interesting).
I always loved that about them. Not all sci-fi needs to crawl into its own navel and reveal the condition of Man. Sometimes it can just create and explore a fantastic universe.
3% is a solid dystopian show - it's clearly got a lower budget for CG but it tends to use practical effects when possible and the CG doesn't terribly detract. It's also nice to see a Brazilian show get an international audience.
3% was originally a few web shorts... and honestly I think I liked those more. Not as flashy, but they were punchier and managed to create the hustled, panicky feeling that the screening process was about.
The actual series expanded on this, but felt hollow by comparison.
I don’t really consider Red Rising dystopian at all.
In that world what the Golds do to humans on Earth is considered ancient history.
The main character’s rise as a Red is certainly a struggle. And the plight of all Reds and the other colors is equally similar.
But overall the story arc is more similar to the Biblical story of Noah, but with gladiators and space ships.
To be fair, the story of Noah might be considered dystopian to prosperous Jewish cultures a few thousand years ago. But at some point everyone’s plights become history.
Eh, Red Rising is a dystopia in that it is not equal for all, in that the low colors are essentially slaves.
The author is a history buff, and describes his motivation for the society as looked back on mankind's history and seeing that it's not a gradual progression towards becoming better, but a cyclical process oscillating between egalitarianism and authoritarianism (fascism).
Either way, it will be a damn good story to see play out as a series. Despite the first three books being from only Darrow's perspective, the characters rival Game of Thrones IMO.
I had the same reaction, it really is what you want to read, for me somehow 'see' became 'saw', then I did a double take and realized what I got wrong.
I don't know. It's kind of a bit too "Settings Document: The Book" for a miniseries, imo. It's like reading a blueprint for a scripted society more than a novel, sometimes.
Sounds like an interesting formula. Ready Player One is popular too, but I guess since there is a movie that's already been done... but I guess you can have a series and also movies... The Purge has a TV series now even though originally it was a movie.
Makes sense. Just shouting out a list of random popular concepts with zero artistic vision or message is exactly how I feel that Netflix originals are generated.
suspect the screening process actually goes like this:
"we have this story about a spunky action girl (who is not a mary sue since she's gonna be the actual main character) and her bumbling male companions, on a quest to impeach cybertrump by the power of fisticuffs. which IP will let us shoehorn it in?"
Wow, so exciting. This has got to be one of my favourite books of all time.
The first time I read around the year 2000, I enjoyed but I essentially thought "That was neat, and funny, but man did he miss how things would turn out! haha". If you read it today, you might be shocked by how many things it has gotten right.
I had the same reaction. I first read "Snow Crash" and "Brave New World" around the same time (circa-2000), and was happy that both missed the mark. Looking back at them now I feel like the modern world has become a blend of the worst parts of both.
Nearly thirty years on, any adaptation will have to lose some of the book’s charming elements that made sense at the time, such as an America dealing with the fallout of specifically the Reagan administration, or a conspicuous amount of immigrants from early post-Soviet Tajikistan. Still, the theme of everything being privatized has held up well.
The one downside of bringing Snow Crash back into the public consciousness, though, is that uninformed viewers may well take Stephenson’s use of Sumerian as the "original human language" seriously, and Julian Jaynes’ work will be probably be accepted as a valid thing when in fact it is extremely controversial.
The biggest challenge is going to be getting the levels of irony and cartoonishness right, especially if the network executives are hoping for something more like Blade Runner. The one downside is it could end up taking itself too seriously or going too far down the road of kitsch crap.
I don't think finding a Reagan substitute is going to be a challenge though, and I don't think there's too much to worry about viewers absorbing themselves in Julian Jaynes' work, not least because any form of adaptation is going to cut Stephenson's exposition to the bare minimum "it's like a virus for your mind. This tech is older than the pyramids; it's how they controlled the people that built them", and it's going to be in the context of skateboarders latching onto mafia pizza delivery drivers, Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong and villains with harpoons hooking up with underage heroes
> such an as America dealing with the fallout of specifically the Reagan administration
I mean, Snowcrash's view of income inequality, limitless corporate power, the value of the human life vs capital... I don't think they have to tone that down at all. In fact, my money is they play that up pretty significantly as the essential Neoliberal endgame.
Jaynes' ideas are facially wacky it's true, but they're still extremely interesting. I recommend anyone who is curious about the human condition to read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I'm not saying he gets everything (or even anything) right, but it's indisputably a really fascinating thesis.
And let's bear in mind that plenty of other obviously absurd theories actually hold up really well, relativity and quantum electrodynamics being two of the obvious big ones. Obviously the science of human consciousness is much more intractable, but even so.
I'm very familiar with that movie - it was on TV fairly regularly when I was younger. My partner has watched the new series - I wonder what she'd think of the original movie...
While Snow Crash is one of the all time great sci fi novels, it famously has a huge plot hole: although Stephenson saw a lot of things about the future with remarkable accuracy, he did not foresee the ubiquity of the cell phone. A simple cell phone would have undercut the main plot.
Now that we know what we know, how will they account for it?
Seinfeld is still funny even though cell phones would resolve most episodes in 5 minutes. Just make it an alternate future where some tech hasn't materialized because of corporate interests.
IIRC, she was calling Hiro from a public Metaverse terminal. Later in the book, it was a huge for him when he had a big enough line of credit to afford the equivalent of a cell phone along with his motorcycle.
It's been awhile, but I thought VR glasses in "Snow Crash" have all the functionality of cell phones, you just need to log into a 3D metaverse to communicate with someone else.
L. Bob Rife is a telecom mogul; presumably there will be some handwave about how he's manipulating the phone network to keep anyone from interfering with his plans.
I wonder if L. Bob Rife will be manipulated more to avoid offending the Scientologists in Hollywood, the corporate synergy with the Rupert Murdoch/Ted Turner types, or the Holy Roller/Southern Baptist/Evangelical Republican bloc.
IIRC, Hiro lives in a self-storage facility in a semi-collapsed America, so you could probably just say that he can’t afford the Metaverse equivalent of a data plan.
Epileptic seizures can be triggered, that's the only actual adversarial attack on the human neural network that I'm aware of that actually works, and is more common than you might think:
You could say that all perceptual illusions are adversarial inputs for the human senses. They're just not damaging ones.
In a lot of adversarial input stuff for AI, you're trying to get the AI to misclassify something, not necessarily to damage the AI or even change its learning at all. In Snow Crash the perceptions were definitely damaging to the perceivers, but I don't think you have to go nearly that far to have adversarial inputs!
True, but it was just the Snow Crash like ones that I had in mind. There are also adversarial attacks possible on all the other senses once you understand how they work at a physical or pre-processing level. You can make something cold feel hot, trigger speech patterns to go off by pre-setting them with auditory patterns, cause people to hear sounds that aren't there and so on. Given how many of these pathways are buggy it is quite impressive how well the brain can make sense of its surroundings. Mimicry in the animal kingdom is another 'adversarial input' that has potentially damaging effects on the perceivers (hunger!) but it is very much a defensive mechanism so that probably should not count either.
True nothing like snowcrash has yet to be created to any of our knowledges. Of course... if it was... how would we be able to respond to this thread! But this is whole other rabbit hole to go down that in light of some recents posts on the front page today doesn’t seem too fun.
I once read a piece of text whose contents was so vividly horrific that it caused me to momentarily pass out, falling out of my chair. Granted, it passed through an intermediate representation in my brain, but I would still count it as an adversarial input to my vision that caused lasting damage.
The damage in Snow Crash just happened to be more severe than "short-term distress followed by periodic unsettlement".
Idk, human neural networks seem to be susceptible to all sorts of adversarial attacks.
Snow-crash is the first example I know of, of the attack being condensed to a bitmap and experienced solely through the optic nerve and subsequently and substantially condensed in the time domain.
Typically the sort of results of an adversarial attack against a human neural network similar to one described in snowcrash is more indicative of long term and repeated exposure to adversarial stimulus that usually starts at birth and last through sometimes as late as adulthood. Snowcrash condenses this effect and that’s whats striking and interesting.
To elaborate, the sort of adversarial attack’s I’m thinking of, are: indoctrination; gaslighting; cycles of abuse (a very nasty one that can go on for generations!); just about anything in the cia psy-ops manual, oh and I shouldn’t leave off entrapment (that’s a fun one).
I'm so excited for this. Snowcrash is one of the best pieces of Science Fiction I've read. It's up there with Permutation City and Stories of Your Life and Others.
Interesting, didn't know HBO was going to be doing online only shows now like Netflix, Apple and Amazon.
Snowcrash is the book that inspired Philip to create Second Life. Then he moved on to create High Fidelity, but they are now pivoting more for virtual meetings and business use it looks. One thing I kinda don't like about the new virtual worlds, they are disconnected spaces while Second Life tried to have a sense of continued space, but never seemed to get as popular as Facebook and a region can't hold more than 100 avatars at once but even 50 is a limit in some places.
I feel SL was early for it's time though, they started working on it in the late 90s and opened in 2003. High Fidelity seemed more focus on HMDs then keyboard and mouse but I feel that is still a bit early too but it's an interesting space. I have some ideas on my own too I've been thinking about exploring, but still a lot to learn and then getting funding at some point when a more solid plan.
Yeah griefers. Particle spam it sounds. Wasn't someone being interviewed for a media report who made a bunch on virtual real estate? Back in the early days too. SL got a bunch of media buzz back in 2006 and 2007. CSI did a tie in too.
I think the HiFi idea might be private spaces though, so probably need to be invited. Kinda like how Google Apps let businesses have their own private version of Gmail and Docs.
I guess that's one of the problems of creating a platform... Got to balance being too open or being too closed... One of the coolest things I thought about SL is you can just start building in world and scripting. However now with Mesh you create stuff externally and upload it, but don't think there's a way to really preview it much so stuck to pay to upload it, unless you logged into the beta grid. But not sure how much stuff can be stopped other than responding to abuse reports. I think screening all content like Apple does might be a solution too, but still has it's own pro and cons. I guess give people tools, and they'll abuse it.
I was thinking maybe charge like half of what a high quality game on a console is to create an account, but then I doubt it would grow as much but it would limit people from creating troll accounts and help fund developments and servers.
I used to play a lot of second life when I was younger. It was interesting to see what happened to everyone I used to play with.
Everyone became a programmer,or a 3d modeler. Something about having a programming language and the ability to make things strapped to what was essentially a chatroom.
I wonder if your comparisons to Facebook are really fair. I always assumed Secondlife was trying to be something closer to IRC or Discord today then something like Facebook. It's not just a series of events to read but something active to engage with.
Yeah wouldn't surprise me if people learned to code in SL and then moved on to real world projects, since learning one language is always similar to others. If you could do LSL, you could probably handle Javascript.
Hmm interesting on comparison to Facebook. Never thought of comparing it more to IRC chat rooms, but I feel like if you looked at the stats maybe it's better to put your effort into a iPhone or Facebook app if you want a bunch of users. I know there's also some stat that a large amount of the userbase just chats with friends instead of exploring the world. But also some content creators are able to make a full time living too.
http://www.gridsurvey.com/ According to that 41,905 people are online right now. But I guess my point is it seem more niche than mainstream, but still impressive and profitable.
I support any network taking on more Sci Fi. I'd give almost anything to see a proper Foundation series done by HBO. Or culture series, or a Dune series, or you name it. Imagine a gritty interpretation of Fire Upon The Deep done by Christopher Nolan. There's not nearly enough Sci Fi movies.
I went through about half of ‘Foundation’ in my sci-fi binge, and discovered that it's all politics instead of robotics. Might not quite fit the wave―even though it could still be a different good show, of course.
I hope it doesn't suck. It seems like every few years a network tries to make a sci-fi series, it bombs and then it's years before anyone tries again. I would love to see Revelation Space (by Alastair Reynolds) get the budget of the mandalorian or huge big screen budget, but alas, that will never happen.
So far Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex is still my favourite cyberpunk TV series. I really want something to dethrone it. If HBO gives Snowcrash the Westworld treatment then I am hopeful but I'm still uncertain.
Science fiction is my favorite genre and have enjoyed a lot of Stephenson. I think that Snow Crash could be great as an HBO production and when it does well we can see Cryptonomicon, the Diamond Age, and others follow.
I wonder how well this will work. While the book exists on several levels, it worked really well in the 90s as the logical, but absurd, conclusion to cyberpunk. The cyberpunk aesthetic feels very dated today though.
The Witcher series was very much not my type of game (I didn't like the Elder Scrolls series either), so I'm unlikely to try Cyberpunk 2077. I think it has a good chance for success though because while cyberpunk is not necessarily big right now, it is a subgenre of dystopian SF, which seems to be on the upswing.
However, while HBO's Watchmen is well timed because of the huge popularity of the MCU, there's not currently any similarly well-known cyberpunk body of fiction right now.
It will be interesting to see how they adapt it though. It's probably one of the more "ready for screen" books that Stephenson has written, but even there it relies heavily on internal-monologue and brute writing style more than it does on great plotting.
Of course if you are going by my theory of dystopian SF being the thing right now, The Diamond Age is probably a better fit, plus it's already populated with a few orgy scenes, which seems to be a plus for HBO. I suppose there are casting issues with the plot centering so much around a young girl though.
Anyone adapting Snowcrash needs to have a sense of the absurd and OTT along with the ability to play it completely deadpan. Angela Robinson brought us D.E.B.S., so I have some hope.
The book is a lot of fun, but it's also not a sacred text. It's a story about a pizza delivery driver who will be murdered if he delivers pizza too late and is also a hacker getting bound up in a story of Sumerian brain programmers run amok. (And somehow these brain programmers also can infect someone's blood?)
For all of its foresight, the book is goofy and dated as hell. If it's going to come to screen there's no way the adaption doesn't either:
1) Update some of the goofier stuff (upsetting the fans)
or
2) Leave it all in, in all its 80s action movie glory. (Which won't look all that great in the modern zeitgeist.)
I'm already expecting people will be disappointed with whoever they cast for Hiro, for either being not Black enough (or too Black) or not Korean enough (or too Korean). Similarly, do they outfit Y.T. with a retrofuturist 80s interpretation of what it means to be a skater punk? Or do they update it to be a 2020s interpretation of what it means to be a future skater punk? There's no answers to these that satisfies everyone. Someone will inevitably say it was 'ruined' no matter what the show runner does.
I remember reading the opening few pages and chuckling out loud:
“Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck 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 fucking 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 microwave ovens 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:
Any book that names is hero/protagonist Hiro Protagonist doesn't take itself too seriously. I think both the producers of this adaptation and the fans would be well served to do the same.
Fully agreed, except that reading your comment made me realise that 'retrofuturist 80s interpretation' is exactly my picture of 'the future' now, and I was born in the 90s.
It's not that it's actually what I expect, it's just that if contemporary futuristic stuff's being made, I'm not watching it. But I have seen the Back to the Future trilogy, and 2010, and so on.
> Fully agreed, except that reading your comment made me realise that 'retrofuturist 80s interpretation' is exactly my picture of 'the future' now, and I was born in the 90s.
Not all, but many wrecks of books include the authors imprimatur on the uplift to live actors. "yea, I know its hard to do a skeleton, lets make death be an actor with a black hood" is low bar. "No, the lead didn't get to sleep with the other lead in the book, but what the hell, put a sex scene in episode 3" is medium bar. "I changed the ending for you, if you need more changes just let me know for $" is high bar. Actually, they're all low bar.
Even Margaret Atwood says she willingly works with the production company to "make it work" on screen. Plot evaporates in an instant.
As you say, and I agree: its not a sacred text. Speaking of which, I think TV novela versions of sacred texts usually wind up where 'hail ceaser' went: a committee of wise men (and it always is men) arguing about whats sacred anyway..
I'm looking forward to it being a critical success and then to watch them search for other works by the author to videoize and either grab Cryptonomicon or, even better, the Baroque Cycle...
Actually, Seveneves would be a kind of amazing long running serial if they just ran a chunk of anthologies during the portion of history the book skips between stabilizing the asteroid and recolonizing earth.
Don't get me wrong, I fucking love Snow Crash, but let's be honest with ourselves: it's basically a dopey Schwazenegger-esque action movie for the IQ 115 crowd, in book form. We're not talking about something with ton of depth or philosophical complexity. I think HBO can manage.
If I have to endure years of my non-cyberpunk friends talking about how Snowcrash feels like a rip-off of Ready Player One, then I will flip tables.
[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10/i-hope-you-lik...