Okay, I’m gonna show a little bit of my age now: I read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash when it was a new book, and it turned my brain inside out. It affected a lot of other people the same way. Though not as seminal a work in the cyberpunk oeuvre as William Gibson’s Neuromancer, it was still pretty damned influential.
At long last, Snow Crash is going to be made into a movie. When I say “at long last”, that doesn’t mean I’ve been eager to see this happen. In fact, I think the odds of a book like this being turned into a good and faithful movie are slim. I mean that the movie rights to the book were first acquired by Paramount in 1992, and the project was later transferred to Disney, where it seemed to die.
The development of the movie is now back at Paramount, in the hands of Kathleen Kennedy (Kennedy/Marshall) as producer and Joe Cornish as director. Cornish is the guy who directed a highly buzzed-about alien invasion movie named Attack the Block, which I haven’t seen but which I heard good things about. He seems to be a hot property, and Paramount seems to have made this production a priority, so this is probably going to become a reality.
I hate to be a pessimist (which in fact goes against my nature), but I have some anxieties because there are so many ways this can be fucked up, starting with selection of the actor to play the book’s half-black, half-Japanese, sword-wielding hacker protagonist, Hiro Protagonist. Yeah, that’s his name, and don’t laugh until you’ve read the book. Continue reading »