Every week Kevin Kelly will look at different writers whose books should be turned into films, films that were much better as books, or books that should never be turned into films upon pain of death. We’ll also talk about book to movie trends and deals if anything interesting happens.

My first introduction to Stephenson came back in the mid 90s when I was working at a bookstore in Austin, Texas. I’d read everything William Gibson had written, and was hungry for more when a coworker suggested Snow Crash. It’s a very Gibson-esque book that is probably one of Stephenson’s most cinematic works, meaning that it would probably require the smallest amount of effort to take it from the page to the screen in terms of putting a screenplay together.

Snow Crash is about a sword-wielding, pizza-delivering hacker who is trying to stop the spread of a computer virus that only affects computer programmers, along with the help of a young female courier who travels around on a high-tech skateboard using a magnetic harpoon to slalom through traffic. Sounds like a movie, right? Hollywood thought so too, since it was optioned by Touchstone Pictures and several drafts were written before it was abandoned due to budget concerns.

Neal Stephenson has been writing books since 1984, on subjects spanning the ecology, cyberpunk, steampunk, cryptography, artificial intelligence, information trafficking, historical fiction, and speculative fiction. However, none of his works has yet been turned into a movie. If you take a glance at Cryptonomicon or any of the three books in The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, or The System of the World, you’ll see why: these are massive tomes that average about about 800 pages in length, and those four titles could take up an entire shelf on their own. Snow Crash, Zodiac, and The Big U are all “normal” sized books, so why haven’t they been smacked onto celluloid?

The closest thing we’ve had to a cinematic adaptation of Stephenson was the announcement, almost two years ago, that the Sci Fi Channel was turning The Diamond Age into a miniseries, with George Clooney and partner Grant Heslov producing while Stephenson himself was going to write the screenplay.The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is Stephenson’s foray into both steampunk and cyberpunk; it involves a Victorian culture clashing with the nanobyte technology of the future. As part of a massive project, a lone engineer puts together an artificially intelligent book that is meant to bond with a young girl and stay with her through adulthood. He tries to sneak a copy out for his own daughter, but it winds up in the hands of a poor girl and changes her life. Science fiction with strong women in the lead roles? There’s your movie right there. However, I’ve tried contacting both the Sci Fi Channel and Clooney’s Smoke House production company, and they’ve both told me they have “nothing to report.” That it’s been two years with no new word about this project is worrisome.

Cryptonomicon combines the storylines of Allies in WWII trying to capture the German Enigma machine while deciphering their codes with a present-day company trying to set up a data haven for electronic information while searching for buried treasure. Granted, this book is a lot bigger than anything Stephenson had written before, and probably couldn’t be condensed into a single film at all. However, this would make an amazing HBO series: breaking it down to an incredibly simple level, think Band of Brothers meets Loot meets U-571 meets Sneakers. Or something along those lines.

Stephenson’s newest book Anathem, just published last month, is his first work of pure science fiction. It takes place on another planet called Arbre, although that planet happens to be a lot like Earth. The history of Anathem is very similar to our own, which gives Stephenson the ability for relevant social commentary while writing speculative fiction. In this world, however, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers live within a protected sanctuary to avoid outside influence, and eventually those two worlds clash. It’s just as massive as his previous works, and on face value it probably doesn’t sound particularly filmic. However, the publishers created a trailer just for the book:

You can read a 12 page excerpt from Anathem right here, and decide if it’s something you’d like to dive into. If you’re still not sold, you can listen to Stephenson discussing the book at this year’s Book Expo America, or even watch as he reads the first chapter from the book here.

While I’m not the biggest fan of trying to cram every book ever written into a movie, Stephenson has a very impressive library of work, and some of those would make very interesting films. There are obvious challenges. He’s definitely a cerebral writer who is sometimes in need of a more stringent editor (Cryptonomicon has a segment that is several pages long about the best way to eat breakfast cereal with an invented milk-spoon delivery system), and his prose also tends to be dense and full of dry humor. But whether they are set in the past, present or future, all of his novels are extremely appealing. So where are the movies?

Top image courtesy of cactusthesaint.