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?
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It’s a third world dictatorship, and the strong man has a list. On it are the names of every known American film critic, from the blogs to the Chicago Reader to Ain’t-it-Cool to The New Yorker to the two wiseass Koreans who used to man the cult counter at DVD Palace on 44th and 8th. They’re already on the road, the death squads. Your door bows in, storm of boots, and before you know it you’re lined up on your knees alongside J. Hoberman and 3 Black Chicks.
I saw it coming a long ways off, so I dressed in militia rags, became a scout helping round up all those poor bastards. I did my best to drown out the whimpering as I double-checked restraints and supervised the digging. But something tugged at my conscience during the second or third corral. It gave me an idea of how to save the critics.
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