By Travis Johnson
Producer Frank Marshall recently confirmed that Joe Cornish’s adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s novel, Snow Crash, may be going into production as early as next year. If this pans out it’ll be Cornish’s first directorial effort since 2011’s hoods vs aliens ripper, Attack the Block, and the first time one of Stephenson’s razor sharp, technically detailed SF tomes has made it to the screen.
“It’s a very, very cool book,” Marshall said. “And Joe Cornish is developing it with us and I hope we get started on that next year, I’m excited about that one… It’s a complicated story. It takes place in the near future and it has a lot of virtual reality in it, it’s a character that goes back-and-forth between what’s called the ‘metaverse’ in Los Angeles, but the sequences are fantastic and it really gives Joe the opportunity to show that great imagination that he has and create some fantastic scenes. If you look it up you’ll see it’s sort of the bible of the internet universe. Neal wrote this back in the ‘90s and you’ll see it’s a very highly regarded book.”
Snowcrash follows the exploits of a hacker/swordsman/pizza delivery man by the name of Hiro Protagonist, who teams up with a smart-mouthed, skateboard-riding female courier, YT, to save the world from a Sumerian metavirus that is transmitted via language – both spoken word and computer code. It’s a very weird book – the bad guy uses glass knives and has “Poor Impulse Control” tattooed on his forehead; there’s a lot of business about a nuclear powered rottweiller; and at one point the action stops for a pages-long discourse on the use of toilet paper in the book’s version of the CIA.
It’s also a great book – a bona fide modern science fiction classic, sneeringly hip and funny as hell, whip-smart and packed with incredible ideas and action scenes. If this thing comes together, it could be amazing.
