Is it unfilmable, /tv/?
No. Its just not a good book.
Why do people keep saying cyberpunk shit is unfilmable?
>>216478352because it's usually a mess of retarded slang made up by out of touch LA types
>>216477927It's filmable with the right direction, but it just hasn't aged well, so it would need a tweaked reinterpretation, thus losing some of it's soul.Even something iconic like Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic won't translate as well now as it did in say the 90s or aughts. And that B movie version with Keanu was kino in it's own right. Cyberpunk was very much about the atmospheric suggestion. The Tom Maddox/Gibson X-files episodes had that vibe.
>>216478352Because no matter how hard they try true cyberpunk characters in live action look goofy as fuck. There is a reason movies like The Matrix and Blade Runner have characters who look like pretty much like regular people and don't have them with cyborg limbs and random bits of plastic and metal all over their bodies.
>>216477927>oh no i'm driving in the winter>on no the roads are slippery!gee that was hard
>>216479362lol
>>216479362>>216479543Holy fuck there really are literal retards here that think this is even slightly clever or funny. You must think family guy is good
>>216477927It's perfectly capable of being filmed with good writers and a good director who care about actually adapting the story. The problem is that the story depicts a working and thriving libertarian world. It shows a true right wing world, where right wing still means small/weak government. The people currently in charge of the entire entertainment industry are incapable of understanding such a thing or ever allowing it to be depicted without sabotaging it somehow, even if the source material is basically lighthearted satire to begin with.
>>216477927was there even an attempt to make it happen?
>>216479586look out everyone here come the fuckin fun police
>>216478132You have bad taste
>>216477927The only thing remotely an issue is the 15 year old having sex with the 40 year old. The plot is still structured pretty traditionally.
>>216477927truth be told, only the first 2 chapters really should be made into a movie or short.
>>216480050
>>216479171>has never read a cyberpunk novelYour archetypal cyberpunk protagonist is a hacker kid, not some guy with a metal armPlus, you can totally make a movie about a guy with a metal arm. What are you even talking about? Have you seen Robocop?
>>216480050yeah that was entertaining. i fucking hate every retarded long drawn out fight or car chase scene ever put to paper (including the other ones in this book) but this somehow managed to be exciting and gripping.
>>216480110the main character here is a blasian called hiro protagonist and he dual wields katanas
>main character's name is Hiro Protagonist
>>216480590>>216480568the book's practically a comedy, if there's anything the current crop of retards in the writing rooms can do it's quirk chungus whedon humor, as we saw with cowboy bebop for example, or the boys, which were also turned into comedies. preacher too i think, though i dropped it after the first episode.snow crash shouldn't be much of a stretch for them, in that regard at least. it's explaining the babylonian mind virus that might be a problem
>>216480722> it's explaining the babylonian mind virus that might be a problem.This. That whole expository in the last quarter of the novel just kills everything. There may a filmic way around it with foreshadowing or flashbacks but I don’t understand how a novel editor didn’t convince Stephenson to get that shit under control.
>>216478132You're right, it's a great book. It's one of the best books about memetics and theory of language ever written.
>>216480803i don't think anyone even tries with him, his other two books i've read, cryptonomicon and diamond age are the same way, just stop everything at various points and spend a dozen pages expounding on the concepts he's come up with. i think they're interesting enough to the point i don't mind it but it definitely kills any momentum in the book and prevents them from being truly great.
>>216477927No, it’s just not worth filming.
>>216477927>America is a hollowed out shell due to outsourcing everything >It is overrun with smelly brown immigrants called jeeks>Richest man in the world is a techbro obsessed with surveillance and ancient aliens-tier schizobabbleWe live in a shittier version of this book already. Who needs a movie?
Here's a suggestion:Violet lighting and smoke machines.People raving and shouting.Robots rampaging in the street.Sounds of the city, reverberating like incessant club noise.Tuna fish apartments housing human beings.Not a tree in sight.
>>216479028>The Tom Maddox/Gibson X-files episodes‘First Person Shooter’ was the single stupidest X-Files episode ever filmed and that’s saying something.
>>216480549>i fucking hate every retarded long drawn out fight or car chase scene ever put to paper (including the other ones in this book)You don't remember the bookThis was one of the most gigachad literary shitposts in history
>>216479660Step aside, true dystopian future story coming through.
>>216480936no i remember that very well and i was thinking to myself "thank god he spared me from this one at least"
>>216477927>Is it unfilmable, /tv/?It's baffling. It's a sci-fi story with a legitimate black protagonist (no race swapping needed) wielding a samurai sword in the original digital "metaverse". It should have already been adapted for Netflix with multiple spin-off series and perhaps even a few generations of reboots by now. The lack of media is highly suspicious.>>216479171>no matter how hard they try true cyberpunk characters in live action look goofy as fuckLook, if Hollywood had no compunction about producing the unwatchable dumpster fire "Ghost in the Shell" with ScarTard, they could have at least tried Snow Crash at some point in the last 30 years.
>>216480913Well you’re not wrong
I love that book and nobody's brought up yet that the #1 reason it's unfilmable is because the villain's plan is literally to flood the US with millions of rape-crazy asian refugees and the heroes work to stop himIf they were gonna film it they'd have to make it the exact opposite
>>216479171That doesn't explain Alita:Battle Angel or a number of other cyberpunk films or the use of heavily armored people in films like Dredd.
>>216481068Alita: Battle Angle was one of the ugliest films ever filmed
I thought about writing le epic dead mall retrofuture 90s/2000s nostalgia movie, about some hacker dude whose oneitis from teenage years is a manic pixie dream girl he had a crush on, and he uses retro tech to sabotage the megacorp that made the drugs that she overdosed on, then he learns she actually didn't die and is in a coma, but when he finally breaks into the facility and rescues her and wakes her up, she is the same as she was 15 years ago, but she's actually a massively annoying consoomer bitch and he realizes his feelings for her were fake and he kills himself and the message is that nostalgia is retarded. But there's be lots of shots of le epic liminal spaces to make it seem more deep. I'd write it jsut as a novel but it's hard to bring across a visual aesthetic in that.
>>216477927Didn't Ready Player One basically already do it, but without the ejaculating god creating reality and human instruction sets plotline?
>>216481079Holy fuck, newfags need to go back.
>>216479028>but it just hasn't aged wellwhat
Neuromancer is my all-time favorite book and I am perversely hype to watch Apple rape it
>>216479171The problem is it’s almost impossible to get the right tone, because it needs to be deep thought drama but also shloxk tech mid/high budget.These sort of films barely exist anymore.Blade runner was neonoir more than cyberpunk. But it was close.Image trying to write a good noir film, then add the future onto it, you just tripled and cubed the budget for a non 4 quadrant film.The matrix had both, the deep thought drama and the tech splux, but it mostly downplayed the deep thought, a 1000 essays and real college classes named “the philosophy of the matrix” and such proves it was there, but you know what I mean when that was hardly the selling point
>>216480050The whole totally not scientology mega yacht arc towards the end would also be kino, though, and its one of the few things from the book that hasn't been used in some other film.
I sorta think Johnny Mnemonic was perfectThat it's the only thing to ever truly translate the manic retardation of a cyberpunk story to live actionWith honorable mention to HackersThat in absolutely every way, it was exactly the movie it needed to be
>>216477927I haven't read this. Someone sell it to me. No I will not read this threadAlso why do dystopian cyberpunk stories always involve katanas in some form?
>>216481303A cyborg dog kills the president and L Ron Hubbard because it remembers that a jailbait courier was nice to it before she had sex with Jason Momoa while wearing an anti-rape condomMeanwhile Afro Samurai saves everyone on the internet from being killed by a flashing light seizure macro using nothing but his katana, his Tron motorcycle, and his Second Life avatar that looks like a giant talking penisAll of this was predicted by the Sumerians 10,000 years ago
>>216481400Fuck you. But you’re not wrong.
>>216481400Assuming you're being truthful with this summary it doesn't sound THAT challenging to film. Though it doesn't sound like an amazing story either. It kinda sounds like Reddit Player OneWhy is the title "snow crash"?
>>216481462>Reddit Player OneReddit Player One was EXTREMELY ripped off of this book>Why is the title "snow crash"?Because the .gif that kills you if you look at it looks like pic related
>>216481303its basically THE go to satire of the cyber punk genre. the main character is called Hiro Protagonist and black/jap happa that delivers pizza for pizza hut(the pizza industry is run by the mob, literally)
>>216477927I read it 20 years ago, here's what I remember in no particular order.> Pizza delivery guy with samurai sword> Italian mafia part of town> Rafts full of cultists> Second life the game is how the internet functions> "Daemon"s in the online world are used for hacking?> A native biker with a sidecar that holds a nuclear bomb> Somehow language brainwashes people> If you get hacked online somehow you can turn into a (temporary?) zombie, aka experience a "Snow Crash"?It was pretty interesting, I would imagine it would end up like Ready Player One 2.0 without all the goofy millennial references.
>>216481560>(temporary?) zombieAnyone it happens to is fucking deadHiro's friend never recovers, he's just braindead on life support for the whole novelRaven describes displaying Snow Crash at the stadium as "nuking the US" in direct revenge for Hiroshima/Nagasaki as in his aim is to kill tens of thousands of peopleYT's mother is the only person to ever see it and live because she was looking at it on her shitty 480P CRT monitor from work instead of through an 8K super VR headset like everyone in the world owns
>>216477927If Ready Player One could be released, a cyberpunk farce like Snow Crash can too.
>>216481560> A native biker with a sidecar that holds a nuclear bomb>>216481400>Jason MomoaAre these suppose to be the same person, is Jason Momoa a native aleut with poor impulse control?
>>216481607Ah okay, yeah that rings a bell.It's been a while. I'd watch the movie probably. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be made in this day and age besides the themes going against the current agenda as >>216479660 points out
>>216481668That would be my guess, yeah.
>>216480068I wish I had this and delivered things like he does.
>>216481462>>Assuming you're being truthful with this summary it doesn't sound THAT challenging to film. Though it doesn't sound like an amazing story either. It kinda sounds like Reddit Player OneIt basically is that, but based on emerging technology, since it was written before any of this actually came to be, not after it was already annoying.
>>216481635Ready Player One is fun and inclusive about multicultural online friends overcoming evil megacorps with silly hijinx. Snow crash is harrowing and oppressive about insane gods that can't be possibly stopped secretly manipulating the course of humanity through technology.
>>216479660>The problem is that the story depicts a working and thriving libertarian world. It shows a true right wing world, where right wing still means small/weak government.The story is literally a post-national techno-feudalist dystopia. Every city block is owned by a different "country" corporation. All of the "cultural relics" are fake replicas made of plaster. And so on. There's nothing in it that didn't happen or isn't happening, or won't happen soon.
>>216481756NTA and I largely agree with your assessment of the setting, but I want to stress that the central conflict of the novel is STILL that America will be ruined if The Raft is allowed to discharge its passengersIn spite of the country already being a nightmarish shithole of Tajikistani rapists and technofeudal mafia hitmen, the protagonists do agree, with a sincere and straight face, that things will get way fucking worse unless the boat people are stopped from emigratingAnd it's not especially clear HOW they could get worse when they're already living in the worst hell possible, but it's not brushed off that it absolutely would
>>216477927yes, it's also unreadable (because it sucks fucking ass)
>>216479362KEK
>>216480722>the book's practically a comedyit's satire saar
>>216481888It's explained by them having the virus and being used to spread it. Obviously you'll get the standard libshit talking points in old sci-fi but at least they were against the fucking dystopia unlike now when no one is on whichever made up side.
>>216481917>one of the most highly acclaimed novels ever written is bad because it just is okay
>>216481969>one of the most highly acclaimed novels ever written
>>216482012>nominated for a Hugo, a Clarke and a BSFA>named in Time Magazine's "100 greatest English language novels'
>>216482055I wouldn't even put it in the top 10 cyberpunk sloppa, let alone a short-list of "best novels ever written">nominated so it didn't even win anything? KEK
>>216482077>the top 10 cyberpunk sloppathere's no way you can come up with 9 cyberpunk books better than this, it's such a shit genre
>>216479171>Because no matter how hard they try true cyberpunk characters in live action look goofy as fuckit's not that hard to make them look not goofy. >inb4 troon gamenot an argument
>>216482120That isn't live action dummy
>>216482101neuromancer or idoru for Gibsonware by ruckerislands in the netaccelerandovurtWind up girlwhen gravity fallstrouble and her friends idk I could do 10 but I'd have to double up on authors off the top of my head
>>216481756None of the franchulates have a monopoly, not even the U.S. Government. None of them even have a monopoly on violence. Dystopia though it may be, the denizens still have more personal freedom than even you or I have.
>>216482055Anon, you and I both know that industry awards do not now, nor have they ever, meant a goddamned thing.
>>216482126it's as close as we have atm. here, have some cosplay
>>216482190sex with becca
>>216477927No, but Stephensons neckbeard stroking is insufferable
>>216482190want the greenie
>>216482172>the denizens still have more personal freedom than even you or I have.This is just because it was unimaginable to people what mass surveillance could actually turn into. And it's not like he didn't mention it with Fedland.
>>216482154alright, i'll give these a chance, i haven't read any of them except for neuromancer of course
>>216482287All of them except Neuromancer are shit.
I've been shilling this book ever since I read itI like that while most cyberpunk novels are basically noir detective stories with a sci-fi veneer, this is very identifiably a Great Depression bootlegger/cowboy land baron story with a sci-fi veneer
>>216482363well like i said i already consider it a shit genre so i won't be too shocked, but it won't kill me to try a couple. i think i've already heard of vurt and when gravity falls
>>216482242The mass surveillance depicted in the book is what we got though. Legions of braindead muppets with their camera phones out feeding thousands of gigs of raw data to CIA server farms and they aren't even getting paid for it.
>>216477927Not really, but it wouldn't be very good filmed. It's a funny book but a lot of that is just the way Stephenson writes.
>>216482363Neuromancer is mogged (except for cultural impact) by the majority of the books anon listed, Charlie Stross kinda sucks thoughbeit.
>>216482435Yes, everyone's a gargoyle now. But it's much worse in many ways.
Diamond Age has a pretty good prediction of the globalized post-national future too. It's very similar to the Snow Crash model:>Society in The Diamond Age is dominated by a number of phyles, also sometimes called tribes, which are groups of people often distinguished by shared values, similar ethnic heritage, a common religion, or other cultural similarities. In the extremely globalized future depicted in the novel, these cultural divisions have largely supplanted the system of nation-states which divides the world today. Cities appear divided into sovereign enclaves affiliated or belonging to different phyles within a single metropolis. Most phyles depicted in the novel have a global scope of sovereignty, and maintain segregated enclaves in or near many cities throughout the world.
>>216483406>"Thetes" are individuals who are not members of any phyle and are often socially disadvantaged and economically poor, being similar to second-class citizens under the CEP. In the novel, the material needs of nearly all thetes are satisfied by freely available food and clothing, albeit of low quality; thetes without the political connections of a phyle are entitled to similarly low-quality "free justice."
>>216482378For me? Its Days of Atonement, a redneck cop vs globohomo time travel corporation.
>>216479028>The Tom Maddox/Gibson X-files episodes had that vibelmao sure
>>216481092sounds like a good idea. screencapped it. Hacker Retard and Juliet.
>>216479362>I CANT BRAKE
>>216479028Cyberpunk has to accept the tryhard cringe and take itself seriously. Johnny Mnenomic is slop but has soul. Snow Gash is peak reddit winking at the audience self fellating shit.
>>216484540Do you think it'd be better as a screenplay or as a novel?Novel is easier to publish. No one is gonna read a screenplay.
>>216477927THE DELIVERATORFucking kino to beI want my blasian niggajap main char. Hiro Protagonist is badass lmao
>>216481026>1 million migrantspeople would just laugh at the small number
