Respect Stephenson: the man’s a true geeks’ geek. (I agree with @gruber: you must watch the video for the full effect.)
Might this be the first Kickstarter that I end up contributing to?
An Incomplete List At Best
Wizard Entertainment has a list of the “ultimate fictional weapons”, including Glamdring (Lord of the Rings), Mjolnir (Thor’s hammer), railguns (The Eraser) and He-Man’s Power Sword, among others.
Stunningly missing, however, is Neal Stephenson’s Reason. I hope Wizard are ashamed at their oversight and that they correct it with all due haste.
Stephenson’s Work On The Small Screen? Hooray! Diamond Age! Eh. George Clooney! …Wha?
Glenn Reynolds pointed out the following highly interesting story over at SciFi.com today:
Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson’s best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions.
When a prominent member of society concludes that the futuristic civilization in which he lives is stifling creativity, he commissions an interactive book for his daughter that serves as a guide through a surreal alternate world. Stephenson will adapt his novel for the miniseries, the first time the Hugo and Nebula award winner has written for TV.
My heart simultaneously leaped and sunk as I read those words in roughly the following order of rationales:
- A Neal Stephenson mini-series? Awesome!
- It’s not Snow Crash? D’oh!
- Oh, it’s The Diamond Age. I guess that’s okay.
- George Clooney is producing it? Crap.
- Well, at least Stephenson is being tasked with writing the screen adaptation.
So, I guess we’ll see what comes of it. If it completely rocks, maybe SciFi and Stephenson can work on Snow Crash as a follow-up. I so want to see The Deliverator and “Reason” brought to the screen, silver or small, it matters not which.
The Illustrated Stephenson
Credit goes out to Aron for ferreting this one out. He’s been on a bit of a Flickr kick recently and happened across a Flickr group that is seeking to photographically document the real-world locations described in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (i.e. Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World). Thus far, it looks as if they just have portions of England covered – I’m quite looking forward to the shots that will come from Mexico City, the Phillipines, the Japanese coast, India and the Barbary Coast.