Hugo and Nebua Award winner Neal Stephenson will be adapting his best-selling novel “The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” into a six-hour miniseries for the SCI FI Channel.
The story centers around a family, in which the father has decided that the futuristic society they live in has grown stale and stagnant and doesn’t want to see his daughter’s vivid imagination sucked dry by the mundane of the modern age. To counter the effects of the current culture he has an interactive book developed for his daughter that allows her to experience the creative surreal alternate reality of her own mind.
George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse Productions will executive produce.
I loved this book but I think it will be hard to do a screen adaptation of it. The narrative structure is a little too disjointed for screen. Snow crash or Crypto would translate better I think.
I’d love to see an adaptation of Snow Crash, but I think that live action for TV would be way too expensive. Maybe if it was an animated project?
We didn’t say the families were highly functional. 🙂
WONDERED HOW LONG IT WOULD TAKE THE REAL GEEKS TO CRY SNOW CRASH. JOE MURPHY RULES
“The story centers around a family, in which the father has decided that the futuristic society they live in has grown stale and stagnant and doesn’t want to see his daughter’s vivid imagination sucked dry by the mundane of the modern age. To counter the effects of the current culture he has an interactive book developed for his daughter that allows her to experience the creative surreal alternate reality of her own mind.”
Is…is that description exactly right?
“The story centers around a family” ??
Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw commissions the Primer for his grand-daughter. Engineer John Percival Hackworth steals a copy of the Primer’s code for _his_ daughter Fiona but that illicit copy is stolen and ultimately lands in the hands of a street urchin, Nell.
The bulk of the story is of Nell’s adventures with (and in) the Primer and her advancement through the Neo-Victorian society of the “Diamond Age”, contrasting with an entirely separate secondary story arc of Hackworth’s decline in Society.
Is there really much of a familial dynamic to the novel?