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Hollywood’s ongoing efforts to adapt every single book that some guy spent way too much time and energy recommending at you at a party in college continues apace today, with Deadline reporting that HBO has put a TV version of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash into development. The series comes courtesy of The Kid Who Would Be King and Attack The Block director Joe Cornish, with 21 Jump Street’s Michael Bacall set to write the script.


For those unfamiliar, Snow Crash is a bit like what you’d get if you picked up Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and then aggressively shook all the copyright violations out of it; set in a far future world where people spend most of their time hooked up to a virtual reality internet, the book centers on a hardcore-hacker-turned-pizza-delivery-guy who stumbles on to a conspiracy to fry people’s brains with a visual virus. Satirical, fast-paced, and with one of the most kinetic opening sequences ever committed to print, it’s also one of Stephenson’s most readily accessible books. (Which is to say, he keeps the parables about computer programming, cryptography, and 17th century economics to a minimum.)

Which is, presumably, why it’s been a target for potential adaptation projects for so long; Paramount launched an effort to do so with a movie back in 2012, and, more recently, Amazon announced it was going to try as a TV show in 2017. That’s presumably related to the project HBO is looking at now, as both versions had Cornish attached.