Stephenson’s Diamond Age in TV Production
posted in General |Woo-Woo!
SCI FI Channel unveiled a new slate of programs in development, which includes shows from executive producers George Clooney, Darren Star and Mark Burnett. SCI FI made the announcement Jan. 12 at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour in Pasadena, Calif.
Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson’s best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)
, 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.
(emphasis mine)
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And to go on from that short blurb; there winds up being two copies of the book. One is, of course, given to the daughter mentioned. The other falls into the hands of an impoverished young woman who doesn’t know how to read (the book adapts and teaches her). It has some great imagining of how nanotechnology could transform our world (both as a lethal weapon and as a tool for construction). It’s actually the second of Stephenson’s books I read, and confirmed my enjoyment of his combination of the technical and the fantastic.
