geekosystem

Fans of author Neal Stephenson should prick up their ears: Joe Cornish has apparently been tapped to direct a forthcoming film adaptation of Stephenson's classic novel Snow Crash. If you love cyberpunk set in a viciously consumer-driven vision of America, then you'll love this.

Neal Stephenson, perhaps best known for his novels Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash, is now seeking pledges on Kickstarter for a real steel video game called CLANG. Coming from Subutai Corporation, the game aims to provide a realistic representation of steel-to-steel swordsmanship on a level previously shrouded in abstraction. Say farewell to your days of wild flailing.

Seriously, just sit back and bask in the huge, loud, awesome that is this sentence: "A gun the size of a bus has set a new world record, and fired its payload so fast it broke the speed of sound seven times over."

It's hard to say what, if any, effect Neal Stephenson's new start up will have on the future of communication, nanotechnology, or Nazi war gold, seeing as how it doesn't really have anything to do with those things and its first project is more about the future of publishing and copyright. From The New York Times:

The company [called Subutai], based in Seattle and San Francisco, has developed what it calls the PULP platform for creating digital novels. The core of the experience is still a text novel, but authors can add additional material like background articles, images, music, and video. There are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers.

Their aforementioned first project launches today, a serialized novel called The Mongoliad, co-written by Stephenson, Greg Bear, and other people.

Yesterday, we wrote about an entire social network dedicated to fictional personas, which made us think: what are some social networks that, while aimed at real human beings, are themselves totally made up to fill a void in pop culture? Join us below for a Campbellian hero's journey into the world of what TV writers, popular authors, and late-night comics think about when they think about social networking!