io9: thediamondage

George Clooney Brings Diamond Age To SyFy [The Diamond Age]

Graeme McMillan — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:00:27 PDT

SyFy is planning on turning Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age into a television series, and it's looking to George Clooney to make it happen. Insert your "Well, here's hoping it's better than Solaris" jokes here.

According to Variety, the network is looking to adapt Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" into a longform series, with Clooney attached as producer. Screenwriter newbie Zoë Green - who currently has projects in development with Rob Reiner and Disney - has been announced as writer, but no launch date has been revealed.

'Diamond' sparkes for Zoë Green [Variety]

India's Walled Cities Resemble Neo-Victorian Enclaves of "The Diamond Age" [Dystopia]

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:14:42 PDT

It's as if we're witnessing the rise of the walled cities in Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, where neo-Victorians live in isolated, nanotech splendor while other people live in cardboard boxes. This image shows the stark contrast between the slums and the mini-city called Hamilton Court in Gurgaon, India.

Today the New York Times has an interesting report on a form of urban design whose popularity is growing in India: the walled mini-city, with its own schools and power generators, surrounded by slums full of people who work as servants. While these mini-cities are like the "gated communities" you see in the west, what sets them apart is the degree of autonomy they have from their environs — they are literally running off a different electrical grid, and are designed so that nobody ever has to leave. [NYT]

Read All About It In Weird Future Newspapers [Triviagasm]

charliejane — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:30:23 PST

This alien-looking newspaper from the movie Ultraviolet recently turned up on a movie props site. I love the weird font that screams "Vampire Epidemic!!!" with the three exclamation marks. It's good to know that even in a dark dystopian future where plague victims drink your blood, sober responsible journalism will reign supreme. Here's a roundup of the strangest scifi newspapers.

In Minority Report, newspapers constantly update themselves, thanks to miracle e-paper. While you look at the cover of this e-paper version of USA Today, the headline changes from "Molecular nano-technology?" to "Precrime Hunts its Own!"Minority Report takes place in 2054, but we could have the technology to make this type of paper happen as soon as 2015, a Washington Post reporter predicts. And here's a prototype.

One of the earliest interactive newspapers turns up in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where it's called the mediatron:

Bud took a seat and skimmed a mediatron from the coffee table; it looked exactly like a dirty, wrinkled, blank sheet of paper. "'Annals of Self-Protection,'" he said, loud enough for everyone else in the place to hear him. The logo of his favorite meedfeed coalesced on the page. Mediaglyphics, mostly the cool animated ones, arranged themselves in a grid. Bud scanned through them until he found the one that denoted a comparison of a bunch of different stuff, and snapped at it with his fingernail. New mediaglyphics appeared, surrounding larger pictures in which Annals staff tested several models of skull guns against live and dead targets.

Minority Report isn't the only future vision to include USA Today, thanks to that paper's awesome powers of time-spanning product placement. Here's 2015's version of the paper, according to Back To The Future 2. Not much difference, except for spacey futuristic fonts:The short-lived TV show Early Edition features a regular newspaper that time-travels. Gary Hobson mysteriously receives tomorrow's edition of the Chicago Tribune today, and tries to avert the terrible things he reads about there. Here he is trying to save a weathergirl (really!) from getting the forecast wrong:

The second-to-last episode of Journeyman featured our time-traveling newspaper reporter landing in 1984, where he drops a digital camera. When Dan returns to the present, everything has changed because someone reverse-engineered his digital camera. Everybody's using fancy nano-tech and smart electronic paper. It sucks that we don't get a really good look at the newspaper Dan works for in this alternate 2007 before he changes the timeline back.

Where The Hell Is Our Diamond Age? [The Diamond Age]

Kevin Kelly — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 08:40:14 PST

Last year at the Television Critics Association, where professional couch pota... er, critics get together to be spoon-fed updates from the networks about what to watch during the upcoming season, the Sci Fi Channel announced that George Clooney and his buddy Grant Heslov were developing Neal Stephenson's awesome The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer novel into a six-hour miniseries. Well, it's a year later, so what's going on with our miniseries? Better yet, which Stephenson project do you think would look best in front of the lens? Vote after the jump and let us know.

Update: The Sci Fi Channel has let us know that The Diamond Age is still in development. Interestingly, Neal Stephenson is on a panel at this year's CES next week featuring other science fiction innovators (like Lucy Lawless) as they "discuss the mutual influence they've had on each other."