Set Your TiVo Now: Diamond Age Coming to SciFi

What do George Clooney and local SF author Neal Stephenson have in common? The diamond age:

Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson's best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, 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.

It's part of SciFi's "2007 development roster," which means you've got plenty of time to read the book first. It's an epic showdown between Victorian and Confucian ideals set in the not-too-distant future -- further down the timeline from Snow Crash, actually.

The Diamond Age is headier than Snow Crash, though not as complex -- or long -- as Cryptonomicon or The Baroque Cycle, the latter of which is so long we've yet to finish it. (Courtney says it's not worth it, but we plan on plowing through volumes 2 and 3 one of these days.)

Put it this way: we liked Diamond Age enough to flirt with naming our daughter Nell, at least until we mentioned the notion to our wife.

And though we don't love everything he's been involved in, we figure if anyone can make Stephenson come up with a decent ending, it's the director of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.