Yet another attempt at a Ringworld movie/miniseries

Four years ago, I wrote Finally, a Ringworld movie!

That's the one in which I repeated my twenty-year-old grousing about how I wrote an adventure for Chaosium's Ringworld table-top RPG, but lost all that effort because the movie rights to the book were sold and the movie production company asserted that they had the game rights, too. To add insult to injury, there was no movie. Apparently, that will change, as SyFy announced that they will develop the book into a four-hour miniseries.

The good news was that it became one of the two most read posts of that year. The bad news is that no "Ringworld" movie or miniseries came of it.

Not all is lost, as io9 reported this week Amazon Is Developing a Bonanza of Genre Titles: Ringworld, Snow Crash, and Lazarus.

Amazon just announced a virtual land grab of genre titles that it’s putting into development: Larry Niven’s scifi classic Ringworld; Neal Stephenson’s cult classic Snow Crash; and Greg Rucka’s acclaimed comic Lazarus. In a perfect world, we could be seeing all three made into drama series.

As Deadline reports, the announcement comes as the streaming network is hoping to land a “big-scope genre drama series in the mold of Game Of Thrones and The Walking Dead.” There aren’t too many details yet, but the standout points include: the Ringworld project will likely draw not just from Niven’s 1970 original, but other books in the series; Rucka will be adapting Lazarus himself from page to screen; and Snow Crash will be co-produced by Joe Cornish, who at one time had the project on his own feature-directing slate.

I'm a lot more confident in Amazon pulling off "Ringworld" than I was about SyFy, so I'm looking forward to it. The other project I want to see is "Snow Crash." It may not be the best of Stephenson's novels, but it is the best-known and it's a lot of fun. Here's to both of them reaching the small screen before the decade is out!