6. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash is not only notable for its contributions to early conceptions and designs of the World Wide Web; it also popularized the word "avatar" and has been cited as a direct inspiration for Google Earth and the Quake series of PC games (among other things). It's hard to decide which, between Snow Crash and Neuromancer, was the more influential piece of fiction in modern computing. Here it outranks Neuromancer on the list only because Gibson has had more of a crack at Hollywood than Stephenson. There is a small glimmer of hope for Snow Crash, yet. Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) has announced that he's adapted the book into a screenplay, which Stephenson himself has approved. Plus the scope of the novel (saving the entire world from an ancient Sumerian mind-virus) is the kind of larger-than-life, save-the-world, blow-up-the-bad-guy story that works perfectly on the big screen. It doesn't seem impossible for some studio, looking to make big bucks with a combination of whiz-bang explosions and pre-existing fanbase, to pick it up---ideally, with John Cho as Hiro, Chloë Moretz as Y.T., and a funky synth-techno soundtrack from the Dust Brothers to tie it all together.