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What Books Should Be Made Into Movies?
At the suggestion of @robtgilsdorf I am moving this from the Ricochet Film Society group to the main feed to see if more people are interested.
I was reading a post about the best western films since 2000 and it got me to thinking, as I was writing my response promoting Elmer Kelton, that there are a ton of great books that need to be made into amazing movies.
For example, it would be amazing if Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was made into a movie that actually bore a passing resemblance to his work. I would love to see The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as a movie as well. I heard it was a project that would be called Uprising, Brian Singer was associated with it, and I am not sure how I feel about that.
I would love to see The Dragonriders of Pern made into a film. I doubt that it would survive contact with Hollywood though and the perceived misogyny would make them want to change it entirely. I doubt they could stomach the all-male dragonrider corps, though they might very much like the homosexual nature of the draconic matings that ensues.
I would also like to see John Ringo’s Legacy of the Aldenata books made into a series of films, at least the first four would be awesome.
What are your thoughts?
Published in Entertainment
Not in the same Forrest Gump way, but that sounds similar to the beginning of the Perry Rhodan series.
Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full really needs to be made into a movie. I understand that there was a project to do so, but some influential people in Atlanta apparently got pretty upset…
I liked a good bit of Bester’s work, but he loses me with “jaunting,” i.e, personal teleportation.
Or The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. Medieval knights against aliens. Knights win, move into the ship and head off to the alien world to conquer it.
One of the best historical novels ever written is Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French, based on the events of 1798, when the French revolutionary government landed 1000 troops in County Mayo to support indigenous Irish rebels, with the objective of overthrowing British rule in Ireland.
The book was made into a movie, in Ireland in 1982, but seems to be unavailable. I’d love to see it either re-released or for a new movie to be made based on the book.
I reviewed the book here.
I never read that one – never even heard of it, as far as I remember – and that’s probably a good thing.
Brain Wave might make a good movie/mini-series.
Maybe. How about Tau Zero?
In the original thread, I mentioned Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni series. Court intrigue, church-and-state conflict, lots of battles, magic, bloody assassinations, really bad bad guys, really good (and religiously devout) good guys, characters you grow to love dying in tragic incidents, . . . it would fill the void left by Game of Thrones.
I would like to see Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta Series made into movies, as well as Jana DeLeon’s Miss Fortune Series . . .
The Pathfinder RPG module Crimson Throne would be great. It is filled with black from Varissia and Shoan-ti tribes based on Native-Americans and has murder and sex and swords and all that fun stuff.
There’s apparently a series in the works based on Ben Aaronovich’s Rivers of London series.
Not sure what I think about that, but then I’m still not sure what I think of the book series. (I’m on the second book. It’s a little darker and more violent than I’m comfortable with.)
I never read that one, but the ending as described at wikipedia reminds me of Cities In Flight by James Blish. That story had a chilling line about preferring death to the survival possibilities they faced. I don’t believe that Blish’s storyline could be done in a single movie, but Surface Tension certainly could be.
Even some “hard” science fiction goes beyond credibility/credulity to me. I never read the “Cities” stories, something about them just smelled like a waste of time to me. Cities flying around the galaxy to “find work?” wtf? From who, aliens? Why? etc. I guess I can somewhat understand someone writing such stories in a time much closer to the Great Depression, but still…
A. Bertram Chandler had a next-universe thing in one of his stories too, that I remember. The conceit there was that the universe plays out pretty much the same from one “big bang” and then “big crunch,” to the next. Chandler’s characters in that story have somehow (perhaps accidentally) jumped forward in time, to a point where their civilization no longer exists in any form. Faced with the reality (according to the story) that travel BACKWARDS in time is impossible, they instead go farther forward, at great speed, past the next “big crunch” and “big bang” and into the next universe, and “stop” just when that universe has reached the point where they left the previous one. So everything seems the same.
Love those books. And how every time they save the earth the are setting it up for the next disaster.
I never read that one, but the ending as described at wikipedia reminds me of Cities In Flight by James Blish. That story had a chilling line about preferring death to the survival possibilities they faced. I don’t believe that Blish’s storyline could be done in a single movie, but Surface Tension certainly could be.
That doesn’t sound like an accurate description. This is from wikipedia and matches more-or-less my vague recollection from almost 50 years ago.
I read that article too.
(emphasis added)
(emphasis added)
If you grant the “suspension of disbelief” regarding anti-gravity “spindizzys” and anti-ageing drugs, wandering the galaxy is not that strange. Today, there are people fantasizing about colonizing Mars. Why? Because it’s there, I guess. There is a segment, or theme, where what is a valid form of money in Blish’s world is explored. “The whole damn galaxy is broke!” is the way one character puts it. “Looking for work” was the way to pass time while a new make-shift economy and medium of exchange was worked out and implemented. The anti-aging drugs were not permanent, but required regular ingesting, IIRC. A manufacturing “city” with capabilities the producers of the drugs didn’t have could be looking for work to do in exchange for the drugs.
My first nomination: The Oxford Unabridged Dictionary .😎😎😎
Reaching back to cyberpunk days, Neuromancer?
I read that book, what, more than 20 years ago, and can still instantly recall the name “Raymond Peepgass,” Wolfe’s unique definition of “saddlebags,” and his description of the way quail hunting (something I’ve never done) works!
I admire Slammers, but it has a written-by-military-for-military quality that would quickly be mistranslated in film/mini-series.
But why are those drug-producers out and about in the galaxy? If the drug is being produced on Earth, why aren’t they looking for work on Earth?
etc, etc.
Also, as mentioned, I never actually read the stories, the descriptions etc put me off. But if these are cities and factories flying around the galaxy, without farmland etc, how do they feed themselves?
etc, etc.
I’ve been wanting a Red Storm Rising for years. However, now that Amazon owns Tom Clancy I know they’d just [bleep] it up so don’t give them any ideas.
I liked the Lenders’ Cactus.
(not a typo)
I don’t remember. Could have been hydroponics instead of farmland. Maybe the drugs were produced in cities that took flight? In any case, if you’re leaving Earth for good, you take drug-producing and medical capabilities with you. Just good planning. Overall, I just remember thinking it was a fascinating idea and a well-told story.
As I recall, it was optioned at the time Johnny Mnemonic came out which is why the Molly character was replaced by whatever that was that replaced her.
Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn and perhaps Embedded.
I thought of that. It seems that the plot might be a little tough to put forward, even though it is a true story, or at least based on one.
Ubik, by Philip K. Dick. I read it as part of a collection that included Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. A very strange story. Two of the other three have already been made.