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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
If they make the drugs themselves, why do they need to “find work?”
etc.
As I’ve learned more and more over the years, I find more and more holes in even science-fiction. Some of it is similar to a problem I’ve long had with silent movies, which are a favorite among other people I know. But I can’t get past the situations where, for example, even the characters in a movie act like they can’t hear anything. Which is clearly nonsense.
Situations in sci-fi aren’t that obvious, usually. But I remember things. Such as a story where it’s “discovered” that suspended animation for long space flights isn’t actually sleep, so fatigue builds up and the people make mistakes, etc. But come on. That might be a “surprise” for the readers who don’t think much, but how could that possibly be a new thing within the story? It’s not like the story being told is the first time suspended animation was used, and some biochemist would have realized that before it was even tried.
My dad always thought The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth would make a good film.
You’d have to change the setting (it takes place primarily on Venus, which we now know is not in any way habitable) but the plot still holds up. I read it about a decade ago along with the sequel, The Merchants’ War, written by Pohl after Kornbluth died.
Well, sort of.
I’d go with the Gateway stories myself.
The only books that should be made into movies are books that you hate.
I like them, too, but there’s approximately a billion of them, and you’d have people arguing about when to start them and what books to make into movies.
Space Merchants isn’t a franchise. Just a nice, one-off film.
Almost all of the Heinlein juvies would make great movies. some of his short stories too.
I don’t think much (possibly any) of Frederik Pohl’s The Space Merchants (1952) actually takes place on Venus. The whole point of the story is that ad agencies are selling the idea of Venus colonization to the overpopulated masses even though Venus is almost uninhabitable.
Pohl was a leftist, once a leader of the Young Communist League, who didn’t like the direction of American society in the 1950s.
It’s pretty good.
I wonder which of the books everyone has listed has not had movie rights sold? They probably have all had the rights sold and are languishing in somebody’s library of rights.
Yeah, I read The Merchants’ War basically right after, and that does have a lot set on Venus because the colony has actually become tenable. It’s not as good a book.
Also, first “real” science fiction book I ever read, circa 4th grade.
before that it was stuff like “the spaceship under the apple tree”” and the wonderful flight to the mushroom planet”,
Brain wave would be a fantastic movie.
Arthur C Clarke’s collection of short stories “Tales From The White Hart” would be a great anthology series.
@hartmannvonaue — The North Malden Icelandic Saga Society’s controversial adaptation of Njorl’s Saga was broadcast by Monty Python in the early 1970s.
It’s not that bad. They wouldn’t necessarily even have to put the whole first novel-collection into a single movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_(novel)
I can’t push my suspension of disbelief that far any more. If I ever could.
Robert Heinlein debunks the popular image of Sen. Joe McCarthy spread by his leftist opponents in his travel memoir, Tramp Royale.
I thought of that too. Sadly, couldn’t find any good youtubes of it.
It’d be a better series than a film, though.
Fine with me. Series of movies, TV (mini-)series, whatever.
Pohl didn’t like the direction of American society in the 1990’s and 2000’s, either, to put it mildly. He loathed the Tea Party movement and everyone in it, even though it was a genuine popular movement protesting the ever-growing and ever-more-unaccountable bureaucratic state, which was imposing ever-more onerous rules upon us and extracting ever-larger taxes from us. It seems that although Fred was theoretically in favor of the individual and individual liberty, in reality he seemed to welcome it only in the context of some sort of socialist or even Marxist framework (which means, in the real world, not at all.)
Fred also railed against the Second Amendment, which was safe for him to do in a quiet and peaceful suburb.
If I may suggest one of my own books:
It would be a great action-adventure film and you could do a lot of the filming aboard USS Constitution for authenticity. (Using Constitution to substitute for Philadelphia, and also to film the parts that took place aboard Constitution.)
Fred has said that he broke with the Communist Party when he learned of the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact. All the previous atrocities committed by the Communists didn’t bother him, or didn’t bother him enough.
Among the reasons to believe that Fred never ceased to be a Marxist at heart: He spun historical accounts to conceal the Communist agents behind such front organizations as the various “peace” movements which claimed to want world peace but in reality only sought to pressure Western governments to disarm in the face of Soviet aggression.
You beat me to it!
Jack Whyte’s Camulod Chronicles series about King Arthur and his antecedents. Starts in late Roman Britain. Lots of action. The first one is The Skystone, about how Excalibur came to be. This series of novels is more obscure than it should be, since Whyte presents an entirely new take on Arthur and his family, and they are all great reads.
The Silmarillion should be made into a movie by someone with more respect for the book than Peter Jackson had for The Hobbit.
“Surface Tension”, the classic 1952 story about genetically engineered humans miniaturized and given gills to survive on a planet of small ponds, cries out for an animated treatment.
Poul Anderson called his 1960 novel, The High Crusade, his most popular work. A German production with a mostly English main cast was released in 1994.
I’d love to see an adaptation of Anderson’s 1965 Nebula nominee, The Star Fox, in which the Earth is unwilling to recognize the danger posed by an alien empire. However, it looks like a video game with the same name is currently being adapted.
I’ll bet someone could make a decent movie out of the novel “Gone With The Wind”.
What’s more, the basic premise could be used as the basis for many more stories. And as a matter of fact, many writers have written their own stories set in that universe, all with varying styles and points of view.
Perhaps “basic premise which can be mined for ideas” would be a good starting point for seeking out stories that might transfer well to the screen.
That’s just crazy talk!