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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
The Dresden files are on Tubitv.com as well – free streaming – ad supported…
They have a problem with believing things could ever get as bad as they already are.
There’s that too. Plus those like some of my relatives and some former neighbors in Arizona, whose attitude seems to be “Wow the Democrats have really made a mess, we have to elect more Democrats to fix it!”
“Tunnel” is another of those stories that can be an entertaining read, and perhaps a “fun romp” as a movie, but doesn’t hold up to closer inspection. Unless they’re sending like a quarter-million people PER DAY off to other planets, it’s not going to impact the Earth’s (over-)population.
“The Cold Equations” was a good short story, and a good Twilight Zone episode, until it was turned into a “movie” padded out with a bunch of government conspiracy and other nonsense.
Hat doffed in respect for the suggestion.
I wouldn’t be surprised if AB had written it with an eye towards TV adaptation. It was, after all, an intentional potboiler, almost a parody of the Sweeping Novel that had brought lesser talents a nice payday, as well as a demonstration of his ability to write an insanely smart version of the potboiler. (He did the same with “Tremor of Intent,” his spy novel.) In typical fashion, he alienated the target market in the very first sentence with a word they didn’t know, and kept mentioning that one of his characters not only had strabismus but venerean strabismus, so the beach & airport paperback crowd may not have won over.
Seriously? The original idea isn’t enough? Did kala fever come from a New Wuhan lab?
I’d like a prestige adaptation of the SPQR or Gordianus series. A private eye in Rome. The former is breezy and instantly relatable, told from the viewpoint of a smart, rough-and-ready optimate, and has the virtue of getting out of town from time to time, so we’re not replaying the end of the Republic for the nth time. It also has an interesting Titus Milo.
The latter has an outsider’s take on the end of the Republic, which means “hanging out naked with Lucious Sergius Cataline in an obvious author insert.” Much more dense and serious, which means it would probably be more expensive and ponderous.
Just looking at the Wikipedia page, “The Stars My Destination” sounds a lot like Firefly…
Look for yourself:
If it could be made without “jaunting” then maybe. But if “jaunting” is included, it doesn’t pass the BS claptrap nonsense test.
Roger Zelazny’s Amber series (Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, et al) would be interesting. They would
monkey with itupdate it to speak to today’s audience though, and I would end up hating it.Reviews said that Burgess worked over ten years on the novel. There were discussions among reviewers whether he had modeled the main character on William Somerset Maugham. I have no opinion because I have little knowledge on that subject. When I read it in the 1980s, it had covered most of the 20th century. It is not the same experience to read it now.
Same reason I have to remain content with the original The Starlost.
“Jaunting” was the point of the novel.
I think it was a key aspect in certain areas, and it’s been a long time since I read it, but just going by the wikipedia recap seems like it might be possible to do without. Unless they don’t give it enough prominence, which is possible.
As far as I’m concerned, any story that involves mental teleportation – whether it’s called “jaunting” by Alfred Bester or “tessering” by Madeleine L’Engle – might as well include magic and dragons too cuz it’s not sci-fi.
The reason that some people were chasing the hero Gulliver Foyle was that he had “space jaunted”. Until he achieved that feat, there were limitation of a few hundred (thousand?) miles. It was left to the reader to speculate why that was important, but hints were given. There was also the complaint by the main female character that jaunting had “taken women back to the seraglio”. Yeah, I had to look up the term. The other part of the story was “PyrE”, something that to me was as fantastic as jaunting.
But it all comes down to Ursula K. Leguin’s statement that she made in an afterword to a story she had written: Grant me a suspension of disbelief on a few details and I’ll do my best to tell you a good story.
Anyway, the
Mental teleportation is no “detail.”
She and Anne McCaffrey were both involved with a sci-fi book club I was a member of in Oregon, long ago. My attitude now is the same as then: I’m not interested in reading about dragons, no matter how “well-motivated” they’re supposed to be.
As the old saying goes, “Different strokes for different folks.” I enjoyed both LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest with its “ansible” and The Stars My Destination with both “jaunting” and “PyrE”.
Fine with me, recognizing that Stars My Destination is necessarily fantasy, not science-fiction. Maybe not because of PyrE, but definitely because of “jaunting.”
Just going to another planet etc, is not automatically/necessarily sci-fi. If you go to another planet etc by essentially “casting a spell,” “wishing” real hard, etc, it’s fantasy.
Maybe we could swap it out for weirding modules?
My issue with the Amber series is that the main characters are literally two-dimensional.
Which might work for TV, but grated enough on me when I read it at 12 years old that while it’s on my Kindle I haven’t restarted it. The story’s good, but the primary actors (I can’t call them “characters”) aren’t interesting.
Corwin, you know, because he’s your narrator. Some of the characters are enigmas to the reader, but only because they are enigmas to Corwin as well. He knows his brother Random better than any of them but he still can’t figure Random out.
It would be interesting to see how “walking through Shadow” would be handled.
Corwin starts off the novels suffering from complete amnesia. It was interesting figuring out what the hell was going on along with the main character.
This would need Tom Hanks and HBO, it is a great and true story of the bravery and dedication of the U.S. Navy in World War II.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/82865/the-last-stand-of-the-tin-can-sailors-by-james-d-hornfischer/
It also has the benefit of occuring in daylight hours, so fighting is visible, unlike night fights in the Solomon Island in 1942-1943.
A Passage at Arms – Glen Cook.
That is an amazing book! My dad (former History Prof at the UGA and later online) recommended it to me and it was extremely well done. My dad also strongly recommends Neptune’s Inferno and Ship of Ghosts.
Speaking of the USS Houston, the Destroyermen series by Taylor Anderson is related to the loss of the Houston and tells the tale of two US Destroyers that end up in an alternate world where humans never evolved as the dominant species. It would also make a great series or series of movies, but the Lemurians would be difficult, then again Avatar worked.
My suggestion would be Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. If not mishandled, it would make a thought provoking film.
I have not read anything by LeGuin, but I have heard good things.
I met her several times, in Oregon. Never could stand her writing.
Read this and see if it sounds interesting. To quote Jonah Goldberg, it makes me want to start cutting myself, and/or take a bath with a toaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed