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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
Interesting that Isaac Asimov wrote about the divide between “soft sci-fi” and “hard sci-fi”. Example of the former he gave was Harlan Ellison; the latter was Larry Niven.
In a foreword to a collection of stories by J. G. Ballard Anthony Burgess wrote of “the pushing of a scientific datum to its theoretical limit . . . the fiction of untrammeled imagination . . . however unsatisfactory, we always return to the term ‘science fiction’ . . .”
The vast, vast majority of fiction is obviously not science fiction. And just having another planet be involved, doesn’t make something science fiction. If you get to the other planet by “dreaming” of it, or if the other planet has dragons etc, then it’s fantasy.
“Jaunting” has so many problems it’s difficult to know where to begin. If you’re going to “jaunt” to someplace, wouldn’t you necessarily need to know where it is? You can’t look into the sky and see even other planets in our own solar system, necessarily. And those you CAN see, even the Moon, are not where you see them. You see them where they WERE, however long ago it took the light to reach here from there.
In the case of the Moon, in its orbit it moves just over half a mile per second, and we see where it WAS about 1.3 seconds ago so that means it’s already nearly a mile from where it appears to be. If you could “jaunt” to what you see, you’d arrive in empty space, or buried within the body of the Moon.
Also if you arrived with your Earth-momentum intact (and why WOULDN’T you?) you’d be in further trouble, especially if you then add in the Moon’s momentum… What a mess!
Every few years I teach a reading seminar on utopian lit. The Wikipedia article captures the kinds of discussion starters The Dispossessed offers. That is why I include it on the list of readings.
Yes. In the short story, the cold equations referred to the unbending laws of physics. In the TV show I saw, it was about the financial equations from cold-hearted capitalists. As many Ricochetti have asked in previous threads, why can’t they just write their own original story instead of taking a good existing story and turning into garbage?
You had a wonderfully written story with great subjects. The amoral man driven by revenge who is forced to grow intellectually and morally through his quest, a super-cool thief lady, one of the more memorable characters in speculative fiction in Saul Dagenham, powerful hereditary clans, the Great What-Is-It in PyrE, and a fantastic conclusion. Neil Gaiman(sp?) wrote that the story was modeled on The Count of Monte Cristo, and that it was in some ways the grandfather of cyberpunk from way back in the 1950s. If the mechanics of jaunting gets in the way of your enjoyment, it’s your call not to read it.
They are full of “woke” sentiments and lack all creativity.
My attitude would be more like it should have been written not trying to be science-fiction. Or maybe just tell people to re-read The Count Of Monte Cristo if it’s more or less the same story. Would someone reading Count or maybe Three Musketeers have accepted any of them “jaunting” around Earth with their sword and pistol via some kind of telepathy or whatever? It would be crap there too.
Other people call it “science fiction”. Bester thought he was writing a good story, the same as his novel The Demolished Man.
I suppose Isaac Asimov thought he was writing science fiction when he wrote Nightfall which was voted the number 1 science fiction short story of all time back in the 1970s. It has plot holes big enough to drive a K Whopper through and Asimov thought he wrote “hard” science fiction. They don’t distract from my enjoyment of the story.
It’s been a long time since I read “Nightfall” but I can’t remember anything of the level of ridiculousness of “jaunting.”
I don’t remember “The Demolished Man” having anything so ridiculous either. Telepathy seems on a different order from claiming to move from planet to planet by wishing it.
A technological society that never developed artificial lighting because it was at the center of five stars and never saw darkness. They never, ever had a war where submarines were used? They did only open pit mining? Never explored the oceans for purely scientific reasons? No, it’s not on the level of imagining “jaunting”, but it’s stupid just the same. And it didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment of the story, the speculation about the mind encountering physical phenomena it couldn’t deal with, resulting in permanent madness. And, as I and Anthony Burgess said, the term is “speculative fiction”.
As far as I can tell, “speculative fiction” is a different animal too. “Speculative fiction” could include things like “what if the Nazis won WW II” etc which wouldn’t begin to approach “science fiction.”
And we have civilizations here on Earth whose “stupidity” matches that story. So no big deal.
I remember the treatment of telepaths in “Demolished” being rather similar to their situation in “Babylon 5,” though.
If you want to be a science fiction “purist”, OK by me.
That would be grouped into what is termed Alternate History, the first story of that is said to be Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which Amazon turned into a series that bore more than a passing resemblance to the book, but was also quite different. One of my favorites is Harry Turtledove’s alternate history where Lee won at Sharpsburg and, defeating the Union Army in detail was able to occupy DC. The French and English forces Lincoln to make peace. He picks up the story in the 1880 with the Second Civil War, and then writes nine books that track WWI, the interphase, and WWII. Fascinating stories, but he adheres to the basics of alt history, single event change, and the same themes tend to resurface.
Ten more. When I realized the third trilogy was actually a tetralogy, I was ready to hunt him down and kill him. But I learned more about how Hitler came to power from Jake Featherston than I ever got from the History Channel.
Frankly, I’d say that “science fiction” is a purist term already. Other things aren’t science fiction. That doesn’t make them bad, but they’re not science fiction and they shouldn’t claim to be, nor should their aficionados claim that they are, perhaps in misguided attempts to expand their readership.
P. K. Dick could be as “meta” as they come. In his alternate history someone had published underground a novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy that proposed an alternate history where the Allies won.
I’m so meta even this acrostic…
(h/t xkcd)
The term is “suspension of disbelief”.
What category would you put Turtledoves “The guns of the south”, where South Africans time travel and give Lee AK-47s?
I know too much to suspend certain areas of disbelief.
The problem with science fiction is that it serves two masters and not every author can do that.
Hard science fiction requires considerable knowledge of science and the more science-y the reader, the harder he will want it. So to speak.
In other words, the bar for hard sf is a mote in the eye of the beholder or something.
~uses telepathic powers to force people to post titles of books that should be made into movies~
That is necessary to enjoy the stories, but I was referring to my previous comment using the term “speculative fiction“ rather than “science-fiction“.
Time travel stories tend to be alt history as well. S. M. Stirling is another great alt-history writer and two of his series fix upon a single event, the Island of Nantucket going to ~1200 BC. One series is from the aspect of the Islanders, and the other is from the aspect of the people in the current time (where all technology and explosives stop working). One is alt-history (the first), the second is post-apocalyptic.
Guns of the South would be alt-history, much like Eric Flint’s 1632 series where a West Virginia town ends up in Thuringia in the middle of the Thirty Years War.
As a matter of fact, that was a key plot element: You could not “jaunt” to someplace unless you already knew where it was, and in order to know that you had to physically visit it first by conventional means.
A second key plot element was that nobody could “jaunt” more than a few hundred to a thousand miles, which meant that it was useless for space travel. But the protagonist was being hunted down by ruthless powers because, unknown to himself, he had “space jaunted” across the solar system while delirious from injuries.
There are numerous scientific problems with the novel, as well as sociological problems–spaceship crews will always be highly skilled people, not the uneducated illiterate gutter trash that the protagonist is.
So call the novel “science fantasy” rather than “science fiction”.
But a very large part of the novel’s appeal lies not in the plot but in Bester’s pyrotechnic writing, which, if I recall hearing correctly, hit the science fiction world like a bomb. Take away Bester’s amazing writing style and you take away a lot of what made the novel so memorable–and made it such an influence on other writers.
The same can be said of Roger Zelazny, whose lyrical style (and sometime ventures into poetry) made him so memorable–as well as his frequent and frequently densely packed literary allusions. How much of what made a Zelazny story a Zelazny story can be brought to the screen?
I have fleeting memories of the book, since I read it so long ago. But what big advantage is there to “space jaunting” if you have to have been there first already by regular means? Cuts way down on the value. Also, the “been there before” might be sort of a maguffin, but it doesn’t make sense since – as indicated previously – all of these other places are constantly moving. Nor does it answer the problem that it’s basically still witchcraft or magic, if they’re doing it just by thought without expending great quantities of energy as would normally be required. At least in my book, even “science fantasy” is insufficiently dismissive.
“The Ringworld is unstable!!”
It’s a book. Relax.
Yes, it’s a book. It’s a fantasy book. And I avoid fantasy books, which is difficult and irritating when fantasy gets disguised as sci-fi. Say what you will about the Ringworld books, but I don’t remember a bit of fantasy in any of them.
Perhaps not under your conveniently shifting definition of fantasy. Compared to reality, uh, it’s littered with it.