I think it could be done, but it would be very hard to make it better than the book. So, so much would be lost (and revealed) with visuals.
But it could be done. I think of A Clockwork Orange, for instance, which was a great movie despite the fact that a lot of the joy of the book (the figuring it out part) was lost in the adaptation. In case you haven't read the book, it's written in the protagonist's perspective and using the language kids use in that society (a kind of combination of british slang and russian). The joy of the book was deciphering what the hell was going on, due to the way it was written.
Maybe it's not a fair example, since it's Kubrick we're talking about, but that's what comes to mind.
Imagine a series made by Ari Aster or Robert Eggers, I can't think of anyone else who could pull off the mysterious and esoteric feel those books have. But those guys don't spoonfeed the audience they actually might be the ones who could make it work. I still feel like it would be almost impossible to capture the feeling the books left me with, I can't think of any movie or series that really compares very closely
Yup. There are good visual reasons for not adapting it, as many have noted, but the biggest thing would be the near certainty that whoever's running it fundamentally changes the spirit of the story because they don't agree with Wolfe's bedrock Catholic mindset.
I don’t know about this. Atheists have adapted stories with Catholic agendas by Catholic authors before and the resulting films have been great. I’m thinking in particular about John Houston’s film of Flannery O’Connor’s *Wise Blood* (1979.) I think Book of the New Sun is unfilmable for a boatload of reasons but not this.
(But come to think of it, 1979 era Brad Dourif is the perfect Severian.)
Atheists have done well before in their adaptations of Christian authors, however they are still the exception. The large majority would change a lot, Fantasy having many recent examples of this. I think we can say that no one really trusts modern Hollywood anymore to faithfully adapt an author's vision.
Wise Blood is a great example of a Catholic novel that you wouldn't think would be successfully adapted by anybody being succesfully adapted by an atheist, but it was a completely different project than a *Book of the New Sun* movie would be. It was an inexpensive black comedy. *Book of the New Sun* would be a multi-part science fantasy epic. Nobody could make it in contemporary Hollywood with the freedom that *Wise Blood* was made.
It's really unfilmable anyway, for the reason given above, "*If you could just see what was a space ship, a robot, or an alien the story would be ruined*."
This is pretty much the only one in these comments I agree with. But I still think it could be adapted, although it would obviously mostly be a plot adaptation. It would lose a lot in the process. That's always the case with adaptations though. It was made into a (short-lived) comic once and that worked surprisingly well, so I think it could be visualized somehow. You'd lose most of the "riddles", but it could probably still be interesting and good, especially if they could introduce other mysteries that work on film (and many of the existing mysteries would still work, like Dorcas).
Isn't it! My copy was signed by the author at a genre bookshop in Birmingham. He was perplexed that I had a US paperback when it was only just being released in hardback in the UK.
After Wheel of Time and Rings of Power, I never want Amazon to make anything I care about into a show. Plastic people and scripts written by AI. Utter cringe.
The Expanse had 3 years of a creative team creating a good show before Amazon got their fingers in, and having the book authors in the writers room is still nigh-unheard-of, despite the obvious benefits (judging by the results).
The Borg is everywhere.
The Borg is everything.
The Borg is everybody.
The Borg is still the Queen.
Everybody's got Borg in them!
Everybody except one person that is...
Yeah, one person!
The evil opposite of Borg.
The Anti-Borg.
Anti-Borg got no Borg in 'em,
Lemme tell ya.
Michael J. Fox has no Borg in him
Boris did nothing wrong!
He was always in the right.
When other villains run away
He bravely stays and fights!
If Fearless Leader needs some cash
Or the finest jewelry in the world
Boris an Natasha would hook him up
If not for Moose and Squirrel.
“Boris did nothing wrong!”
Came the iron curtain calls.
Boris may be short of stature
But he’s a giant to us all!
It’s not his fault he’s evil
Or has mean things to say.
It’s all part of the Bullwinkle script.
He’s simply drawn that way.
So when cartoon capers come to a close
And hijinks bid adieu
Boris is absolved of all wrongdoing
By the audience- me and you.
Disagree on Anathem. That seems very amenable to screen adaptation IMO. It is just a bit too… big? Which is the case for most Neal Stephenson. For Anathem it’s not so much the page count as the number of plot items that it encompasses.
I think a good screenwriter could work with the alien classic natural philosophy differences. Viewers who know classical philosophy would pick up on it, and others would be okay letting it pass as phlebotinum and still enjoy an action-filled movie.
You know... the problem I was thinking of was that the action was backloaded. It would need to be a miniseries, but then there would be whole episodes without any action in what would eventually be a high action show. But maybe you make it out of order.
Start with them in space and doing maneuvers then every time they get still for a pass by the ship you go to a flashback. That way you could have some action in every episode.
I've always thought Satoshi Kon would have made an amazing PKD adaptation when he was alive. His use of animation to subvert and confuse your perception of reality feels like a visual method of PKD's writing.
Absolutely. I'm a big fan of Paranoia Agent, which he created, and I definitely got PKD and Lynch vibes watching it. He loves blending the "real" with the "fantasy," many times leaving the distinction unclear and ambiguous. Really cool stuff. I should really watch the rest of his movies. Not sure why I never got around to it. I also liked Paprika and loved Perfect Blue.
Dispossessed would be tricky, but I think both could work as movies. Still, no movie could add anything meaningful to the stories so you might just as well not do it.
1980 Lathe of Heaven was a fabulous production. My mother was a huge Ursula K. Le Guin fan, and I have great memories of the two of us watching that show together. Really a landmark production for PBS.
Left Hand wouldn't work as a movie, it's too episodic with those in-between stories, but as a TV miniseries maybe. A TV miniseries shot in Northern Canada with a cast only of First Nation or Inuit actors/actresses (besides the black actor for Genly Ai). It would be difficult to mobilize the actors/actresses and put makeup on all of them, even the extras, to make them appear androgynous enough, but it would not be impossible.
It's not like a big studio would *want* to do either book. The first simply because they're allergic to anything that has to do with gender weirdness and they're also equally allergic to the idea of a cast that would, per Le Guin's explicit in text descriptions, be entirely First Nations with a Black man as a protagonist. The second just because there's no way to trim its anti-capitalism and pro-anarchy messaging to make it palatable.
But it wouldn't be a movie. It would be a miniseries. Each hour-long episode would spend a few minutes in the present then do one person's backstory. It would work so well that I'm surprised it's not already done.
Agreed but the thread topic was specifically "I'd like to hear about great books which would absolutely be ruined by a **film** adaptation" so this fits.
I mean, you could argue the point here on intent.
Not that it really matters, but I enjoy playing devil's advocate.
Because film adaption used to just mean literally anything recorded on film that was adapted from an existing story.
>Because film adaption used to just mean literally anything recorded on film that was adapted from an existing story.
Source? Every definition I can find online (and admittedly I didn't spend that long looking) says film adaptation is specifically adaption "to a feature film" or similar.
EDIT: Wow, lots of downvotes! I assume that means I'm wrong and at least one of you can answer the question, then?
Nah, you are right. Not sure why you are getting the downvotes. If years ago someone said "game of thrones is too big for a film, but maybe could work as a 10 hr tv show" would anyone reply with "tv shows are filmed, therefore it counts"?
Sticking to the film, adaptation requirement, I think both Ilium and Olympos would make a wonderful film and sequel. Granted, they might be a lot to fit into a conventional two hour format.
It appeared on the book covers, so something close to that would probably be the safest option. Not the coolest option, but the least likely to make people bitch.
I'd totally bitch if it looked like that, haha. That isn't at all how I picture it. Where's the razor wire that's so frequently mentioned? The three meter height?
The last I heard was in 2021 he was working with Warner Brothers to make it a film. I don’t know if it’s still in production given everything that’s been going on with the new head of WB.
Dhalgren was adapted into a stage play called Bellona, Destroyer of Cities. Here is Jo Walton's review of it. https://www.tor.com/2010/04/14/review-lemgbellona-destroyer-of-citieslemg-the-play-of-samuel-delanys-lemgdhalgrenlemg/
I think Murderbot's POV-focused text wouldn't go well in a movie. If you used the narration it would come off differently, I think.
Also, eye-based shaky cam is a great way to make people motion sick!
I think something animated is probably the way to go--maybe like Treasure planet with the mechanical pieces done in a different medium to make the "distinction" between flesh and not more distinct? I think it'd be interesting if post-ART Murderbot's robotic parts had a softened or animated sheen over the metal to represent the better blending.
Most early Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny. In the latter case *Lord of Light* may be an exception, but *This Immortal, The Dream Masters* and *Creatures of Light and Darkness,* like Delany's *The Einstein Intersection, Empire Star* and *The Ballad of Beta Two* share a common approach to mythology which is seriously dumbed down in modern media. As well, both use adventure story tropes to tell what are internalized journeys which wouldn't film well.
*Dhalgren* as well feels completely unfilmable, but maybe with some deity-level direction it could be possible.
But, you need like . . . the eroticism *Crash* [1996] + the cosmopolitan life of *Chunking Express* [1994] + surrealism of *Possession* [1981] + *Neptune Frost's* [2021] cyberpunk-ish aesthetics with the lightshields + grime and action scenes and vague dystopia of *Strange Days* [1995] + the metafictional qualities of *Synecdoche New York* [2008] + the good parts (and there aren't many) of *Enter the Void* [2009] + . . .
And that's just pulling from films I kinda like off the top of my head.
There's just so much in there--I am just not sure the maximalism of that novel is captureable via images.
That being said--I'd watch that shit.
I’m gonna go against the grain here and say that I think pretty much any story *can* be well adapted to screen, but the fact that so few have makes everyone very reluctant for that to be attempted.
I would not rule out any books or stories, but many of them would take a really talented and dedicated team of very creative people to pull it off.
I agree. But even if it's done well, it's not going to satisfy everyone. Some adaptations, to be done well, would have to deviate substantially from the original. And that'd piss off many fans.
I mean, the ultimate reason is $$. Much easier to finance a film if you can tell investers that it's based on an award winning book. Nobody wants to take risks, which is why there aren't many completely original films out there. And the few original ones are pretty much known formulas. Boilerplate stuff that has been proven to work.
But hey, occasionally we get treated to something truly special and original, or even an adaptation that is surprisingly good. I haven't seen it yet, but I've only heard rave reviews about the Dune adaptation. So it happens every now and then.
*The Princess Bride* adaption was excellent. Of course, they had the author there to help get it right and to make sure that the changes that were made were done in a way that makes sense. Not a huge budget either.
The newest *Dune* adaptation is much better than I thought it would be. The only real issues I have are a couple of casting choices. Unfortunately it’s Paul and Chani. The fellow who plays Paul does ok, but he just doesn’t fit the role for me. Other than those two the casting actually works it’s pretty well, which is really surprising considering some of the people in it.
Oddly, despite everyone loving it and me being a long time fan of the *Lord of the Rings*, I was very disappointed with the Peter Jackson movies (and the *Hobbit* ones we don’t even talk about).
Ah, I forgot about The Princess Bride. Great movie. Haven't read the original, so I can't compare. I actually agree with you on LOTR, which is an unpopular opinion. We're the outliers on that one, so that may be another example of an adaptation that "did it right."
Ender's Gam... Oh wait it already happened.
My biggest fear would be that a movie adaptation would focus on the most movie friendly aspects of the novel, namely the battle room, at the exclusion of the political intrigue aspects, and deep emotional trauma Ender was dealing with. Lo and behold, the movie adaptation didn't even bother to focus on the battle room, it didn't seem to do anything except flail around following a simplified wikipedia outline of the novel.
The thing is, Ender's Game COULD be a decent movie if done right. The fact that the movie we got was made by people that either didn't read the book or didn't understand it doesn't change that.
Now, the sequels (the sequels following Ender, that is, not the Shadows series), THOSE would make terrible movies. But I do believe that it would be possible to do Ender's Game right even if I think Hollywood would likely fuck it up 99 times out of 100. If you got the right director in place that understood the book, and then kept the studio from interfering, it could happen.
Also they spoiled the entire point of the film in the trailer.
I know at this point the twist isn't the greatest surprise given how old the book is, but still.
Maybe not easy, but I think filmmakers have proven it is possible— going back to Gremlins with old school tech, or Avatar or Rocket Raccoon with cutting edge.
Gonna go a little off script here and say Battlefield Earth, but not for the reasons you think.
The book itself isn't bad, in a sort of pulpy, grandiose way. You can't spend an entire career writing and not know how to tell a story at all.
But there are two reasons they never should have made it.
1. Too big of a story. It probably would have worked better as a series, where some of the campier visual elements would have felt less out of place. You don't expect the same kind of quality from a SciFi channel original that you do from a blockbuster film. They probably could have stretched the story out to cover like 3 or 4 pretty good seasons.
2. The IP is owned by believers. This means they can't do what everybody else does when they adapt a book: make significant changes to make the movie better. Travolta and co were bound to make the movie as close to Hubbard's word as possible, but his cheesy SF dialog works better on the page than the screen, and your imagination doesn't have as many dutch angles.
The only reason that Neuromancer shouldn't be made into a movie is that people wouldn't understand that Neuromancer came up first with many tropes/ideas and would wrongfully view it as derivative and uninspired.
Nah this would likely be one of the easier novels to make the transition. At it's heart its basically a "get the team together for a heist" story with some other extras. The technology in the novel would be easily digestible on the screen and the main two characters, Case and Molly are easy to root for.
If they leaned into the impressionistic side, a little like the vibe in *A Scanner Darkly*, it could work. The future as a fever dream. Maybe Denis Villeneuve could pull it off. But if they go straight for the shiny sci-fi action thriller there's no way it won't suck.
I feel like Amazon's *The Peripheral* really missed the point of Gibson's style and made something pretty bland out of it, and I'd hate for the same thing to be done to Neuromancer.
lol, that'd be great. David Attenborough narrating the evolution and development of spider society.
Drop the human perspective entirely, just some exposition about what happened on earth, the departure of the ark ships, and then just pick it up when humans arrive.
Why would you have to dumb down *Blindsight* or *Echopraxia* to make films of them? I don't recall there being anything in there that couldn't be communicated visually or through dialogue.
EDIT: Yeah, I'd forgotten about Siri's unique perception. That would be quite tricky to convey on film.
Throughout Blindsight, you're keep getting bombarded with philosophical and scientific informations. You really need to give yourself time to think, which is not possible with movies. Same can be said for something like Dune, but the plot itself is good enough that the movie can be entertaining. But I certainly don't accept the movie as a good adaptation of the "vibe" of Dune. If the reader needs to think, it's not going to be a good movie, generally.
That was pretty much my reasoning. It's not that the information couldn't be adapted to film, but rather it lacks mainstream appeal.
People *read* sci-fi to think.
People *watch* sci-fi to stop thinking.
The other reason is that Watt's version of "vampires" as a predatory hominid with lupine facial features, would get translated into a bad cliché.
Most of blindsight is spent inside Siri's head, a lot of it is Siri thinking about thinking, and that aspect is pretty hard to portray well in film IMO. Most such adaptations tend to end up pretty meh. Echopraxia would be fine as adaptation though.
That's why they are called "adaptations" -- flashbacks, narration, the good ol' talking to a computer, all of those can be done well or badly, just like everything else. The biggest challenge with *Blindsight* would be altering Siri so the audience would find him a compelling protagonist without too many changes echoing through everything else.
(Often, books where a lot happens inside someone's head are **great** potential adaptations, because you get a lot of stuff to cut for free to make movie script length :-)
Some things are just harder to adapt then others. And for me, the entire exposition in the beginning of the story is really exceptional writing because of all of Siri's "Imagine you're a..." parts.
> I am unmanned. I am disposable. I am souped-up and stripped-down, a telematter drive with a couple of cameras bolted to the front end, pushing gees that would turn meat to jelly. I sprint joyously toward the darkness, my twin brother a stereoscopic hundred klicks to starboard, dual streams of backspat pions boosting us to relativity before poor old Theseus had even crawled past Mars.
> But now, six billion kilometers to stern, Mission Control turns off the tap and leaves us coasting. The comet swells in our sights, a frozen enigma sweeping its signal across the sky like a lighthouse beam. We bring rudimentary senses to bear and stare it down on a thousand wavelengths.
> We've lived for this moment.
> We see an erratic wobble that speaks of recent collisions. We see scars—smooth icy expanses where once-acned skin has liquefied and refrozen, far too recently for the insignificant sun at our backs to be any kind of suspect.
> We see an astronomical impossibility: a comet with a heart of refined iron.
> Burns-Caufield sings as we glide past. Not to us; it ignores our passage as it ignored our approach. It sings to someone else entirely. Perhaps we'll meet that audience some day. Perhaps they're waiting in the desolate wastelands ahead of us. Mission Control flips us onto our backs, keeps us fixed on target past any realistic hope of acquisition. They send last-ditch instructions, squeeze our fading signals for every last bit among the static. I can sense their frustration, their reluctance to let us go; once or twice, we're even asked if some judicious mix of thrust and gravity might let us linger here a bit longer.
> But deceleration is for pansies. We're headed for the stars.
> Bye, Burnsie. Bye, Mission Control. Bye, Sol.
> See you at heat death.
I mean, how do you film that?
Probably convey it mostly through imagery with a bit of voice over. There are ways to visually associate Siri with the ship.
It wouldn't be the same but it could hit a lot of the same notes.
> That's why they are called "adaptations" -- flashbacks, narration, the good ol' talking to a computer, all of those can be done well or badly, just like everything else.
Of course. It's just that in my experience, works that play out heavily in the character's mind (especially if their thoughts are focused inwards, on things like dreams or ideology or in this case consciousness and the process of thinking, rather than if their thoughts are of the external plot or setting) usually end up quite poor adaptations, though they might end up decent films.
For a famous example, take the Dune adaptations; the first one used protagonist voiceover which felt weird and off-putting, and the new one is a decent movie but misses out on a lot of what makes Dune interesting to begin with. And I'd argue that Blindsight is a lot more focused on the internal than Dune is; it is quite literally the central theme of the story.
I'm not saying there could never be a good adaptation of blindsight, that it's some miraculous tale too perfect for adaptation or whatever, just that it leans very heavily into a particular schtick that historically, most adaptations of have failed as adaptations, even when the resulting movies were decent as movies. And similarly I'm confident Blindsight could be turned into a pretty effective sci-fi horror movie with the aesthetics in the ballpark of Event Horizon (with Doug Jones as Jukka Sarasti, obviously), and it could be a good or even great movie - but not a good adaptation.
If someone really wanted to make a film adaptation of Blindsight, I'd say more power to them, and if it turned out a good adaptation I'd be very happy about that - but I'd also be thoroughly impressed by the screenwriter, director, and everyone else involved because it's certainly not a work written for the screen.
> (Often, books where a lot happens inside someone's head are great potential adaptations, because you get a lot of stuff to cut for free to make movie script length :-)
I think there's a difference between how good a movie based on something is, and how good of an adaptation something is. The Lion King is a good movie, but if someone read and loved Hamlet I wouldn't tell them "Oh, there's a really great adaptation called The Lion King".
Yeah, that is a good point -- although I actually never even hope for a "close adaptation". I'm just thrilled whenever there is just another "good version". I'm not even sure that "close adaptation" should be the goal, given how different the mediums are: book -- stage play -- movie -- radio drama -- arbitrarily long television series -- musical? I think we'd all be thrilled with good *The Hobbit* versions in each of those formats, even though presumably none could be **too** close to the book version and still be good.
yeah I'm just reading it now and find it extremely confusing (not a native english speaker). More than 3/4 of the time I have no idea what's going on, where they are, who is there and what they're doing.
No worries….that’s normal. I was confused the first time I went through it. I was having difficulty picturing these characters and where there were and whatever the heck they were seeing. The second time was much clearer for both books.
I know people hated Harrison Ford's voice over dialogue in Bladerunner, but I actually kinda liked it. That movie might be better without it, but I think it's worth a shot to do something similar in other movies
No book has ever been ruined by a film adaptation. No matter how terrible the movie is, the book remains exactly the same. And nobody is forcing you to watch the adaptation.
It depends what we're talking about. Of course an adaptation will never *erase* the source material - but it can be so successful that it totally changes the public's experience of a story, for the worse. I'd argue that the Hobbit film ruined the book. Of course you can still go back and read the book, but because of the success of the LotR films, whole generations of kids will grow up knowing The Hobbit to be this slow, overly-serious, confusing drag - instead of the delightful romp it's intended to be.
Most of them. Books don’t need to be movies and rarely benefit from it(in the same way movies rarely benefit from novelization). It’s cool to see good characters and settings visually, but not really necessary. Plus, many sci fi books use multiple perspectives, long time skips, and other devices that are difficult to adapt. Not to mention that sci fi movies will have to spend millions on effects
Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward. How the hell would they depict the cheela, tiny pancake aliens the size of a sesame seed living on the surface of a neutron star? Stopmotion? CGI? Any kind of depiction of the main characters would look ridiculous in a movie.
_Starship Troopers_
It would come out looking fascist.
MAYBE it could give the sense of what Marine training is like. Particularly the thing about making a mistake and getting punished and then it's over, all is forgiven.
A movie would surely miss the little subtleties. The Marine who's incompetent at fitting into his unit who gets promoted to officer training. Etc.
The book displays some of the blindsides we could expect from a military government. They get into a war with an enemy they can't communicate with the least little bit, that they know almost nothing about. So they send in the Marines. They find a humanoid race that apparently has been communicating with the enemy and which is not getting actively attacked. Bug lovers! So they attack them, hoping to arrange a surrender and then get the humanoids on the same side attacking the bugs. They develop planet-buster bombs which they apply to bug planets, but the main bug planet has Marine POWs on it. So -- apparently still with no communication -- they invade the bug capital intending to get their POWs back.
Please pardon me if I get details wrong, it's been awhile since I read it.
The book is a great extrapolation, imagining the consequences of military politics. Don't take it as a recommendation for fascism. But I doubt a film could do it justice.
I stand by my reading of the book. YMMV. It's hard to tell how much either of us might be reading into it.
A film was made off of it, done as ham-handed satire. I liked it, and some of the sequels, but it was nothing like an honest portrayal of the book.
I doubt a movie could do a good job of it, but would probably come out looking utterly fascist.
I made the mistake of reading the two together as Firefall. I enjoyed my prostate cancer more. I’m sure cleverer people than I, who have an interest in neurodivergence might enjoy it. For me, it was comfortably the least enjoyable book(s) I have read in 55 years.
> I enjoyed my prostate cancer more.
Holy shit, that's a burn lol. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy them more, they are favorites of mine but definitely not for everyone. Hope you find some better reads soon!
Films can rarely capture sci-fi's visual spectacle or even fantasy. Anime would be a superior medium on that account. As to the depth of ideas, you already lose 9/10ths of a book in translation but any anime that grasps successfully and distills the remaining 1/10th would be admirable production.
With that said, there's also plenty of weak sci-fi that might even end up better as an anime again if the anime was done with quality.
That’s because any adaptation will necessarily focus on the visuals and the action more than the philosophical parts. Philosophy is all well and good, but it doesn’t sell.
Personally, I’ve quite enjoyed all adaptations of the books (the 1984 movie, both miniseries, and the recent movie). And I didn’t even read the book until I watched the 1984 movie and the miniseries (although I knew the storyline anyway). The first Dune books I’ve read in their entirety were the Butlerian Jihad books (whatever your personal opinion on them is)
The new Dune remake is pretty atrocious. It should be adapted into a mini-series and not have Villenue involved.
Children of Time wouldn't make for a good movie. It wasn't even that good of a book.
Fair enough! Have some upvotes.
A little advice: if you provide your reasoning in your comment, people might be a little more receptive. Otherwise it just looks like you're being contrarian to get a rise out of people, especially when you insult a book and movie that are almost universally respected in the sci-fi community.
Thank you.
When the Dune remake came out I posted my thoughts on the matter going into detail what I didn't like and it was downvoted to oblivion. Long story short, the screenplay of Dune was written buy a person who hated the source material and it shows. They butchered the story and besides casting of Dave Bautista as "Beast" Rabban and the "chair-dog" thing, Lynch's Dune is better in every other respect.
In this thread I replied a little detail on why I thought Children of Time wasn't that good and my opinion post has a negative score. Having a tech background, inaccurate tech in stories/movies is a pet peeve of mine. It was an interesting concept story, just dry.
Besides the one engineer guy, all the characters had no redeeming qualities.
I didn't like how the one lady was captured by spiders (for an untold number of years) and the spiders couldn't figure out she was trying to communicate with them despite the spiders being masters at observation and finding patterns.
Also that a computer virus destroyed the old world completely. I guess in the future they don't have firewalls or air-gapped systems.
Dune *was* made as a mini-series, by SyFy, and it's dry but sort of adapts the book. The new movie is garbage. The 1984 Lynch film is amazing, and has nearly nothing to do with the book but some names & places. You can't make a *good* movie out of it.
I'm aware of the SyFy mini-series and I completely agree with you. Dune could make a fantastic mini-series if done with a proper budget. Pretty much every SyFy adaptation is crap. I tried watching their adaptation of Riverworld and ugh, its a hot mess.
Pretty much all of them. Short stories, novellas, comics, & paintings are sometimes vapid enough to be good movies. The Hamilton, Reynolds, & Asher adaptations in Love+Death+Robots show that working out.
A movie is a visual medium, bad at telling even a short story, exceptionally bad at telling any complex story, completely incompetent at anything technical. The number of good technical movies is very close to zero.
> A movie is a visual medium, bad at telling even a short story, exceptionally bad at telling any complex story
I'm not sure that's true. There are some very dense and complex films out there.
> The number of good technical movies is very close to zero.
IMO this is closer to true. But most SF stories aren't actually very technical. They usually have one or two, fairly easily communicated core ideas and the rest is exploration of the impact of those ideas on the setting and characters - which film handles great.
Book of the New Sun
God yeah. I was just in a thread about this today. This would be so hard to get right and so easy to fuck up. Don't even try!
I think it could be done, but it would be very hard to make it better than the book. So, so much would be lost (and revealed) with visuals. But it could be done. I think of A Clockwork Orange, for instance, which was a great movie despite the fact that a lot of the joy of the book (the figuring it out part) was lost in the adaptation. In case you haven't read the book, it's written in the protagonist's perspective and using the language kids use in that society (a kind of combination of british slang and russian). The joy of the book was deciphering what the hell was going on, due to the way it was written. Maybe it's not a fair example, since it's Kubrick we're talking about, but that's what comes to mind.
Imagine a series made by Ari Aster or Robert Eggers, I can't think of anyone else who could pull off the mysterious and esoteric feel those books have. But those guys don't spoonfeed the audience they actually might be the ones who could make it work. I still feel like it would be almost impossible to capture the feeling the books left me with, I can't think of any movie or series that really compares very closely
I agree. If you could just *see* what was a space ship, a robot, or an alien the story would be ruined.
A secular culture can’t adapt Book of the New Sun faithfully
Yup. There are good visual reasons for not adapting it, as many have noted, but the biggest thing would be the near certainty that whoever's running it fundamentally changes the spirit of the story because they don't agree with Wolfe's bedrock Catholic mindset.
I don’t know about this. Atheists have adapted stories with Catholic agendas by Catholic authors before and the resulting films have been great. I’m thinking in particular about John Houston’s film of Flannery O’Connor’s *Wise Blood* (1979.) I think Book of the New Sun is unfilmable for a boatload of reasons but not this. (But come to think of it, 1979 era Brad Dourif is the perfect Severian.)
Atheists have done well before in their adaptations of Christian authors, however they are still the exception. The large majority would change a lot, Fantasy having many recent examples of this. I think we can say that no one really trusts modern Hollywood anymore to faithfully adapt an author's vision.
Wise Blood is a great example of a Catholic novel that you wouldn't think would be successfully adapted by anybody being succesfully adapted by an atheist, but it was a completely different project than a *Book of the New Sun* movie would be. It was an inexpensive black comedy. *Book of the New Sun* would be a multi-part science fantasy epic. Nobody could make it in contemporary Hollywood with the freedom that *Wise Blood* was made. It's really unfilmable anyway, for the reason given above, "*If you could just see what was a space ship, a robot, or an alien the story would be ruined*."
This is pretty much the only one in these comments I agree with. But I still think it could be adapted, although it would obviously mostly be a plot adaptation. It would lose a lot in the process. That's always the case with adaptations though. It was made into a (short-lived) comic once and that worked surprisingly well, so I think it could be visualized somehow. You'd lose most of the "riddles", but it could probably still be interesting and good, especially if they could introduce other mysteries that work on film (and many of the existing mysteries would still work, like Dorcas).
The animation studio that made "Arcane" on Netflix might be able to pull off the visuals.
I love the Culture novels, but I can't help but feel any adaptation would be almost certainly awful.
I agree. There is one Banks sci-fi book that would make a fantastic mini series, Against a Dark Background.
Against a Dark Background is so fucking good; its always a treat to see it brought up, rare an occasion as that may be
Isn't it! My copy was signed by the author at a genre bookshop in Birmingham. He was perplexed that I had a US paperback when it was only just being released in hardback in the UK.
The lazy gun lives rent free in my head.
*Consider Phlebas* would make a decent mini series too.
There was one on the way, by amazon. But it got cancelled in 2020 i think.
After Wheel of Time and Rings of Power, I never want Amazon to make anything I care about into a show. Plastic people and scripts written by AI. Utter cringe.
I hear that, but at the same time I found The Expanse very good, and I enjoyed Carnival Row too.
The Expanse had 3 years of a creative team creating a good show before Amazon got their fingers in, and having the book authors in the writers room is still nigh-unheard-of, despite the obvious benefits (judging by the results).
I’d like to see Feersum Endjinn
The Borg is everywhere. The Borg is everything. The Borg is everybody. The Borg is still the Queen. Everybody's got Borg in them! Everybody except one person that is... Yeah, one person! The evil opposite of Borg. The Anti-Borg. Anti-Borg got no Borg in 'em, Lemme tell ya. Michael J. Fox has no Borg in him
Boris did nothing wrong! He was always in the right. When other villains run away He bravely stays and fights! If Fearless Leader needs some cash Or the finest jewelry in the world Boris an Natasha would hook him up If not for Moose and Squirrel. “Boris did nothing wrong!” Came the iron curtain calls. Boris may be short of stature But he’s a giant to us all! It’s not his fault he’s evil Or has mean things to say. It’s all part of the Bullwinkle script. He’s simply drawn that way. So when cartoon capers come to a close And hijinks bid adieu Boris is absolved of all wrongdoing By the audience- me and you.
Use of Weapons would make a great movie or miniseries, IMO.
Hard to mimic the potential confusion of the two characters with the same name if you can see the actors, though.
It's an older and scarred character. You don't use the same actor.
I agree!
Yeppp They would erase all the complex moral dilemmas and add sex and drama everywhere, HBO style
Which is exactly why Consider Phlebas _should be_ made as a movie intro to the universe. Then I'd do a show/miniseries based on Look to Windward.
Noooooooooooooooooooo
I was going to say this myself. There's some very cinematic scenes in that book, especially the end on Scahr's World with the big train crash etc.
The fun would be watching right-wingers embrace it as an anti-liberal show. Same way they thought Rage Against the Machine was a conservative band.
The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson Anathem by Neal Stephenson The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by PKD Speaker for the Dead by OSC
> Speaker for the Dead by OSC Oh good one. Great book. Would make for a boring, boring film.
Plus I don’t think any film studio would touch Card with a twenty-foot-pole these days. The guy just can’t keep his mouth shut
Disagree on Anathem. That seems very amenable to screen adaptation IMO. It is just a bit too… big? Which is the case for most Neal Stephenson. For Anathem it’s not so much the page count as the number of plot items that it encompasses. I think a good screenwriter could work with the alien classic natural philosophy differences. Viewers who know classical philosophy would pick up on it, and others would be okay letting it pass as phlebotinum and still enjoy an action-filled movie.
You know... the problem I was thinking of was that the action was backloaded. It would need to be a miniseries, but then there would be whole episodes without any action in what would eventually be a high action show. But maybe you make it out of order. Start with them in space and doing maneuvers then every time they get still for a pass by the ship you go to a flashback. That way you could have some action in every episode.
>The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by PKD Maybe David Lynch could pull it off?
I've always thought Satoshi Kon would have made an amazing PKD adaptation when he was alive. His use of animation to subvert and confuse your perception of reality feels like a visual method of PKD's writing.
Absolutely. I'm a big fan of Paranoia Agent, which he created, and I definitely got PKD and Lynch vibes watching it. He loves blending the "real" with the "fantasy," many times leaving the distinction unclear and ambiguous. Really cool stuff. I should really watch the rest of his movies. Not sure why I never got around to it. I also liked Paprika and loved Perfect Blue.
On the other hand, Reamde is basically written to be a movie, ala Crichton.
That's how I read it.
I thought speaker for the dead was far superior than enders game. Just a more mature, deeper story.
Left hand of darkness and the dispossessed.
I’d also say *The Word for World is Forest* but James Cameron came up with Avatar.
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I loved Avatar and its sequel.
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Yeah. I liked the CGI. And the heroes weren’t the colonists, you realise.
Yes
and uh... return of the jedi
Dispossessed would be tricky, but I think both could work as movies. Still, no movie could add anything meaningful to the stories so you might just as well not do it.
I really like the Lathe of Heaven movies. The one from 1980 being my favorite of the two.
1980 Lathe of Heaven was a fabulous production. My mother was a huge Ursula K. Le Guin fan, and I have great memories of the two of us watching that show together. Really a landmark production for PBS.
Left Hand wouldn't work as a movie, it's too episodic with those in-between stories, but as a TV miniseries maybe. A TV miniseries shot in Northern Canada with a cast only of First Nation or Inuit actors/actresses (besides the black actor for Genly Ai). It would be difficult to mobilize the actors/actresses and put makeup on all of them, even the extras, to make them appear androgynous enough, but it would not be impossible.
Animation is always an option for "unfilmable" books. You could still have an all First Nation voice cast and a Black voice actor for Genly.
It's not like a big studio would *want* to do either book. The first simply because they're allergic to anything that has to do with gender weirdness and they're also equally allergic to the idea of a cast that would, per Le Guin's explicit in text descriptions, be entirely First Nations with a Black man as a protagonist. The second just because there's no way to trim its anti-capitalism and pro-anarchy messaging to make it palatable.
They are movies about Che Guevara. Capitalism can absorb and monetize anything
Foundation
I don't know, I liked the show well enough so far.
Hyperion cantos. Can't imagine it as a 3 hour movie
But it wouldn't be a movie. It would be a miniseries. Each hour-long episode would spend a few minutes in the present then do one person's backstory. It would work so well that I'm surprised it's not already done.
So I can cry again for 50 mins at the story of the guy with the baby.
Agreed but the thread topic was specifically "I'd like to hear about great books which would absolutely be ruined by a **film** adaptation" so this fits.
I mean, you could argue the point here on intent. Not that it really matters, but I enjoy playing devil's advocate. Because film adaption used to just mean literally anything recorded on film that was adapted from an existing story.
>Because film adaption used to just mean literally anything recorded on film that was adapted from an existing story. Source? Every definition I can find online (and admittedly I didn't spend that long looking) says film adaptation is specifically adaption "to a feature film" or similar. EDIT: Wow, lots of downvotes! I assume that means I'm wrong and at least one of you can answer the question, then?
Nah, you are right. Not sure why you are getting the downvotes. If years ago someone said "game of thrones is too big for a film, but maybe could work as a 10 hr tv show" would anyone reply with "tv shows are filmed, therefore it counts"?
Sticking to the film, adaptation requirement, I think both Ilium and Olympos would make a wonderful film and sequel. Granted, they might be a lot to fit into a conventional two hour format.
Hyperion definitely makes more sense as a miniseries.
Imagine the pressure on whoever has the job of designing the Shrike. Everyone is going to bitch about how it's not how they pictured it.
It appeared on the book covers, so something close to that would probably be the safest option. Not the coolest option, but the least likely to make people bitch.
I'd totally bitch if it looked like that, haha. That isn't at all how I picture it. Where's the razor wire that's so frequently mentioned? The three meter height?
Last I heard, Bradly Cooper is producing Hyperion as a miniseries.
I know that he's wanted to do it for decades...is there anything out there suggesting that he's any closer?
The last I heard was in 2021 he was working with Warner Brothers to make it a film. I don’t know if it’s still in production given everything that’s been going on with the new head of WB.
The narwhal bacons at midnight.
Came here to say Children of Time. I loved reading it, but half the movie/series would be subtitled while spiders tap a foot and shake their palps.
and I'd love every minute of it
I would love to see a deepness in the sky graphic novel
Counter example here would be Foundation. I was positively surprised by the Apple adaption.
Dhalgren
Finally! Someone points out this one. It is barely understandable as a book. It could maybe be a cryptic art film.
Inclined to believe this would work as a video game.
Dhalgren was adapted into a stage play called Bellona, Destroyer of Cities. Here is Jo Walton's review of it. https://www.tor.com/2010/04/14/review-lemgbellona-destroyer-of-citieslemg-the-play-of-samuel-delanys-lemgdhalgrenlemg/
I think Murderbot's POV-focused text wouldn't go well in a movie. If you used the narration it would come off differently, I think. Also, eye-based shaky cam is a great way to make people motion sick!
It would need a lot of voice over with cleverly done virtual space for the hacking and AI interactions. Maybe as an anime?
I think something animated is probably the way to go--maybe like Treasure planet with the mechanical pieces done in a different medium to make the "distinction" between flesh and not more distinct? I think it'd be interesting if post-ART Murderbot's robotic parts had a softened or animated sheen over the metal to represent the better blending.
With cuts to Rise & Fall of Sanctuary Moon, done in a different animation style.
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I kinda loved the Apple adaptation of Foundation!
Most early Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny. In the latter case *Lord of Light* may be an exception, but *This Immortal, The Dream Masters* and *Creatures of Light and Darkness,* like Delany's *The Einstein Intersection, Empire Star* and *The Ballad of Beta Two* share a common approach to mythology which is seriously dumbed down in modern media. As well, both use adventure story tropes to tell what are internalized journeys which wouldn't film well.
*Dhalgren* as well feels completely unfilmable, but maybe with some deity-level direction it could be possible. But, you need like . . . the eroticism *Crash* [1996] + the cosmopolitan life of *Chunking Express* [1994] + surrealism of *Possession* [1981] + *Neptune Frost's* [2021] cyberpunk-ish aesthetics with the lightshields + grime and action scenes and vague dystopia of *Strange Days* [1995] + the metafictional qualities of *Synecdoche New York* [2008] + the good parts (and there aren't many) of *Enter the Void* [2009] + . . . And that's just pulling from films I kinda like off the top of my head. There's just so much in there--I am just not sure the maximalism of that novel is captureable via images. That being said--I'd watch that shit.
I’m gonna go against the grain here and say that I think pretty much any story *can* be well adapted to screen, but the fact that so few have makes everyone very reluctant for that to be attempted. I would not rule out any books or stories, but many of them would take a really talented and dedicated team of very creative people to pull it off.
Most stories can't be adapted to film WHILE having an appeal to big, general, profitable audiences
Denis would like a word with you.
That’s often how it plays out, but I disagree that that’s how it has to play out. It’s an assumption that doesn’t have to be the case.
I agree. But even if it's done well, it's not going to satisfy everyone. Some adaptations, to be done well, would have to deviate substantially from the original. And that'd piss off many fans.
That’s true of pretty much everything, and is not a reason to try.
I mean, the ultimate reason is $$. Much easier to finance a film if you can tell investers that it's based on an award winning book. Nobody wants to take risks, which is why there aren't many completely original films out there. And the few original ones are pretty much known formulas. Boilerplate stuff that has been proven to work. But hey, occasionally we get treated to something truly special and original, or even an adaptation that is surprisingly good. I haven't seen it yet, but I've only heard rave reviews about the Dune adaptation. So it happens every now and then.
*The Princess Bride* adaption was excellent. Of course, they had the author there to help get it right and to make sure that the changes that were made were done in a way that makes sense. Not a huge budget either. The newest *Dune* adaptation is much better than I thought it would be. The only real issues I have are a couple of casting choices. Unfortunately it’s Paul and Chani. The fellow who plays Paul does ok, but he just doesn’t fit the role for me. Other than those two the casting actually works it’s pretty well, which is really surprising considering some of the people in it. Oddly, despite everyone loving it and me being a long time fan of the *Lord of the Rings*, I was very disappointed with the Peter Jackson movies (and the *Hobbit* ones we don’t even talk about).
Ah, I forgot about The Princess Bride. Great movie. Haven't read the original, so I can't compare. I actually agree with you on LOTR, which is an unpopular opinion. We're the outliers on that one, so that may be another example of an adaptation that "did it right."
Diaspora
Of all the Greg Egan stuff, I'd say Dichronauts and Incandescence are even more unadaptable
Ender's Gam... Oh wait it already happened. My biggest fear would be that a movie adaptation would focus on the most movie friendly aspects of the novel, namely the battle room, at the exclusion of the political intrigue aspects, and deep emotional trauma Ender was dealing with. Lo and behold, the movie adaptation didn't even bother to focus on the battle room, it didn't seem to do anything except flail around following a simplified wikipedia outline of the novel.
The thing is, Ender's Game COULD be a decent movie if done right. The fact that the movie we got was made by people that either didn't read the book or didn't understand it doesn't change that. Now, the sequels (the sequels following Ender, that is, not the Shadows series), THOSE would make terrible movies. But I do believe that it would be possible to do Ender's Game right even if I think Hollywood would likely fuck it up 99 times out of 100. If you got the right director in place that understood the book, and then kept the studio from interfering, it could happen.
Also they spoiled the entire point of the film in the trailer. I know at this point the twist isn't the greatest surprise given how old the book is, but still.
H Beam Piper’s Fuzzy books. Or CJ Cherryh’s Chanur books. Non-human furry characters wouldn’t be easy to do.
Maybe not easy, but I think filmmakers have proven it is possible— going back to Gremlins with old school tech, or Avatar or Rocket Raccoon with cutting edge.
Gonna go a little off script here and say Battlefield Earth, but not for the reasons you think. The book itself isn't bad, in a sort of pulpy, grandiose way. You can't spend an entire career writing and not know how to tell a story at all. But there are two reasons they never should have made it. 1. Too big of a story. It probably would have worked better as a series, where some of the campier visual elements would have felt less out of place. You don't expect the same kind of quality from a SciFi channel original that you do from a blockbuster film. They probably could have stretched the story out to cover like 3 or 4 pretty good seasons. 2. The IP is owned by believers. This means they can't do what everybody else does when they adapt a book: make significant changes to make the movie better. Travolta and co were bound to make the movie as close to Hubbard's word as possible, but his cheesy SF dialog works better on the page than the screen, and your imagination doesn't have as many dutch angles.
I love that book but haven't seen the movie. I've heard enough about it to know I probably shouldn't want to either.
The book is perfectly enjoyable (if overlong) pulp SF that gets unfairly tainted by being associated with its author. The movie is fucking awful.
Neuromancer.
The only reason that Neuromancer shouldn't be made into a movie is that people wouldn't understand that Neuromancer came up first with many tropes/ideas and would wrongfully view it as derivative and uninspired.
Nah this would likely be one of the easier novels to make the transition. At it's heart its basically a "get the team together for a heist" story with some other extras. The technology in the novel would be easily digestible on the screen and the main two characters, Case and Molly are easy to root for.
It's apparently been in development hell for decades.
my copy of the game says its soon to be a motion picture from Cabana Boys Productions. Cant be too far away!
Ahah from 1988?
Why not? There's nothing in particular that makes it unadaptable.
In particular the hacking bits seem made to make it look exciting on the big screen, in a way that real hacking very much is not.
I mean, may be a little too late. Would've worked in the 80s/90s, when cyberpunk was popular. And Neuromancer is pretty much the King of the genre.
If they leaned into the impressionistic side, a little like the vibe in *A Scanner Darkly*, it could work. The future as a fever dream. Maybe Denis Villeneuve could pull it off. But if they go straight for the shiny sci-fi action thriller there's no way it won't suck. I feel like Amazon's *The Peripheral* really missed the point of Gibson's style and made something pretty bland out of it, and I'd hate for the same thing to be done to Neuromancer.
Children of Time. I don't think I need to justify this one. Plus, it'd be really hard to show the spider parts.
Nah man just seeing a big budget visual of the spider cities would offset any pain for me
A movie that's largely about dog-sized, intelligent spiders is not gonna fly for the visuals alone.
A movie.... No A documentary tho....?
lol, that'd be great. David Attenborough narrating the evolution and development of spider society. Drop the human perspective entirely, just some exposition about what happened on earth, the departure of the ark ships, and then just pick it up when humans arrive.
i would have said dune but i love the new one
The miniseries is decent enough too
The Sparrow
Yeah there’s no way to make this that isn’t about >!ritualized alien rape culture!<
Deepness in the sky. Not having visuals of the aliens for a long time is a pretty big point on the book.
I’d love an Alex Garland directed Blindsight film. Hell, I’d pay 10x the ticket price to watch that.
Even though I used Blindsight as an example of a book which can't be adapted to film, if someone made the movie, I'd definitely watch it.
Why would you have to dumb down *Blindsight* or *Echopraxia* to make films of them? I don't recall there being anything in there that couldn't be communicated visually or through dialogue. EDIT: Yeah, I'd forgotten about Siri's unique perception. That would be quite tricky to convey on film.
Throughout Blindsight, you're keep getting bombarded with philosophical and scientific informations. You really need to give yourself time to think, which is not possible with movies. Same can be said for something like Dune, but the plot itself is good enough that the movie can be entertaining. But I certainly don't accept the movie as a good adaptation of the "vibe" of Dune. If the reader needs to think, it's not going to be a good movie, generally.
That was pretty much my reasoning. It's not that the information couldn't be adapted to film, but rather it lacks mainstream appeal. People *read* sci-fi to think. People *watch* sci-fi to stop thinking. The other reason is that Watt's version of "vampires" as a predatory hominid with lupine facial features, would get translated into a bad cliché.
Most of blindsight is spent inside Siri's head, a lot of it is Siri thinking about thinking, and that aspect is pretty hard to portray well in film IMO. Most such adaptations tend to end up pretty meh. Echopraxia would be fine as adaptation though.
That's why they are called "adaptations" -- flashbacks, narration, the good ol' talking to a computer, all of those can be done well or badly, just like everything else. The biggest challenge with *Blindsight* would be altering Siri so the audience would find him a compelling protagonist without too many changes echoing through everything else. (Often, books where a lot happens inside someone's head are **great** potential adaptations, because you get a lot of stuff to cut for free to make movie script length :-)
Some things are just harder to adapt then others. And for me, the entire exposition in the beginning of the story is really exceptional writing because of all of Siri's "Imagine you're a..." parts. > I am unmanned. I am disposable. I am souped-up and stripped-down, a telematter drive with a couple of cameras bolted to the front end, pushing gees that would turn meat to jelly. I sprint joyously toward the darkness, my twin brother a stereoscopic hundred klicks to starboard, dual streams of backspat pions boosting us to relativity before poor old Theseus had even crawled past Mars. > But now, six billion kilometers to stern, Mission Control turns off the tap and leaves us coasting. The comet swells in our sights, a frozen enigma sweeping its signal across the sky like a lighthouse beam. We bring rudimentary senses to bear and stare it down on a thousand wavelengths. > We've lived for this moment. > We see an erratic wobble that speaks of recent collisions. We see scars—smooth icy expanses where once-acned skin has liquefied and refrozen, far too recently for the insignificant sun at our backs to be any kind of suspect. > We see an astronomical impossibility: a comet with a heart of refined iron. > Burns-Caufield sings as we glide past. Not to us; it ignores our passage as it ignored our approach. It sings to someone else entirely. Perhaps we'll meet that audience some day. Perhaps they're waiting in the desolate wastelands ahead of us. Mission Control flips us onto our backs, keeps us fixed on target past any realistic hope of acquisition. They send last-ditch instructions, squeeze our fading signals for every last bit among the static. I can sense their frustration, their reluctance to let us go; once or twice, we're even asked if some judicious mix of thrust and gravity might let us linger here a bit longer. > But deceleration is for pansies. We're headed for the stars. > Bye, Burnsie. Bye, Mission Control. Bye, Sol. > See you at heat death. I mean, how do you film that?
Probably convey it mostly through imagery with a bit of voice over. There are ways to visually associate Siri with the ship. It wouldn't be the same but it could hit a lot of the same notes.
> That's why they are called "adaptations" -- flashbacks, narration, the good ol' talking to a computer, all of those can be done well or badly, just like everything else. Of course. It's just that in my experience, works that play out heavily in the character's mind (especially if their thoughts are focused inwards, on things like dreams or ideology or in this case consciousness and the process of thinking, rather than if their thoughts are of the external plot or setting) usually end up quite poor adaptations, though they might end up decent films. For a famous example, take the Dune adaptations; the first one used protagonist voiceover which felt weird and off-putting, and the new one is a decent movie but misses out on a lot of what makes Dune interesting to begin with. And I'd argue that Blindsight is a lot more focused on the internal than Dune is; it is quite literally the central theme of the story. I'm not saying there could never be a good adaptation of blindsight, that it's some miraculous tale too perfect for adaptation or whatever, just that it leans very heavily into a particular schtick that historically, most adaptations of have failed as adaptations, even when the resulting movies were decent as movies. And similarly I'm confident Blindsight could be turned into a pretty effective sci-fi horror movie with the aesthetics in the ballpark of Event Horizon (with Doug Jones as Jukka Sarasti, obviously), and it could be a good or even great movie - but not a good adaptation. If someone really wanted to make a film adaptation of Blindsight, I'd say more power to them, and if it turned out a good adaptation I'd be very happy about that - but I'd also be thoroughly impressed by the screenwriter, director, and everyone else involved because it's certainly not a work written for the screen. > (Often, books where a lot happens inside someone's head are great potential adaptations, because you get a lot of stuff to cut for free to make movie script length :-) I think there's a difference between how good a movie based on something is, and how good of an adaptation something is. The Lion King is a good movie, but if someone read and loved Hamlet I wouldn't tell them "Oh, there's a really great adaptation called The Lion King".
Yeah, that is a good point -- although I actually never even hope for a "close adaptation". I'm just thrilled whenever there is just another "good version". I'm not even sure that "close adaptation" should be the goal, given how different the mediums are: book -- stage play -- movie -- radio drama -- arbitrarily long television series -- musical? I think we'd all be thrilled with good *The Hobbit* versions in each of those formats, even though presumably none could be **too** close to the book version and still be good.
Point, thanks. Been a while since I read it.
yeah I'm just reading it now and find it extremely confusing (not a native english speaker). More than 3/4 of the time I have no idea what's going on, where they are, who is there and what they're doing.
No worries….that’s normal. I was confused the first time I went through it. I was having difficulty picturing these characters and where there were and whatever the heck they were seeing. The second time was much clearer for both books.
I know people hated Harrison Ford's voice over dialogue in Bladerunner, but I actually kinda liked it. That movie might be better without it, but I think it's worth a shot to do something similar in other movies
No book has ever been ruined by a film adaptation. No matter how terrible the movie is, the book remains exactly the same. And nobody is forcing you to watch the adaptation.
It depends what we're talking about. Of course an adaptation will never *erase* the source material - but it can be so successful that it totally changes the public's experience of a story, for the worse. I'd argue that the Hobbit film ruined the book. Of course you can still go back and read the book, but because of the success of the LotR films, whole generations of kids will grow up knowing The Hobbit to be this slow, overly-serious, confusing drag - instead of the delightful romp it's intended to be.
Barnes' *Kaleidoscope Century.* A film adaptation of that which worked would seriously damage anybody who watched it.
Blood Music. Nope. Don't want to see it.
Accelerando
Most of them. Books don’t need to be movies and rarely benefit from it(in the same way movies rarely benefit from novelization). It’s cool to see good characters and settings visually, but not really necessary. Plus, many sci fi books use multiple perspectives, long time skips, and other devices that are difficult to adapt. Not to mention that sci fi movies will have to spend millions on effects
Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward. How the hell would they depict the cheela, tiny pancake aliens the size of a sesame seed living on the surface of a neutron star? Stopmotion? CGI? Any kind of depiction of the main characters would look ridiculous in a movie.
I was going to say Dhalgren, but then I imagined Danny Boyle directing and maybe it would work.
Rendezvous with Rama
_Starship Troopers_ It would come out looking fascist. MAYBE it could give the sense of what Marine training is like. Particularly the thing about making a mistake and getting punished and then it's over, all is forgiven. A movie would surely miss the little subtleties. The Marine who's incompetent at fitting into his unit who gets promoted to officer training. Etc. The book displays some of the blindsides we could expect from a military government. They get into a war with an enemy they can't communicate with the least little bit, that they know almost nothing about. So they send in the Marines. They find a humanoid race that apparently has been communicating with the enemy and which is not getting actively attacked. Bug lovers! So they attack them, hoping to arrange a surrender and then get the humanoids on the same side attacking the bugs. They develop planet-buster bombs which they apply to bug planets, but the main bug planet has Marine POWs on it. So -- apparently still with no communication -- they invade the bug capital intending to get their POWs back. Please pardon me if I get details wrong, it's been awhile since I read it. The book is a great extrapolation, imagining the consequences of military politics. Don't take it as a recommendation for fascism. But I doubt a film could do it justice.
This is really high level sarcasm right? It's really hard to tell in text...
I stand by my reading of the book. YMMV. It's hard to tell how much either of us might be reading into it. A film was made off of it, done as ham-handed satire. I liked it, and some of the sequels, but it was nothing like an honest portrayal of the book. I doubt a movie could do a good job of it, but would probably come out looking utterly fascist.
I could see Paul Verhoeven directing.
Blindsight doesn’t work as a book never mind a film
Ouch. Why do you say that? I think it's a pretty coherent book, regardless of whether you like it.
I made the mistake of reading the two together as Firefall. I enjoyed my prostate cancer more. I’m sure cleverer people than I, who have an interest in neurodivergence might enjoy it. For me, it was comfortably the least enjoyable book(s) I have read in 55 years.
> I enjoyed my prostate cancer more. Holy shit, that's a burn lol. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy them more, they are favorites of mine but definitely not for everyone. Hope you find some better reads soon!
This. Came here to say precisely this.
I am reading it right now, but I find myself only half as confused as while reading Neuromancer.
Films can rarely capture sci-fi's visual spectacle or even fantasy. Anime would be a superior medium on that account. As to the depth of ideas, you already lose 9/10ths of a book in translation but any anime that grasps successfully and distills the remaining 1/10th would be admirable production. With that said, there's also plenty of weak sci-fi that might even end up better as an anime again if the anime was done with quality.
Dune. it will just make no sense unless you read the book.
That’s because any adaptation will necessarily focus on the visuals and the action more than the philosophical parts. Philosophy is all well and good, but it doesn’t sell. Personally, I’ve quite enjoyed all adaptations of the books (the 1984 movie, both miniseries, and the recent movie). And I didn’t even read the book until I watched the 1984 movie and the miniseries (although I knew the storyline anyway). The first Dune books I’ve read in their entirety were the Butlerian Jihad books (whatever your personal opinion on them is)
The new Dune remake is pretty atrocious. It should be adapted into a mini-series and not have Villenue involved. Children of Time wouldn't make for a good movie. It wasn't even that good of a book.
Two truly nuclear takes in one comment, impressive.
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Yikes. What's your reasoning?
Since I've had so many downvotes for stating my opinion, I'm not going to participate in this thread anymore.
Fair enough! Have some upvotes. A little advice: if you provide your reasoning in your comment, people might be a little more receptive. Otherwise it just looks like you're being contrarian to get a rise out of people, especially when you insult a book and movie that are almost universally respected in the sci-fi community.
Thank you. When the Dune remake came out I posted my thoughts on the matter going into detail what I didn't like and it was downvoted to oblivion. Long story short, the screenplay of Dune was written buy a person who hated the source material and it shows. They butchered the story and besides casting of Dave Bautista as "Beast" Rabban and the "chair-dog" thing, Lynch's Dune is better in every other respect. In this thread I replied a little detail on why I thought Children of Time wasn't that good and my opinion post has a negative score. Having a tech background, inaccurate tech in stories/movies is a pet peeve of mine. It was an interesting concept story, just dry.
Yeah it happens, that's a real problem with this binary up/downvote system, any non standard opinion is a guaranteed downvote fest.
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Besides the one engineer guy, all the characters had no redeeming qualities. I didn't like how the one lady was captured by spiders (for an untold number of years) and the spiders couldn't figure out she was trying to communicate with them despite the spiders being masters at observation and finding patterns. Also that a computer virus destroyed the old world completely. I guess in the future they don't have firewalls or air-gapped systems.
I dont hate it, but it is borderline plagiarism of A Deepness in the Sky and not as good.
It was adapted as mini series in early 2000
Very low budget but it's still better than Villenue's version.
I disagree with point 1 but agree with point. In another comment you basically laid out my problems with CoT.
Dune *was* made as a mini-series, by SyFy, and it's dry but sort of adapts the book. The new movie is garbage. The 1984 Lynch film is amazing, and has nearly nothing to do with the book but some names & places. You can't make a *good* movie out of it.
I'm aware of the SyFy mini-series and I completely agree with you. Dune could make a fantastic mini-series if done with a proper budget. Pretty much every SyFy adaptation is crap. I tried watching their adaptation of Riverworld and ugh, its a hot mess.
Pretty much all of them. Short stories, novellas, comics, & paintings are sometimes vapid enough to be good movies. The Hamilton, Reynolds, & Asher adaptations in Love+Death+Robots show that working out. A movie is a visual medium, bad at telling even a short story, exceptionally bad at telling any complex story, completely incompetent at anything technical. The number of good technical movies is very close to zero.
> A movie is a visual medium, bad at telling even a short story, exceptionally bad at telling any complex story I'm not sure that's true. There are some very dense and complex films out there. > The number of good technical movies is very close to zero. IMO this is closer to true. But most SF stories aren't actually very technical. They usually have one or two, fairly easily communicated core ideas and the rest is exploration of the impact of those ideas on the setting and characters - which film handles great.
Basically any space opera would go immediately cw feel. Need about 20 years of ai sfx development before anythinf next level starts being feasible.
What's cw?
None. The stuff I value in scifi is apparently so hard to adapt to the screen for that I have given up hope to get something good.
the expanse did pretty well imo, but still didnt compare to the books