Sci-fi books screaming for a film adaptation

[EgonSpengler]

I read that Renee Elise Goldsberry has been cast for Netflix's adaptation of Altered Carbon. I like her. otoh, Joel Kinnaman has been cast as the lead. For some reason, I've never been able to get next to Kinnaman. I'm not really sure why.

 

[onejayhawk]

Didn't they already do something with Left Hand of Darkness?

I read awhile ago that there will be a TV series based on The Handmaid's Tale. Ordinarily I'd be happy about that. But it's going to be shown on Hulu... which is not available to Canadians. WTH was Margaret Atwood thinking, agreeing to a deal like that?

Meh. I thought, "A Handmaid's Tale" was vastly overrated. The movie from it stunk. "A Boy and His Dog" was a better treatment of the same material.

J

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Do you dislike the novel, as well?

Thing is, the movie was made to take American sensibilities into account. I thought the ending should have been like the book - ambiguous. Not everything in life gets a happy ending, or even any ending.

 

[Silurian]

What about Ursula Le'Guin? "The Left Hand of Darkness" would be a great mini-series. They did something a while back with the Earthsea books but it was wretched.

Kind of on the side, I used to have a dentist named Jack Vance.

J

BBC Radio 4 did it last year.
And the pictures are better on the radio.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pkqkl

BBC Radio 4 also did The Foundation Trilogy (Isaac Asimov) in 8 episodes in the 70s which gets repeated now and then.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

BBC Radio 4 did it last year.
And the pictures are better on the radio.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pkqkl

BBC Radio 4 also did The Foundation Trilogy (Isaac Asimov) in 8 episodes in the 70s which gets repeated now and then.

Heh. There's an essay linked there in which Le Guin says she wishes that J.K. Rowling would be more honest about where she got some of her ideas for Harry Potter.

 

[onejayhawk]

Do you dislike the novel, as well?

Thing is, the movie was made to take American sensibilities into account. I thought the ending should have been like the book - ambiguous. Not everything in life gets a happy ending, or even any ending.

Dislike is too strong but I did not like it enough to finish. I have similar opinions about Ayn Rand and she has legions of sycophants.

J

 

[Valka D'Ur]

You should finish the novel. The ending is not like the one shown in the movie.

 

[FriendlyFire]

I haven't read the last book yet. It deals with contact with aliens from another solar system (no spoilers from anyone who has read it, please). Bova said he wasn't going to bother with novels about Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto because he didn't think they were interesting enough.

I think he's wrong, but oh well...

I already spoiled EVERYTHING ! Sorry
Well the "new" story arc seems to be much better and more urh grand in its scope having taken on a more strange and unexpected turn. I fear like David Weber he might have run out of good ideas with each progressive book in the series a little more crazy than the last.

Dislike is too strong but I did not like it enough to finish. I have similar opinions about Ayn Rand and she has legions of sycophants.
J

Someone will be living the handmaidens tale soon if Trump wins, I dont think the US can survive another disastrous Republican controlled government
Once you have read one 1984 you pretty much have read most of the dystopic style themed reto future books. I found which ever book one read first is the one that stands out and with each subsequent classical sci-fi dystopia becomes less exciting.

 

[Kyriakos]

major but with very good reason:

I found this in Wikipedia:

Was reading the treatise where i said this novel you liked (read the post, you would likely have forgotten it by now!!! ) is named, and apparently it would be The Night Land (1912), by Wiliam Hope Hodgson.
Description in Lovecraft's treatise:

The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (583 pp.) tale of the earth’s infinitely remote future—billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in “Glen Carrig”.

Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget. Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort—the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid—are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency; while the night-bound landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author’s touch.

Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years—and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole.

There is a (imo small, but not entirely non-existent) chance that it will instead be something more modern; i haven't yet read the final part of the treatise, which mostly deals with concurrent or almost concurrent to Lovecraft literature.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

A few weeks back Robert Silverberg told us (in his Yahoo group) that a couple of his stories have been optioned. Possibly Hawkbill's Station, as well, though it would need updating a bit for 21st century audiences. The story is still good, though. The basic premise is that political prisoners are sent back to prehistory - long before even the dinosaurs and to an area that would eventually be well underneath the ocean, so no trace of them would ever be found; men and women were sent to separate times, millions of years apart. Apart from supplies sent now and then from the 21st century, there's no contact with the future; these people are stuck there, trying to cope with the loneliness and utter alienness of Earth of that time period, and trying to find ways to make life meaningful.

 

[Ferocitus]

These have had numerous attempts at getting scripts together but not quite to
the point where a serious effort could be made to get money for a movie or
series for many scifi books I'd like adapted. These two were very close at one point.

The Foundation Trilogy
The Forever War

I'd like to see series made from Niven's Ringworld and Protector series.
Movies would be too short to do them justice.

And, of course, CFCers would love to see a movie of The Cyberiad, the
indisputable influence for Civilization written way back in 1965.
"You must be joking!" Trurl exclaimed. "Really, the whole kingdom fits into a
box three feet by two by two and a half... it's only a model..."
"A model of what?"
"What do you mean, of what? Of a civilization, obviously, except that it's a
hundred million times smaller."

 

[civvver]

The only sci fi I've really read is asimov stuff and we already have Blade Runner movies which are close enough to caves of steel and robot trilogy novels, and the I Robot flim sucked. So Idk what else to do. Foundation series is too disjointed for film I think.

I gravitate more towards video games I want to see on a big screen. Deadspace and Mass effect.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The Silverberg books I'd really want to see adapted are Lord Valentine's Castle and Up the Line.

Silverberg has had multiple offers for Lord Valentine's Castle but has never agreed, out of concern that the source material wouldn't be treated with respect. Given how some other classic SF novels have been treated by Hollywood, I can understand his view.

Up the Line is a fun time travel adventure story... but there are some racist and sexist attitudes of some of the characters that would definitely need updating for modern audiences.

 

[Ferocitus]

The only sci fi I've really read is asimov stuff and we already have Blade Runner movies which are close enough to caves of steel and robot trilogy novels, and the I Robot flim sucked. So Idk what else to do. Foundation series is too disjointed for film I think.

The I Robot movie was awful, but the adaptation of Bicentennial Man was even
worse.

Funny comparison of Blade Runner and the Asimov novels! I found a series with
the appalling and misleading title "Total Recall 2070" which was pretty good.

One of the two main characters is a pretty good rendition of R. Daneel, and the
Total Recall in the title has very little to do with the series. Dated but not
bad compared to a lot of other scifi around now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Recall_2070

 

[Arwon]

I want to see someone try to come up with a filmable version of the Ancillary Justice trilogy.

Still this

 

[rah]

While some might say there have been too many already, I'd like to see Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle. It's by far the best meteor strike book that i've read. It's short enough for a stand alone movie. And there are a few scenes that would translate well to the screen, (the surfer for one )
And it has been awhile since the last one.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

My all-time Must Be Made Into A Movie Science Fiction novel is Randall Garrett's Too Many Magicians. Set in an alternate Present which springs from two assumptions:
1. Richard the Lion Hearted did not die overseas, but returned to England to rule for another 20+ years and so the Plantagenet dynasty still rules The United Kingdom of Britain, France, and New England (which is everything from Canada to Panama) at the current time, which is 1965 when the novel was written.
2. Back in the 13th - 14th century, some scribbling monk discovered the mathematical laws that govern magic, putting 'thaumaturgy' on an experimental and provable basis, so that magic takes the place of a great deal of technology.

The result is what we now call 'Steampunk' but much, much better realized.

For instance, the lead character, Lord Darcy of Rouen, Chief Investigator for the Duke of Normandy (the current King's brother) has no magical talent whatsoever, but is a pure Sherlock Holmes deductive reasoning detective. His assistant is Sean O'Lachlain, a Forensic Sorcerer. The mystery at the heart of the story is that the Chief Forensic Sorcerer for the city of London is murdered in his locked-from-the-inside hotel room at a convention of all the greatest magicians in the Empire. He is stabbed through the heart, but a sorcerous examination of the crime scene indicates that he was killed a half hour before he died, no one else was in the room at either time, and magic was not used to kill him.

It has it all: a Sherlock Holmes story with magic, spies, CSI, a locked room murder mystery and a superb integration of Science-Fiction/Fantasy elements into a Victorian background.
Oh, and a Stephen Hawking-like character, a non-magic-talented theorist who investigates the most obscure elements of Theoretical Thaumaturgical Mathematics.
And a Polish spy ring, a British Naval Intelligence secret agent, and an Aztec Apprentice Magician named Lord John Quetzalcoatl.

Like I said, it has everything...

 

[Ferocitus]

While some might say there have been too many already, I'd like to see Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle. It's by far the best meteor strike book that i've read. It's short enough for a stand alone movie. And there are a few scenes that would translate well to the screen, (the surfer for one )
And it has been awhile since the last one.

Who would play Bruce Willis?

I agree it could work as a movie because so much could be stripped out.
There are some scenes involving religious fanatics in Contact that reminded me
of similar nutjobs in Lucifer's Hammer.
Mote in God's Eye is a better scifi novel IMO, but that should be made into a
long series (unless they make the moties look like Ewoks or ComicCon furries).

 

[rah]

Mote in God's Eye was indeed a better Scifi novel but LH would make a much better movie as it would translate better into an action flick.
And yeah, they could strip quite a bit out and still have enough left for a good movie.
And still have a broader appeal. Good trailer material too.

 

[Arakhor]

1. Richard the Lion Hearted did not die overseas, but returned to England to rule for another 20+ years and so the Plantagenet dynasty still rules The United Kingdom of Britain, France, and New England (which is everything from Canada to Panama) at the current time, which is 1965 when the novel was written.

That's an odd divergence point since Richard I hated spending time in England and his brother's descendents perpetuated the dynasty for another three centuries.