Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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Ten Great Science Fiction Novels that Would Make Terrible Movies
November 11th, 2008
I’m going to hammer some popular books, books that I love, but for a number of reasons these stories just won’t translate well to the big screen. Maybe some brilliant director could do it, or the stories could be rewritten, or made into mini-series, or something, but I don’t see any winners here in the summer movie schedule, ever.
Startide Rising, by David Brin. Smart dolphins look dumb on film. Remember Johnny Mnemonic? And underwater chase scenes never come off that cool, either.
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. Let ´s watch the kid play video games instead of actually fighting aliens, or playing a video game ourselves. Why isn’t Ender’s Game a super-popular game on Xbox?
A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge Because of the alien multi-minded dog creatures, duh! Cool to read about, and think about. Confusing and dumb to watch.
The Gods Themselves by Issac Asimov. Extra-dimensional alien scientists? Multi-minded merging creatures? Stories that connect only tangentially? Hard to follow I bet.
The Vor Game, by Lois McMasters Bujold. Or any of the other popular Miles Vorkosigan books in the series. Because reading about someone who is, for want of a better word, physically challenged, is a whole lot more engaging than watching. Audiences are shallow.
Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis. Who wants to watch people get the plague and die for a couple of hours?
Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Maybe this could be a great mini-series, but it would be a mess crammed into a two-hour movie. I would love to see the Shrike come to life, however…
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. Intellectual and introspective, a great read, but unlikely to carry to the big screen. I mean, if A Wizard of Earthsea can get screwed up so badly as what we saw on the sci0fi channel, this one has no hope.
Timescape, by Gregory Benford. As much as I hate to say it, this book brilliantly captures the culture and daily life of science, which is why it would fail on film.
The Dragon’s Egg, by Robert Forward. First, this book lacks for human characters and much of a plot from our point of view. And a history of microscopic aliens on a world so alien it might as well be virtual, well, not much to engage the emotions. Hard to even imagine what this story would look like from the alien perspective.
Did I miss something obvious? Disagree?
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Dan Galouye’s “Dark Universe” would be hard to film, set as it is in a post-apocalypse nuclear bunker where the lights have been out for decades and people “hear” their way around in the dark with clickstones. (Though maybe some kind of echolocation visualisation effect could be done).
Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky would be trickier than Fire, on account of the spidery aliens, who are fine in each others’ minds but rather gross to us. And hallo.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, but kind of from the other side. With so many formats to write for these days (film, tv, blogs, youtube, etc.) I often ask myself “why should this idea even be a book?”
If the idea seems unfilmable, like Vinge’s two big space operas, which I totally love, then in a way it’s a good sign. That means perhaps the only way to do it is as a book. As they say in nonfiction publishing, the length and detail is a “feature” of the book, and the fascination and interior world you build up in your mind is a “benefit” of reading it.
I think when major characters are not human, they pretty much just always look laughable on film. That’s why a lot of those Brin books would stink on film. Humans are programmed to respond to faces and arms and legs — in some ways a talking cloud just doesn’t pass the instinct test. You can show nonhumans for flashes, but any longer than that just reminds you that the whole thing isn’t real. It re-engages disbelief — because, when they’re seeing with their eyes instead of their mind, humans don’t really have that much imagination. They struggle to hold any different viewpoint.
Vinge was really on to something in Deepness in the Sky, which I just re-read. One motif of the book, which was a bit subtle until the end, was that the Spider plot was being told by translators on the human vessels spying on the spiders from space — so the translators converted the incredibly strange viewpoint of the spiders into human terms. Then at the end when the non-translator humans viewed the Spiders directly, they were surprised to see these grotesque arthropods.
It’d be conceivable to do “Deepness” as a film by following that translation motif — doing the Spider story with human actors, and then only “revealing” the true look of the Spiders later.
Of course even with that trick, there are so many ways it could get screwed up. Might be better to just leave it be. :-\
I’d tend to agree. There are very few books that I want to see on the big screen. They play oh so much better in the theatre of my mind.
Unfortunately, they’re supposed to be making Hyperion into a movie, but they’re going to combine the first two books into one movie…don’t ask me how they’re going to pull that off. There’s far too much material for a two or three hour movie.
Visions of Starship Troopers keep coming to mind…
Any of these books is PERFECTLY filmable. You just need to leave it on Hollywood ´s hands and they will make it a blockbuster. Too bad it will completely ruin the original book history.
Havent they done it with I, Robot and so many other sci-fi books?
a few years ago they were saying Enders Game, Foundation and The End of Eternity were FINALLY AND REALLY going to the big screen… several years passed, and I lost my hope. Well, after watching I Robot, I dont feel so bad anymore.
It depends also on whether it’s a direct lifting of the story from the page to the screen, or an ‘adaptation’. Granted the majority of book adaptations are worryingly bad, but if you look at Bladerunner, it was an ‘adaptation’ that fairly successfully conveyed much of what Dick intended for his literary audience without necessarily remaining too true to the actual plot.
An ‘adaptation’ that focuses on and identifies the *essence* of what makes a particular story unique has a much better chance of being successful, but are unfortunately few and far between.
(I Robot was, indeed, thoroughly execrable, and quite possibly the longest shoe advert in existence.)
I, Robot was a case of where they had the rights to Asimov, but they also had another property about killer robots. Take the title and characters from the one, take the plot of the other, and ta-da! You’ve filmed two properties for the price of one!
Ender’s Game has been in development for a loooonggg time. It has been said that OSC hasn’t seen a script he likes. I’m hoping it is true–that he is watching over his property.
At one point the Foundation trilogy was going to be filmed back-to-back and then released in a very short span, over a month or so. Me, I think they are not very filmable–they are very “talky” books and I think you’d have to change too many things to make it “work”.
Thinking further on Vinge, maybe “Deepness in the Sky” would be a better one to film. You only have to deal with one alien race, not the multiple aliens that “Fire” had (beyond the multiple-mind ferret critters). There’s a lot of good human-on-human conflict.
However, it being Hollywood, they would probably turn the alien spiders into bumpy-head humans.
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very geeky scifi book: nClone by Dovin Melhee
would be difficult to imagine it on film
Been looking for a UFO template like this for my site would love for the developer to contact me.
Thanks for the post. I have The Art of Happiness. Maybe I ought to reread it.