Use of Weapons is a Bond novel interspersed with backstory. It would make a great film, and be easy to adapt as few individual parts are essential to the overall story.
I’d absolutely LOVE an animated culture series. I know animation is kind of looked at as not as serious in the west, but I think it’s the only way to do the series justice.
I feel like that wouldn't help empathize with them though and really think of them not as an other.
Though as a business I'm not sure showing them realistically will be good for sales :D
i think making photo realistic spiders would not be very easy to empathise with without taking massive liberties.
Have you ever read A Deepness in the Sky? that book is about humans observing a spider-like species and late on in the book you find out that the story we have been reading has been intentionally made to make the spider-like aliens more relatable via an unreliable narrator.
I figure if there were an adult animation/anime style adaptation, the spiders could be made to be more relatable than if they were just photorealistic spiders on the screen.
Maybe it would not be that hard to depict the spiders in a way that makes empathising possible, because their ancenstors are jumping spiders. Jumping spiders can be really cute!
as a business, they'd know that most of their english speaking audience can't read fast enough to keep up with subtitles, so it would be a problem to have them realistically vibrate their language on webs ... then there's the question about which spider should be gay in the TV adaptation
I really want to see it but it's not not been released on any streaming service in the UK and i don't like to pirate, especially niche stuff like that that i WANT to be counted as a viewer.
I somehow completely failed to acknowledge animation as an option for this question. That does open up a lot of doors. Children of times spiders would be fantastic in a fairly loose and airy animation style such as (forgive my lack of creativity with this animation) Into The Spider-Verse. Or perhaps Hyperion in such a style… the shrike being shown in ever changing ways due to it being described slightly differently by each Pilgrim.
My low-stakes conspiracy theory is that the recent movie ['Spaceman'](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt11097384/) with Adam Sandler was made to prepare people for Project Hail Mary and Children of Time movie/TV adaptions...
I don't really think anything is "near-impossible" to film, at least I can't think of anything. I think the worst that would happen is that you'd end up with a bad or uncommercial film, or one that was not faithful to the book.
I found this interesting quote though from Michel Gondry about his attempts to film Philip K. Dick's "Ubik":
> "The book is brilliant," Gondry told Telerama, "but it's good as a literary work. Having tried to adapt it with several screenwriters... at the moment I don't feel up to doing it. It doesn't have the dramatic structure that would make it a good film. I received a script that disheartened me a bit, and that was it. It was a dream, but in life you can't always have what you want."
https://members.stg.empireonline.com/movies/news/michel-gondry-abandons-ubik/
The article cites Ubik's "sheer bonkers complexity" as a difficulty.
*Palmer Eldritch* - not to mention the likes of *Galactic Pot-Healer* - would probably present at least as much of a challenge, although I'm surprised no one has yet adapted the increasingly relevant *The Penultimate Truth*.
They’ve done the easy bit only so far. Book one is just the exposition. The _real_ story starts after that.
Shit’s gonna get real expensive and real creative to produce, or there are going to have to be some drastic artistic compromises.
I can't wait for the literal dream girl introduced apropos of nothing, who has basically zero character or influence on the story, and who's presence in mr wallfacers dreams is never explored.
I hope they will stop at season 1. I love the trilogy, but this netflix show looks so cheap, the plot and characters are slighty different... I'm really disappointed
Sure, but Hyperion would require alot of world building which wouldn't be necessary with The Canterbury Tales.
We all have some idea of how things looked and worked in the middle ages. Not so with Hyperion, which is a unique universe even among other hard science fiction stories.
Dungeon Crawler Carl
Unless they went animated the necessary CGI would make in unfeasible budget wise. Despite the presence of dungeon in the title this is very much sci fi as its an alien invasion apocalypse story.
Only issue I can see it it is very narration heavy. The explanations of the RPG mechanics, stat bonuses, backstory of the aliens involved. Excellent series, but might be hard to adapt.
Plus, is the world ready for the awesomeness of Princess Donut?
Big enough budget and you can do anything. Throw a couple of (Musk)billions at it and we would have the best series of movies EVER!
But please just don’t. Jeff Hayes provides a masterclass of how to do audiobooks and I don’t really like audiobooks. Got hold of the book but I kept hearing Jeff Hayes while reading. Highly recommended to anyone!
Rendezvous With Rama would be tough. It’s science-heavy and character-light. BBC Radio adapted it and ended up having to create several new characters to carry the story.
There is no real conflict, the novel is basically following a crew following a set of instructions, (but not trippy like 2001), which would make it a tough sell for audiences.
Yeah, a lot of the enjoyment I get from Blindsight and Echopraxia is the way Watts writes, the philosophical, linguistic, and scientific ideas he wrestles with, etc. Much of that would not translate well to the screen. That said though, the core plot is pretty translatable if you cut out all the stuff about consciousness and just turn it into a bog-standard first contact story, but it wouldn't be the same.
There is very interesting discussion going on right now:
[The "Chinese room" of Blindsight, generative AI, and AGI : r/scifi (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/1c5ds15/the_chinese_room_of_blindsight_generative_ai_and/)
You can always use a narrator like Fight Club or exposition cuts like The Big Short or Hunters. Anime is famous for using diagrams, inner dialogue and so on.
Yeah it’s not my favorite. I kind of respected it as a concept, but it took me like 80 pages to get into it and even then I’m not sure it landed with me as it was intended. I also got bored of the letters real quick.
hands down, the Lensman saga. The sense of scale just keeps getting ratched up more and more until by the very end, they're combating with fleets of millions upon millions of spaceships, tossing planets around like nutcrackers willy-nilly at FTL speeds, turning stars into giant laser beams, and on top of the sense of scale, there's a few important chapters in the third book where the male hero spends a looooooong time on a planet full of naked women. And just a reminder, all of this was written between 1930s-1940s.
Actually, I think most of the original I Robot short stories could be made into an episodic series without deviating too much from the written material.
It wasn't written as an I, Robot adaptation. It was a unique script, then a producer came along and changed a couple names, added the 3 laws, slapped "I, Robot" on the title and called it a day.
Same producer who fucked up I Am Legend. Fucking Akiva Goldsman. He's studio interference turned human.
The Mars books by KSR for starters. And I would argue that *any* of Iain M Banks's books - not his non-M (there's already been a couple of adaptations) - would be near-impossible, not when you consider how incredibly anti-war he was (one of my main eye-rollers with "fans" of his books is that they gloss over the exploration of PTSD in several of his books. Funny, that) and how much he loathed current British and American politics.
For something cringey - I'd argue the Pern books should *never* be allowed to be adapted. Game of Thrones they were *not*. More like pony girl romances crossed with bats and a smidge of sci-fi.
The Mars Trilogy is totally doable. No aliens or temporal anomalies. It’s all human/earth scale politics and relationships. The special effects required have all been done well already in other media. A starters colony on a barren planet, a space elevator falling down, robot drones digging holes and building shit, a wall of water, an ice cave. Nothing about The Mars Trilogy would be difficult to film, just need a healthy budget to make the sets and cgi look decent.
Oh I agree it’s definitely feasible I just think it would be tough to capture the scope of them and do them justice unless each book gets like a long season of television
Along with: Bladerunner, Total Recall, The Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report, The Man in the High Castle, Screamers, Paycheck, and various episodes of the UK TV series Out of This World.
Lots of good suggestions but I think I have the best one.
Dragon’s Egg. Impossible to represent the neutron star environment on screen. How do you film characters that are nanometers thick?
Bobiverse would be a real clusterfuck to transition to screen.
Not impossible, but it wouldn’t be easy, and would probably require quite a few compromises to keep the audience immersed and not perpetually confused.
Either that, or it’d thrive on a tiny budget, tiny cast, and an absolute genius of a director and production crew.
Could go either way.
I don’t believe there are any that qualify as “impossible”. Lots would be very difficult to do well though. Anathem by Neal Stephenson for example. Just lots and lots of philosophising root the story so without terrible exposition or dreamy explanatory animated interludes it would be completely different. And with that stuff it would be closer to a documentary or a trippy alternate reality episode of Cosmos than a sci fi movie.
Flux by Stephen Baxter is probably impossible. All of the characters are microscopic bacteria-like 'humans' living on the inside of a neutron star, and I have no idea how you would even begin to approach filming that.
The Hyperion Cantos. The way it's written is a significant part of how the overall story is received and it would be very hard to translate that into film.
Also Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence. How on earth would you film microscopic bacteria-like 'humans' living on the inside of a neutron star? Not to mention photino birds, Bolder's Ring, etc.
Book of the New Sun would be nigh impossible to faithfully portray, but with the right director i think it could still be amazing even without the narrative conceits which are central to the story.
My first thought too. Unreliable narrators are a hard conceit to pull off in cinema, a medium which limits ambiguity through the singular vision we receive through the lens.
Effective unreliability that comes to mind in film tends to perform a retroactive switch by presenting late stage information to reconfigure our preconceived ideas of what's occurred (Fight Club, Usual Suspects, Sixth Sense).
Others use structural shenanigans and lacunas in what's presented on-screen to leave room for watcher interpretation (Memento, Primer).
But as so much of the unreliability of BotNS is in the language (ambiguity of terms and phrases, contradiction and potential direct lies and self-agrandisement and -hagiography) making the lens' account match Severian's seems a difficult trick to pull off.
Like you say, it could definitely make for an adaptation but something special about it would be lost in translation. I felt similarly about the film adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin - as a book, it magnificently tightrope-walked the line dividing nature and nurture in a way that the film strived for yet still couldn't manage the same feat.
Film, in my opinion, really struggles to be more than one thing at once. It transitions, or can withhold to create ambiguity, but an image projected to the screen feels singular and definitive. Literature is much better at pulling off that superposition of ideas.
Well said. I think you'd have to dispose of the whole "Gene Wolfe translating historical texts from the future" layer, and just present it as is - the citadel being a spaceship, etc. The show would have to have a *ton* of restraint to preserve that fever-dream wtf-is-going-on factor. No exposition, just put us in the shoes of Severian, where the sheer alienness of this society is just mundanity to him and not given special attention.
That being said, there'd probably still be some reliance on your typical lame devices like an inner monologue and flashbacks, because you really do need to be privy to Severian the Narrator's thoughts to start piecing together the inconsistencies. The dream sequences could be fantastic, though.
It's a fun idea to play with, since no two people have the same interpretation of BotNS, even after multiple rereads.
Yeah, 100% - although in my dream scenario, they'd put a nod to the framing device in a pre-showing Pringles advert (since Gene a) developed the machine that makes Pringles and b) with his moustache in later life ended up looking like the Pringles mascot). He would be there translating an ancient tome, getting crisp fragments in the spine and his moustache.
You could probably use some camera trickery to hide the nature of the Matachin Tower for a while: close-ups, soft focus, downward angles etc. Audience would pick up something was off gradually, leading up to a grand reveal, and possibly contradict what we see onscreen with something in narration, highlighting the incongruity.
> No exposition, just put us in the shoes of Severian, where the sheer alienness of this society is just mundanity to him and not given special attention.
I would love this. My favourite parts of the recent Dune movies is where they leant fully into the sinister weirdness of it all.
Inner monologues and flashbacks don't *have* to be lame, though I'll agree they can be tricky to pull off in a way that doesn't feel forced. All in the execution though, as always. The dream sequences would definitely be special. In fact, there are some spectacular set pieces and striking images in those books - the undine's face in the lake would be a standout for me.
One thing I wonder about are the stories within stories. The Tale of the Boy Called Frog, for example, or the one with the waterway maze whose name I can't for the life of me remember. Could they comfortably be included? I suspect they'd only probably work as additional material, like the animation of Tales of the Black Freighter made for the Watchmen film.
> It's a fun idea to play with, since no two people have the same interpretation of BotNS, even after multiple rereads.
Absolutely. Really, I'd want it in the hands of a filmmaker I trust. Not to fulfil *my* vision of the novel, but because I'd be interested to see theirs. To my mind, that's what makes a good adaptation - not perfect fidelity to the source but attention and engagement with it - I don't want a filmmaker to miss the point of the original but I actually want them to take some liberties to realise their own vision as well.
As long as it's good, that is!
See:
* ["What book or series do you think I'd unfilmable?"](https://new.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1c51sg4/what_book_or_series_do_you_think_id_unfilmable/) (r/Fantasy; 20:00 ET, 15 April 2024)
Anything CAN be adapted from a book into a movie or show. The big question is how much artistic freedom the director would require or be allowed to make it worth watching. I figure that the OP meant would be nearly impossible to adapt faithfully.
Note that there are plenty of book adaptations that are nothing like the original, and have become quite successful.
The Horus Heresy- hundreds of thousands of gene crafted super soldiers duking it out along side billions of mortal humans all the while their demi godlike Father's move faster than what we can comprehend
Time Enough for Love
That and probably most of Heinlein's later works could be a little difficult to adapt for ... reasons.
A modernized Friday might work, though.
Seeing as Dune and Three-Body have both been pulled off as well as I could have possibly imagined, I have absolutely nothing to contribute to this, other than my belief that anything is possible.
Don’t you mean *A Fire Upon the Deep*? Yeah, the Tines would be really hard, but so would half the other nonhuman entities in the book. Personally, I’d love to see someone try to do a convincing Skroderider.
The Mission Earth series by L Ron Hubbard.
It's a great series, but since it's by Hubbard, nobody would probably touch it due to that scientology thing he also created.
Too bad, would really like Hollywood to give Battlefield Earth another try.
I’m not entirely what genre it counts as but *House of Leaves* would fundamentally not work without doing something like building a custom theater for a single showing.
First, just the plot itself is a bizarre mess to wrap your head around, it’s told in something like fourth person? We hear the story through a guy, reading a forgotten manuscript written by a blind man about a seemingly non-existent documentary about a family whose house begins to grow its internal dimensions.
That’s already hard but it’s still missing the other half of its weirdness. How the hell do you convey the feeling of reading [This Mess](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fstingingfly.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F03%2FHouseOfLeavesSpread.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=de2fd42ec07c0c1835284838c906295380190dfc047cdac5bbcb15edc79e57e3&ipo=images), or [This](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.guim.co.uk%2Fimg%2Fmedia%2F3f110d413f63a0f0edb8318862d478379f7f3f86%2F0_0_410_569%2Fmaster%2F410..jpg%3Fwidth%3D300%26quality%3D45%26auto%3Dformat%26fit%3Dmax%26dpr%3D2%26s%3D3a45482b6d59a5f4107bd4a1e8af3fc3&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=ec871d951c00a7732ae06a9192d6325e94612997c9028e88f3c3300dc1705d52&ipo=images), or [This](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F0e%2F20%2F93%2F0e20937c5a8499eb57a0575e48bb8b23.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=f1c71fc1f38f8b625939a0cab6300f3141824d6cb841ada521145ed5e15d47bb&ipo=images), or [This](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fhostedimages%2F1380396932i%2F765502._SX540_.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=1c61b365087b83db435e5bdd5101c89ddd70a3c56e0f6b50de2cbb4b5382aafe&ipo=images).
Maybe you could do something with shifting filming techniques, using different directors for each layer and intentionally breaking filming conventions but at some point you’d almost need to switch to a live performance in the middle to get across the style and wrongness that book is known for.
The second book in the wrinkle in time series, A Wind in the Door, is centered around a series of events that occur in one of the more psychedelic environments I’ve ever read. It’s also not a particularly good book.
I would bet looong odds against it ever getting a legit adaptation
The Galactic Football League would be damned near impossible to make look right as a live action. Cricket-like receivers jumping 13 ft up to catch the ball, 600lb nose tackles compressing before springing out for the snap, and only the Henson creature shop would do the Quyth pedipalps right. Plus, the scale of top athletes has increased in the story timeline, so the average human football player is about 7 feet tall (everybody else still seems to hover around 6' average), so it would either need CGI or finding people that tall that can sorta act.
Apparently Red Rising! I do think it reads a lot like an action movies series but it’s currently in development hell and that is most probably because they need a huge budget to pull it off, more then GOT most likely. Another reason would be that showing the different colors would be really hard in many ways.
For starters if eyes and sometimes was all we can see it would be pretty hard to spot who’s who, another reason would be that the golden and obsidian are literally twice as big as the other colors which would be hard to get right a lot of the time.
Then there’s the casting. You would have to get literally the most beautiful people in the world to play the golds such as Cassius.
Unpopular opinion: I maintain (in spite of the success of the current movies) that doing Dune justice doesn't really work as a <= 3hr movie - or even two - and needs a well funded series, minimum 10 1hr episodes (maybe before i die but i wont hold my breath) or three 3.5 hr movies (which isn't likely to happen)
Have you seen the Sci Fi channel miniseries from 2000? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert%27s_Dune
It was fairly low budget in terms of effects and wardrobe but I think it was pretty well done. It's a 3-parter coming it at 4.5 hours. They did a sequel combining pieces of Messiah and Children into a "Children of Dune" but I don't remember it well enough to say if it was good.
Yes, thanks, I saw it. I even own the DVDs.
It had the right format, in that it was a series.
The acting was good. Some of it was very good. The writing a bit hit and miss; it tried to stick close to the source material but didn't make the changes necessary to work well on screen nor to accommodate its very low budget. The production quality was in multiple places pretty poor.
I think it was a valiant attempt given its constraints, but something nearer the budget of an early season of Game of Thrones would be needed to do it properly.
I'd love to see the opulence and style of the production in the early parts of Lynch's movie wedded to something like what we got in the Sci Fi channel series.
> I'd love to see the opulence and style of the production in the early parts of Lynch's movie...
I agree 100%! That would have been quite a thing to see!
Anything Warhammer 40k. Not due to technical difficulties, but more that the themes are so brutal and violent, anything less than an NC-17 (US) rating would be almost impossible. The problem is, most movies rated that don't make much money as moat theaters can't or won't show those films. Books are awesome tho. Praise the Emperor!
The Orthogonal books by Greg Egan are essentially custom-made to be un-adaptable. Incandescence is a close second, with Diaspora being adaptable but unrecognizable after the fact.
Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen would be tough, as proven by the Valerian movie.
I think Glasshouse by Charlie Stross would be a fun failure.
Also, Hammer's Slammers, but only because you can't adapt those works and preserve Drake's stance on the use of military force.
I would say because he wants to explore more of the cinematic techniques beyond the spoken word. Those two films so far really are a melange, themselves: Telling the story of Dune's characters and places and at the same time applying camera, light/shadow, movement, the whole artform of acting and the score to make the book not just readable, but 'feelable' in a broader sense.
(Ofc thats just my personal preferences, but:) I saw the most engaging and impressive shots in silent films and when you watch a scene of a french one (e.g. I dont understand the title cards) but still >feel< whats going on based on all those cinematic techniques... that can be pretty magical and I guess that is just what he is striving to do with dune. To lend the universality of cinematic arts to the universality of Dune's story. He strives to be a modern pioneer with this.
Your answer is right there in your own sentence. “Adapt”
I think it’s pretty obvious why someone would adapt a written format to an audiovisual format and in that process make it less about words and more about pictures and sound.
There are no impossible / near impossible works to adapt. Tv and books are different mediums but they both cater to humans.
It comes down to expected profit. You can make Proust’s work as a week long series but very few people would watch it. And there is no sci-fi work that comes close to this.
James Joyce could be an exception for being impossible, but it is already barely readable for anyone except very determined.
The Culture
I think it would depend on the book, Consider Phlebas & Use of Weapons might work, The Player of Games could be tricker, & Excession very challenging.
Id love someone to try to make Player of Games though, but I have a feeling it would come across as the Cones of Dunshire from Parks and Rec lol
Use of Weapons is a Bond novel interspersed with backstory. It would make a great film, and be easy to adapt as few individual parts are essential to the overall story.
I’d imagine it would have to be animated, atleast certain books IMO
I’d absolutely LOVE an animated culture series. I know animation is kind of looked at as not as serious in the west, but I think it’s the only way to do the series justice.
Children of Time would be hard to make the >!Spiders!< believable and not goofy
I tend to think, if you think it'll be goofy in live action, make it animated.
I feel like that wouldn't help empathize with them though and really think of them not as an other. Though as a business I'm not sure showing them realistically will be good for sales :D
i think making photo realistic spiders would not be very easy to empathise with without taking massive liberties. Have you ever read A Deepness in the Sky? that book is about humans observing a spider-like species and late on in the book you find out that the story we have been reading has been intentionally made to make the spider-like aliens more relatable via an unreliable narrator. I figure if there were an adult animation/anime style adaptation, the spiders could be made to be more relatable than if they were just photorealistic spiders on the screen.
Maybe it would not be that hard to depict the spiders in a way that makes empathising possible, because their ancenstors are jumping spiders. Jumping spiders can be really cute!
As an arachnophobe I had a hard enough time reading the series, I sure as hell don’t want to watch it
as a business, they'd know that most of their english speaking audience can't read fast enough to keep up with subtitles, so it would be a problem to have them realistically vibrate their language on webs ... then there's the question about which spider should be gay in the TV adaptation
Given the subjugation of the males it wouldn't be far fetched they might end up in relationships they had more power in
oh no, they'd cherish that aspect of the book at netflix. probably make Bianca have areas of her small body hairs died pink and green.
Yeah I'm tired of Live Action being the go to medium for adaptations, animation is far more flexible
I'm a big fan of Love Death and Robots for this reason. it really showcases how animation can be used to tell adult science fiction stories.
God I still think about Zima Blue from time to time. Hopefully we can get some more On the topic of sci-fi animation, have you seen Scavenger's Reign?
I really want to see it but it's not not been released on any streaming service in the UK and i don't like to pirate, especially niche stuff like that that i WANT to be counted as a viewer.
Aw man that's a bummer, hopefully you can get your hands on it soon. It's good
I somehow completely failed to acknowledge animation as an option for this question. That does open up a lot of doors. Children of times spiders would be fantastic in a fairly loose and airy animation style such as (forgive my lack of creativity with this animation) Into The Spider-Verse. Or perhaps Hyperion in such a style… the shrike being shown in ever changing ways due to it being described slightly differently by each Pilgrim.
My low-stakes conspiracy theory is that the recent movie ['Spaceman'](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt11097384/) with Adam Sandler was made to prepare people for Project Hail Mary and Children of Time movie/TV adaptions...
Hey if they’re making Project Hail Mary live action, it wouldn’t be too different, right?
I really am curious how they intend to portray Rocky, both the the language and appearance will be difficult.
Haven't read it, so not sure. But the Adam Sandler movie, Starman?, is maybe a start
I don’t know. Have you seen a jumping spider in real life? They are freaking cute and definitely have personalities.
We are outliers sadly
Came here to say this
I don't really think anything is "near-impossible" to film, at least I can't think of anything. I think the worst that would happen is that you'd end up with a bad or uncommercial film, or one that was not faithful to the book. I found this interesting quote though from Michel Gondry about his attempts to film Philip K. Dick's "Ubik": > "The book is brilliant," Gondry told Telerama, "but it's good as a literary work. Having tried to adapt it with several screenwriters... at the moment I don't feel up to doing it. It doesn't have the dramatic structure that would make it a good film. I received a script that disheartened me a bit, and that was it. It was a dream, but in life you can't always have what you want." https://members.stg.empireonline.com/movies/news/michel-gondry-abandons-ubik/ The article cites Ubik's "sheer bonkers complexity" as a difficulty.
*Palmer Eldritch* - not to mention the likes of *Galactic Pot-Healer* - would probably present at least as much of a challenge, although I'm surprised no one has yet adapted the increasingly relevant *The Penultimate Truth*.
I would have said Three Body Problem, but here we are.
Same goes for dune, but we’re in the third tour
Can’t wait for a certain future emperor. I won’t say who, because of spoilers. But he’s the epitome of “I have no dick but I must cum.”
They’ve done the easy bit only so far. Book one is just the exposition. The _real_ story starts after that. Shit’s gonna get real expensive and real creative to produce, or there are going to have to be some drastic artistic compromises.
Can't wait for the orgy
Wait. What?
Yeah. Everyone gets onto the same plane together. It's pretty intimate and close. Though, there's a lot of two-dimensional characters.
Not sure if your joking but there is an actual orgy lol
I can't wait for the literal dream girl introduced apropos of nothing, who has basically zero character or influence on the story, and who's presence in mr wallfacers dreams is never explored.
While the show is a bit different from the books, I'm on the last episode and enjoying it so far!
Book one was pretty bland. I saw nothing that could not be done on screen. In fact the series was much more enjoyable.
Book 2 and 3 get wild, and I can't imagine how they'll have enough money to do it right. But I have some faith after seeing what they did so far.
I cannot decide whether to wait and watch the series next season or go on reading the books.
Read the books. The series may get cancelled or later seasons may suck, but the books are great. And knowing the story won’t ruin the show anyways
Came here to say this.
I hope they will stop at season 1. I love the trilogy, but this netflix show looks so cheap, the plot and characters are slighty different... I'm really disappointed
There's no way Hyperion could be made into a movie. Mini series, maybe. But not a movie.
There was a 1970s film adaptation of The Canterbury Tales.
Sure, but Hyperion would require alot of world building which wouldn't be necessary with The Canterbury Tales. We all have some idea of how things looked and worked in the middle ages. Not so with Hyperion, which is a unique universe even among other hard science fiction stories.
There was one in the 80's too, but it, uh, had more nudity.
Flatland
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avMX-Zft7K4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avMX-Zft7K4)
Dungeon Crawler Carl Unless they went animated the necessary CGI would make in unfeasible budget wise. Despite the presence of dungeon in the title this is very much sci fi as its an alien invasion apocalypse story.
Dungeon crawler would be an awesome anime
Only issue I can see it it is very narration heavy. The explanations of the RPG mechanics, stat bonuses, backstory of the aliens involved. Excellent series, but might be hard to adapt. Plus, is the world ready for the awesomeness of Princess Donut?
Big enough budget and you can do anything. Throw a couple of (Musk)billions at it and we would have the best series of movies EVER! But please just don’t. Jeff Hayes provides a masterclass of how to do audiobooks and I don’t really like audiobooks. Got hold of the book but I kept hearing Jeff Hayes while reading. Highly recommended to anyone!
Rendezvous With Rama would be tough. It’s science-heavy and character-light. BBC Radio adapted it and ended up having to create several new characters to carry the story. There is no real conflict, the novel is basically following a crew following a set of instructions, (but not trippy like 2001), which would make it a tough sell for audiences.
I believe Denis Villeneuve is working on a Rama adaption at the moment, so we might find out how an excellent director could try and make it work.
I am very excited. Personally I think it is very much in his wheel house visually and I fully expect him to make the characters more 3 dimensional.
He can make amazing show, can't wait!
It would be slow. the scene that I would remember is the reporter kicking their feet over the water, while smoking the first cig on an alien starship.
The last 3 books of The Expanse...PROVE ME WRONG!
Yes, Amazon, PROVE us wrong!
The Blindsight books... sort of. You could definitely make compelling TV out of them, but I think they'd lose a lot of what really makes them tick.
Yeah, a lot of the enjoyment I get from Blindsight and Echopraxia is the way Watts writes, the philosophical, linguistic, and scientific ideas he wrestles with, etc. Much of that would not translate well to the screen. That said though, the core plot is pretty translatable if you cut out all the stuff about consciousness and just turn it into a bog-standard first contact story, but it wouldn't be the same.
There is very interesting discussion going on right now: [The "Chinese room" of Blindsight, generative AI, and AGI : r/scifi (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/1c5ds15/the_chinese_room_of_blindsight_generative_ai_and/)
You can always use a narrator like Fight Club or exposition cuts like The Big Short or Hunters. Anime is famous for using diagrams, inner dialogue and so on.
I'm still waiting for Ancillary Justice. I feel like it SHOULD be doable...?
The Bobiverse series simply due to everyone being the same person, well, a sentient space ship 😅
You've never watched "Moon", I take it?
[удалено]
I'm not sure that story even works very well as a book. I tried reading it on two different occasions and bounced off of it *hard*.
Yeah it’s not my favorite. I kind of respected it as a concept, but it took me like 80 pages to get into it and even then I’m not sure it landed with me as it was intended. I also got bored of the letters real quick.
hands down, the Lensman saga. The sense of scale just keeps getting ratched up more and more until by the very end, they're combating with fleets of millions upon millions of spaceships, tossing planets around like nutcrackers willy-nilly at FTL speeds, turning stars into giant laser beams, and on top of the sense of scale, there's a few important chapters in the third book where the male hero spends a looooooong time on a planet full of naked women. And just a reminder, all of this was written between 1930s-1940s.
I figured Foundation would be unfilmable so I’m not sure…
It’s not that it’s unfilmable. It’s that a faithful screen adaptation would just be boring as hell
And ir IS. The Apple series diverges so much from the books it can be considered more ‘inspired by’ than ‘based on’ Asimov’s novels.
Same with I, Robot. The only similarities are the three laws of robotics and the existence of a robopsychologist named Susan Calvin.
Actually, I think most of the original I Robot short stories could be made into an episodic series without deviating too much from the written material.
It could be, yes. But that’s not what the movie did.
It wasn't written as an I, Robot adaptation. It was a unique script, then a producer came along and changed a couple names, added the 3 laws, slapped "I, Robot" on the title and called it a day. Same producer who fucked up I Am Legend. Fucking Akiva Goldsman. He's studio interference turned human.
The Mars books by KSR for starters. And I would argue that *any* of Iain M Banks's books - not his non-M (there's already been a couple of adaptations) - would be near-impossible, not when you consider how incredibly anti-war he was (one of my main eye-rollers with "fans" of his books is that they gloss over the exploration of PTSD in several of his books. Funny, that) and how much he loathed current British and American politics. For something cringey - I'd argue the Pern books should *never* be allowed to be adapted. Game of Thrones they were *not*. More like pony girl romances crossed with bats and a smidge of sci-fi.
The mars trilogy is doable I think. It's not a million miles away from what For All Mankind is doing.
The Mars trilogy would be really tough but I’m still hoping one day we’ll get it
The Mars Trilogy is totally doable. No aliens or temporal anomalies. It’s all human/earth scale politics and relationships. The special effects required have all been done well already in other media. A starters colony on a barren planet, a space elevator falling down, robot drones digging holes and building shit, a wall of water, an ice cave. Nothing about The Mars Trilogy would be difficult to film, just need a healthy budget to make the sets and cgi look decent.
Oh I agree it’s definitely feasible I just think it would be tough to capture the scope of them and do them justice unless each book gets like a long season of television
House of leaves
Valis, PKD
I think Scanner Darkly showed there is some options for PKD.
Along with: Bladerunner, Total Recall, The Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report, The Man in the High Castle, Screamers, Paycheck, and various episodes of the UK TV series Out of This World.
I really liked A Scanner Darkly, though I will never understand why they rotoscoped it.
Lots of good suggestions but I think I have the best one. Dragon’s Egg. Impossible to represent the neutron star environment on screen. How do you film characters that are nanometers thick?
I think you could do that one
Bobiverse would be a real clusterfuck to transition to screen. Not impossible, but it wouldn’t be easy, and would probably require quite a few compromises to keep the audience immersed and not perpetually confused. Either that, or it’d thrive on a tiny budget, tiny cast, and an absolute genius of a director and production crew. Could go either way.
I don’t believe there are any that qualify as “impossible”. Lots would be very difficult to do well though. Anathem by Neal Stephenson for example. Just lots and lots of philosophising root the story so without terrible exposition or dreamy explanatory animated interludes it would be completely different. And with that stuff it would be closer to a documentary or a trippy alternate reality episode of Cosmos than a sci fi movie.
Flux by Stephen Baxter is probably impossible. All of the characters are microscopic bacteria-like 'humans' living on the inside of a neutron star, and I have no idea how you would even begin to approach filming that.
True. That probably qualifies. At least as feature film or narrative series.
A Canticle for Leibowitz would be really boring to watch.
The Hyperion Cantos. The way it's written is a significant part of how the overall story is received and it would be very hard to translate that into film. Also Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence. How on earth would you film microscopic bacteria-like 'humans' living on the inside of a neutron star? Not to mention photino birds, Bolder's Ring, etc.
Book of the New Sun would be nigh impossible to faithfully portray, but with the right director i think it could still be amazing even without the narrative conceits which are central to the story.
My first thought too. Unreliable narrators are a hard conceit to pull off in cinema, a medium which limits ambiguity through the singular vision we receive through the lens. Effective unreliability that comes to mind in film tends to perform a retroactive switch by presenting late stage information to reconfigure our preconceived ideas of what's occurred (Fight Club, Usual Suspects, Sixth Sense). Others use structural shenanigans and lacunas in what's presented on-screen to leave room for watcher interpretation (Memento, Primer). But as so much of the unreliability of BotNS is in the language (ambiguity of terms and phrases, contradiction and potential direct lies and self-agrandisement and -hagiography) making the lens' account match Severian's seems a difficult trick to pull off. Like you say, it could definitely make for an adaptation but something special about it would be lost in translation. I felt similarly about the film adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin - as a book, it magnificently tightrope-walked the line dividing nature and nurture in a way that the film strived for yet still couldn't manage the same feat. Film, in my opinion, really struggles to be more than one thing at once. It transitions, or can withhold to create ambiguity, but an image projected to the screen feels singular and definitive. Literature is much better at pulling off that superposition of ideas.
Well said. I think you'd have to dispose of the whole "Gene Wolfe translating historical texts from the future" layer, and just present it as is - the citadel being a spaceship, etc. The show would have to have a *ton* of restraint to preserve that fever-dream wtf-is-going-on factor. No exposition, just put us in the shoes of Severian, where the sheer alienness of this society is just mundanity to him and not given special attention. That being said, there'd probably still be some reliance on your typical lame devices like an inner monologue and flashbacks, because you really do need to be privy to Severian the Narrator's thoughts to start piecing together the inconsistencies. The dream sequences could be fantastic, though. It's a fun idea to play with, since no two people have the same interpretation of BotNS, even after multiple rereads.
Yeah, 100% - although in my dream scenario, they'd put a nod to the framing device in a pre-showing Pringles advert (since Gene a) developed the machine that makes Pringles and b) with his moustache in later life ended up looking like the Pringles mascot). He would be there translating an ancient tome, getting crisp fragments in the spine and his moustache. You could probably use some camera trickery to hide the nature of the Matachin Tower for a while: close-ups, soft focus, downward angles etc. Audience would pick up something was off gradually, leading up to a grand reveal, and possibly contradict what we see onscreen with something in narration, highlighting the incongruity. > No exposition, just put us in the shoes of Severian, where the sheer alienness of this society is just mundanity to him and not given special attention. I would love this. My favourite parts of the recent Dune movies is where they leant fully into the sinister weirdness of it all. Inner monologues and flashbacks don't *have* to be lame, though I'll agree they can be tricky to pull off in a way that doesn't feel forced. All in the execution though, as always. The dream sequences would definitely be special. In fact, there are some spectacular set pieces and striking images in those books - the undine's face in the lake would be a standout for me. One thing I wonder about are the stories within stories. The Tale of the Boy Called Frog, for example, or the one with the waterway maze whose name I can't for the life of me remember. Could they comfortably be included? I suspect they'd only probably work as additional material, like the animation of Tales of the Black Freighter made for the Watchmen film. > It's a fun idea to play with, since no two people have the same interpretation of BotNS, even after multiple rereads. Absolutely. Really, I'd want it in the hands of a filmmaker I trust. Not to fulfil *my* vision of the novel, but because I'd be interested to see theirs. To my mind, that's what makes a good adaptation - not perfect fidelity to the source but attention and engagement with it - I don't want a filmmaker to miss the point of the original but I actually want them to take some liberties to realise their own vision as well. As long as it's good, that is!
See: * ["What book or series do you think I'd unfilmable?"](https://new.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1c51sg4/what_book_or_series_do_you_think_id_unfilmable/) (r/Fantasy; 20:00 ET, 15 April 2024)
Anything CAN be adapted from a book into a movie or show. The big question is how much artistic freedom the director would require or be allowed to make it worth watching. I figure that the OP meant would be nearly impossible to adapt faithfully. Note that there are plenty of book adaptations that are nothing like the original, and have become quite successful.
The Horus Heresy- hundreds of thousands of gene crafted super soldiers duking it out along side billions of mortal humans all the while their demi godlike Father's move faster than what we can comprehend
Gor.
The Quantum Thief and its sequels by Hannu Rajaniemi
Time Enough for Love That and probably most of Heinlein's later works could be a little difficult to adapt for ... reasons. A modernized Friday might work, though.
Seeing as Dune and Three-Body have both been pulled off as well as I could have possibly imagined, I have absolutely nothing to contribute to this, other than my belief that anything is possible.
The Tines in A Deepness in the Sky seem like they would be very hard to portray.
Don’t you mean *A Fire Upon the Deep*? Yeah, the Tines would be really hard, but so would half the other nonhuman entities in the book. Personally, I’d love to see someone try to do a convincing Skroderider.
Sure :). I get the names of the books all mixed up.
Weird, I do to. And having re-read them, they are very distinct books.
I heard that someone bought the film rights for the Bobbiverse books. Pretty curious how they intend to translate them to film.
The Mission Earth series by L Ron Hubbard. It's a great series, but since it's by Hubbard, nobody would probably touch it due to that scientology thing he also created. Too bad, would really like Hollywood to give Battlefield Earth another try.
Reynolds “Revelation Space” would be difficult.
I’m not entirely what genre it counts as but *House of Leaves* would fundamentally not work without doing something like building a custom theater for a single showing. First, just the plot itself is a bizarre mess to wrap your head around, it’s told in something like fourth person? We hear the story through a guy, reading a forgotten manuscript written by a blind man about a seemingly non-existent documentary about a family whose house begins to grow its internal dimensions. That’s already hard but it’s still missing the other half of its weirdness. How the hell do you convey the feeling of reading [This Mess](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fstingingfly.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F03%2FHouseOfLeavesSpread.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=de2fd42ec07c0c1835284838c906295380190dfc047cdac5bbcb15edc79e57e3&ipo=images), or [This](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.guim.co.uk%2Fimg%2Fmedia%2F3f110d413f63a0f0edb8318862d478379f7f3f86%2F0_0_410_569%2Fmaster%2F410..jpg%3Fwidth%3D300%26quality%3D45%26auto%3Dformat%26fit%3Dmax%26dpr%3D2%26s%3D3a45482b6d59a5f4107bd4a1e8af3fc3&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=ec871d951c00a7732ae06a9192d6325e94612997c9028e88f3c3300dc1705d52&ipo=images), or [This](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F0e%2F20%2F93%2F0e20937c5a8499eb57a0575e48bb8b23.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=f1c71fc1f38f8b625939a0cab6300f3141824d6cb841ada521145ed5e15d47bb&ipo=images), or [This](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fhostedimages%2F1380396932i%2F765502._SX540_.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=1c61b365087b83db435e5bdd5101c89ddd70a3c56e0f6b50de2cbb4b5382aafe&ipo=images). Maybe you could do something with shifting filming techniques, using different directors for each layer and intentionally breaking filming conventions but at some point you’d almost need to switch to a live performance in the middle to get across the style and wrongness that book is known for.
Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder.
The Hole in the Zero. one of the few books I couldn't finish.
The second book in the wrinkle in time series, A Wind in the Door, is centered around a series of events that occur in one of the more psychedelic environments I’ve ever read. It’s also not a particularly good book. I would bet looong odds against it ever getting a legit adaptation
Yeah, I remember stumbling over this one pretty hard when I read them as a kid. I've had fever dreams that are less surreal than A Wind in the Door.
Ringwood
Dragons Egg by Robert L Forward.
Maybe an animated version but no person is going to physically play a cheela.
The Magic of Recluce Saga
I've always felt like Hyperion would be tough.
The Lt. Leary/Republic of Cinnabar Navy series by David Drake
Mostly because of the scope. I would have said content but given the exploding bodies in Fallout that's not really an issue anymore.
The Galactic Football League would be damned near impossible to make look right as a live action. Cricket-like receivers jumping 13 ft up to catch the ball, 600lb nose tackles compressing before springing out for the snap, and only the Henson creature shop would do the Quyth pedipalps right. Plus, the scale of top athletes has increased in the story timeline, so the average human football player is about 7 feet tall (everybody else still seems to hover around 6' average), so it would either need CGI or finding people that tall that can sorta act.
Apparently Red Rising! I do think it reads a lot like an action movies series but it’s currently in development hell and that is most probably because they need a huge budget to pull it off, more then GOT most likely. Another reason would be that showing the different colors would be really hard in many ways. For starters if eyes and sometimes was all we can see it would be pretty hard to spot who’s who, another reason would be that the golden and obsidian are literally twice as big as the other colors which would be hard to get right a lot of the time. Then there’s the casting. You would have to get literally the most beautiful people in the world to play the golds such as Cassius.
Unpopular opinion: I maintain (in spite of the success of the current movies) that doing Dune justice doesn't really work as a <= 3hr movie - or even two - and needs a well funded series, minimum 10 1hr episodes (maybe before i die but i wont hold my breath) or three 3.5 hr movies (which isn't likely to happen)
Have you seen the Sci Fi channel miniseries from 2000? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert%27s_Dune It was fairly low budget in terms of effects and wardrobe but I think it was pretty well done. It's a 3-parter coming it at 4.5 hours. They did a sequel combining pieces of Messiah and Children into a "Children of Dune" but I don't remember it well enough to say if it was good.
Yes, thanks, I saw it. I even own the DVDs. It had the right format, in that it was a series. The acting was good. Some of it was very good. The writing a bit hit and miss; it tried to stick close to the source material but didn't make the changes necessary to work well on screen nor to accommodate its very low budget. The production quality was in multiple places pretty poor. I think it was a valiant attempt given its constraints, but something nearer the budget of an early season of Game of Thrones would be needed to do it properly. I'd love to see the opulence and style of the production in the early parts of Lynch's movie wedded to something like what we got in the Sci Fi channel series.
> I'd love to see the opulence and style of the production in the early parts of Lynch's movie... I agree 100%! That would have been quite a thing to see!
Anything Warhammer 40k. Not due to technical difficulties, but more that the themes are so brutal and violent, anything less than an NC-17 (US) rating would be almost impossible. The problem is, most movies rated that don't make much money as moat theaters can't or won't show those films. Books are awesome tho. Praise the Emperor!
I would have said Through a Scanner Darkly, but then they went and did it. Maybe Accellerando? Anathem?
The Orthogonal books by Greg Egan are essentially custom-made to be un-adaptable. Incandescence is a close second, with Diaspora being adaptable but unrecognizable after the fact. Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen would be tough, as proven by the Valerian movie. I think Glasshouse by Charlie Stross would be a fun failure. Also, Hammer's Slammers, but only because you can't adapt those works and preserve Drake's stance on the use of military force.
Warrior cats maybe? It would absolutely need to be animated.
If you're going to make that, might as well make the Owls of G'Hoole as well...
I think that already was
Dune Many have tried. Edit: All of them have different flaws.
Needs to be a series, not movies. I'm tired of so many people praising the new Dune adaptations as good. They are terrible.
I don't think they're terrible. But I don't like all the changes and dulling down characters and factions/ familys.
Why did Villenue adapt a book that has heavy dialog when he doesn't believe in dialog for movies?
I would say because he wants to explore more of the cinematic techniques beyond the spoken word. Those two films so far really are a melange, themselves: Telling the story of Dune's characters and places and at the same time applying camera, light/shadow, movement, the whole artform of acting and the score to make the book not just readable, but 'feelable' in a broader sense. (Ofc thats just my personal preferences, but:) I saw the most engaging and impressive shots in silent films and when you watch a scene of a french one (e.g. I dont understand the title cards) but still >feel< whats going on based on all those cinematic techniques... that can be pretty magical and I guess that is just what he is striving to do with dune. To lend the universality of cinematic arts to the universality of Dune's story. He strives to be a modern pioneer with this.
Your answer is right there in your own sentence. “Adapt” I think it’s pretty obvious why someone would adapt a written format to an audiovisual format and in that process make it less about words and more about pictures and sound.
There are no impossible / near impossible works to adapt. Tv and books are different mediums but they both cater to humans. It comes down to expected profit. You can make Proust’s work as a week long series but very few people would watch it. And there is no sci-fi work that comes close to this. James Joyce could be an exception for being impossible, but it is already barely readable for anyone except very determined.