
Cancelled...
Half way through season 2 despite fan protests and a big seller on DVD rivalling Firefly, leaving everyone to wonder why on earth it was cancelled. Especially as NCIS had just been renewed. Again.
It wasn't quite good enough for you lot, but it looks like Kim Stanley Robinson's award-winning Mars Trilogy is set for TV adaptation. Fans of Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars (insert RGB joke here...) can look forward to a forthcoming adaptation of the series, after the announcement by cable TV channel Spike TV that it's …
Hey! If it weren't for NCIS, we'd never have discovered that the silver bullet for computer security is Two Nerds, One Keyboard.
(Personally, I find the original NCIS moderately watchable, in that I can generally sit through an episode without wanting to murder the writers - when they stay away from the magical-computer crap. [I know, Murray Gell-mann Amnesia Effect.] That's more than I can say for most procedurals. But I agree that the world isn't suffering from a lack of NCIS episodes.)
20 years ago these books rocked my world. I studied engineering at university just so I could go to Mars. Sadly I re-read them recently and they've not stood the test of time. Cardboard characters and so utopian that they make Star Trak:TOS look like Soylent Green.
Utopian?!
Guess you skipped all the bits with the <spoilers!> rioting, murdering, politically motivated attacks, assinations and, oh what was that bit again, ah yes - the violent revolution in which the planet is nearly destroyed by a falling space elevator, then?
I'd hate to hear what you thought was a dystopian future! :-)
At 99p I'll read anything. Well, except Dan Brown, and Jeffrey Archer, obviously.
Reg, your link is borked:
http://harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk/2014/09/kim-stanley-robinsons-mars-trilogy-coming-soon-to-tv/
.. In a word.
I started reading these a few years ago, and gave up half way through the second one. (Blue Mars?)
I didn't care about the (cardboard) characters, or even the direction things were going. And that whole Coyote thing never really seemed to go anywhere.
Maybe they can just take the one way mission to Mars concept, and turn it into something completely different. (Like Big Brother perhaps...)
It seems to me like there is a current obsession with all thing "Mars", much as we were obsessed with the "Moonshot" in the late 60's.
I've only read Red Mars and I found it a bit dull to be honest. A lot of the science was interesting but the characters themselves were uninteresting for the most part.
The Martian by Andy Weir is out as a film next year. The science in it is pretty hard but it was a lot more entertaining than Red Mars.
One of the best books I have read in a long time, Weir's Mark Watney is anything but one-dimensional.
" In space, no one can hear you scream like a little girl".
“I guess you could call it a "failure", but I prefer the term "learning experience"
“My asshole is doing as much to keep me alive as my brain.”
“Problem is (follow me closely here, the science is pretty complicated), if I cut a hole in the Hab, the air won't stay inside anymore.”
I just hope Ridley Scott doesn't turn it into another Prometheus.....
I just hope Ridley Scott doesn't turn it into another Prometheus.....
I watched Blade Runner a few weeks ago (must have been the Director's Cut), followed by a documentary on it. I wonder if all films have quite that level of infighting...?
Ridley Scott said he'd optioned Dune at the time, but decided on Blade Running instead. I wonder what he'd have made of that? As many problems as I thought Prometheus had, it's still Citizen Kane in comparison with David Lynch's Dune. Dune has crap script, crap acting and crap special effects, all rolled into one package.
Heh, I'd forgotten about the gap series - cheery stuff as I recall. I'm not sure it'd work as a TV series - there's no-one/anything you can really root for or particularly care about, though Angus makes a good anti-hero (with most of the emphasis on the "anti")...
Not sure about the Mars one's either Red & Blue where OK, but Green was heavy going.
If The GAP series is Donaldson's best work by Far (and I don't doubt it, it was less traumatic than the Thomas Covenant) than that man should be forcefully restrained from ever touching a keyboard, pen, pencil, or any other writing utensil.
I have disliked many characters in many books, but to get me to hate everyone in a book to the point that the hatred starts to bleed over to the writer.. that takes a special talent - one that should never be used.
Gap was a triumph simply because at the end of the last book your were cheering for an evil rapist, mentally wrecked woman, whiny manchild, and a weak emasculated pirate. And they were the good guys!
Never have so many utterly flawed characters appeared together in a sci fi series.
It Has never left my top 3 sci/fi fantasy novels/series since I read it.
Well in contrast to most of the commentards above, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the trilogy when it was first published, and have re-read it a number of times since.
However, I'm honestly not sure that the stories will translate well into watchable TV, and I really doubt that any TV adaptation which was written to be entertaining would have much of the original books left in.
I think it more likely that the basic premise will be kept, and new "exciting" plotlines will be written from scratch.
It will probably end up like BBC's Outcasts...
I grew up reading these, Heinlein, Niven, Asimov and the like. They all suffer from context deficiencies, that is to say, when they came out, they were superb, mind expanding tomes and we didn't care about cardboard characterizations, or dodgy political philosophies. But in recent decades, we've had much better writers take up the mantle, for example, Iain M. Banks, Neal Stephenson, Neal Asher and my personal favourite Peter F. Hamilton. Those writers are on a par, with the old guard, scientifically, but are ahead in writing style and characterization.
The Culture or the Night's Dawn universes would make much better TV, IMHO.
I suspect the older writers thought the science was what the book was all about so the rest was just pencil sketches.
The problem with science fiction "film of the book" projects is often a commercial one. The audience is usually under 35 years of age. So it's often the case that they haven't read the book. So do you make a film that's reasonably true to a book and accept it won't be as successful as a film based on themes that <35yo are familiar with, or do you plunder the book for eye catching ideas and make a block buster?
Still, this has prompted me to by copies of the John Carter and Ender's Game films.
"I suspect the older writers thought the science was what the book was all about so the rest was just pencil sketches."
To me it seems they were deep into exploring an essence of humanity. Which happens to be the main topic for most good writers over the history. Futuristic science serves mainly as a plot background. There's a frequent notion that technology alone will not solve our main problems. Plus swaths of witty observations about the societies over the time, and some outright prophetic bits.
Quoth Asimov:
"The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity - a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop."
"The civil wars of the last two centuries have smashed up more than half of the Grand Fleet and what's left is in pretty shaky condition. You know it isn't as if the ships we build these days are worth anything. I don't think there's a man in the Galaxy today who can build a first-rate hypernuclear motor."
And then there was Hober Mallow, with a stunning discovery that almighty Empire doesn't have any people capable of repairing a planetary powerplant, nevermind building new ones. Classy.
I don't think character development is as important in a science fiction book as in other genres; I think science fiction should be about the plot, the setting and the science and the characters are there to give the reader a "view point" into the books world rather than be subjects in and of themselves.
I too regard Peter F Hamilton as one of the best of the current crop of writers but, having read pretty much all he's written, I don't think his characterisation is that much better than, say, Niven or Heinlein for instance. Hamiltons characters are "fleshed out" by internal monologues more that normal development.
I'd have thought some of Hamilton's stuff would film really nicely. I've gone off him, since his books started getting mind-bogglingly enormous, but then I've not been reading as much in the last few years either.
I lost the ability to suspend disbelief in the Night's Dawn trilogy, though ploughed through to the end anyway. I can see any attempt to make telly out of that risking becoming utterly ridiculous. Although who wouldn't want to see Al Capone in spaaaaaaace. If you could find a way round that, it would be easy to translate to the screen. I gave up early on in the next lot (Void trilogy?). Obviously decent modern CGI makes space opera a lot easier.
I was thinking that his first three books would work as well. The Greg Mandell stuff. But then maybe not. How to do mind-reading on screen?
I guess this is why I've always preferred books to telly. Although at least the TV series can do a lot better job than a film. A TV series of 'Ender's Game' might have been great. The film just didn't work at all. There wasn't enough time to grow to understand and like the character, so you didn't care what happened to him. The space opera bits worked fine.
Eponymous Cowherd,
Ouch. Comparing Ender's Game to Battlefield Earth seems rather harsh. Although the lead actor didn't seem to be able to make Ender likeable - which was either a failure of script or acting ability.
However, I didn't think they dawdled through the plot. I think that only having 90 mnutes was its problem. Maybe Ender isn't likeable (you don't get named Ender The Xenocide for nothing), but he is supposed to be a born leader. The book can sidestep that problem by spending the whole time inside his head, so you can understand his motives. Film can't.
As to your problem with the ending, the book isn't about the aliens. The book is about Ender and why he's not like his brother or sister. So I guess their choice was do it properly as two films (or a TV series), or just make another aliens vs. humans film and option a best-selling book so you can hopefully get some people guaranteed to come and see you. In which case they should have dumped most of the plot, and just kept the battle room and the space battles. After all, Total Recall and The Running Man are great fun films, but bear very little relation to the short stories they're nominally based on. Total Recall didn't even keep the name, although I suppose it would be hard to fit 'We Can Remember it for You Wholesale' on the poster...
Night's Dawn suffered from a terrible ending, literally a Deus Ex Machina that hammers a sudden stop leaving alot of the (multitude of) ongoing plot threads feeling cut short or irrelevant.
Still, if they make anything into a series they would probably start with Mindstar Rising et.al, except re-flavoured as an open-ended psychic detective series with umpteen episodes...
I ploughed through the gore and nastiness of the first book without realising it was part of a trilogy in the first place. I picked up the second hoping that the g&n would abate in that one, but no such luck. I eventually reached a quarter of the way in before giving up - sf horror is not really my cup of tea and I felt I had given PFH a chance with this one.
A considerable time later I was working away from home and needed a book to read so I picked it up again; it probably helped that I had forgotten most of the details of my previous attempt. I then went on to the third and saw it through to the end, more out of a fascination with how the mess was going to get resolved. The Deus Ex Machina ending makes me feel that PFH didn't know how he was going to resolve this either and panicked.
I still have the books but they're not likely to get read again.
I liked his Greg Mandel stuff.
"The books touch on issues like terraforming ... "
Including, IIRC, the deliberate use of greenhouse gases to bring about global warming. I think the "Russell Cocktail" (named after Saxifrage Russell, the character who developed the idea) was accepted, in universe at least, to be the ideal mixture of gases to warm the Martian atmosphere.
Note: I'm not trying to start an AGW/climate change flame war here, so please don't take this comment as such.
Colin
Well, if you're terraforming a planet, the temperature is one of the big variables to alter, so why wouldn't you fiddle with the atmosphere?
You'd pretty much have to add greenhouse gasses to Mars if you wanted it to be liveable, and you'd have to find a way of removing them from Venus's atmosphere to make that place habitable as well.
...I'm happy and willing to see any new Sci-fi movies or mini-series being produced, they can't all be winners but the genre (in my eyes at least) has got to be better than the normal mindless fodder we are served.
They might have bitten off more then they can chew with this one, the 'strengths' of this book, to me anyhow, were the political and social changes that the move to Mars engendered, and the monumental task of terraforming. Not sure if that amount of twists and detail can be transfered to screen with much success.
What I'm really waiting for is a movie of Joe Haldeman's 'The forever war', which is simply an outstanding book, and has the plot and pace that I think could fit well to a visual medium.
I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.[1]
Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
If even one of SF's staunchest defenders admits 90% of it is crap, we should too. Because it is. And the reason most of us think of it as great is that even for the grey beards amongst us, half of it was written before we were born. So the crap for that half has been excised and only the good stuff was left. I observed the same thing as anime was cresting on US shores.
Theodore Sturgeon short stories and novellas were already soundly plagarized by comics, television and movies.
He had so many thought provoking story ideas. There was hardly any late 50's and 60's science fiction that did not draw something from his writings. Not to mention his Star Trek episodes
The wiki on him is extensive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Sturgeon
Find the North Atlantic books and read them, you'll find much in common with so many plots by various producers.
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The two best TV shows of the year have been True Detective and Fargo. Both are a stand-alone series of 8 or 10 episodes, both have no possibility of a sequel. As a viewer, you can commit to them safe in the knowledge that they will not be cancelled later on, or stagnate into boringness.
Beginning, Middle, END. With some genuine surprises along he way.