Charlie Stross
#WritersCoffeeClub
Which novel to TV or movie adaptation was the most disappointing and why?
I don't generally watch TV/movies, and I *especially* avoid adaptations of books because they're uniformly shit.
If you look at a script, it's equivalent in content to a novella, not an entire novel. Anything shorter than a TV miniseries will require disastrous cuts to a book length work. And the requirements of contemporary commercial TV/film are inimical to depth in storytelling.
Charlie Stross
#WritersCoffeeClub I'll allow a limited exception to the "all adaptations are shit" rule for works of fiction that were written by people with scriptwriting chops with eventual adaptation in mind (GRRM's mammoth fantasy thing about dragons, The Expanse, etc.)
Charlie Stross
@pdcawley Again: Ben started out writing TV scripts before switching to novels.
Piers Cawley
@cstross I suspect that, should it ever happen, The Rivers of London books will adapt remarkably well for similar reasons.
Charlie Stross
@quixoticgeek I tried to read A Game of Thrones three times, never got more than 100 pages in. (Yes, I got the source material in history classes at school. Don't want to re-do it as homework when I'm trying to read for pleasure!)
Quixoticgeek
@cstross except those dragon thing books are really badly written. Excessively verbose, and incredibly repetitive. No meal can be mentioned with our grease running down a chin, no lady can be mentioned without the moisture level of her downstairs being detailed. He's in desperate need of a good editor.
Charlie Stross
@pdcawley @DJDarren The LoTR films are unwatchable. (It's the camerawork—my damaged retinas can't make sense of all those tracking/zooming/panning shots, the first half of Fellowship was just a muddy blur to me so I gave up.
Piers Cawley
@DJDarren @cstross TV adaptations have more chance of working even if the original author wasn't writing with that in mind though, because TV has more time and don't have to pare everything down to the bone to fit in ninety minutes.
Jackson's LotR films are astonishing, really. Because there's no way JRRT was writing with any consideration for film adaptation.
DJDarren
@cstross The Golden Compass.
Northern Lights is wonderful. I've read the Dark Materials series a number of times now and will never tire of them.
But that movie was dog shit.
Don't get me wrong, it looked beautiful, the cast was outstanding (Sam Elliott was a *perfect* Lee Scoresby). But the studio fucked it six ways to Sunday, leaving it a neutered mess. And worse, they then abandoned the series.
But it eventually led to the wonderful TV adaptation, so I guess it worked out. @pdcawley
Charlie Stross
@DJDarren @pdcawley No, my problem with the LoTR movies is *the camerawork*. I literally can't see anything but a greenish-brown blur! (My eyes, according to an ophthalmology professor, are "complex", and not in a good way.)
DJDarren
@cstross @pdcawley Yeah, the pacing for the first half of Fellowship is kinda weird, but in fairness, very little happens in the book that massively impacts the story before Frodo gets stabbed up on Weathertop.
From Rivendell onwards I was amazed at how close Jackson was able to keep it. I guess it illustrates just how much of those books is purely world building and description.
The Hobbit trilogy, however, can fuck right off.
Charlie Stross
@baishen Go read a book about scriptwriting, and one about the structure of novels. HTH!
Bai Shen
@cstross Can you elaborate some on what you mean by the requirements being inimical? I don't know anything about script writing and barely know anything about story writing. Thanks.
Charlie Stross
@log Haven't seen the movie. By all accounts it's a very good movie making an entirely different point to the one Heinlein was making.
Log 🪵
@cstross Are we considering Starship Troopers? That delta is so large that one could argue that the film is a brand adoption on a completely unrelated script, rather than an adaptation.
Log 🪵
@cstross It is. It could have stood on its own without copying the names. It's just extremely weird that they forced those two magnets close in the wrong orientation.
Charlie Stross
@log I'm still waiting for someone to make the movie of Alan E. Nourse's classic 1970s satire about private medicine, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"
FeralRobots
@cstross Fred Zimmerman's 1973 adaptation of Day of the Jackal was both a really faithful adaptation & a darn good thriller. But it's a major exception.
Also I'd put in a similar vote for The Ipcress File.
Charlie Stross
@FeralRobots "The Day of the Jackal" was an insane commercial success as a book—multiple millions sold, at a time when that didn't normally happen in publishing—and movie budgets were an order of magnitude smaller in real terms, so less meddling by money men.
2001, from 1968, was a very expensive high budget movie of that era, made for $10.1M, or about $91M in today's terms.
Charlie Stross
@fazalmajid @quixoticgeek The weird thing is I really like almost everything else GRRM has written!
Fazal Majid
@cstross @quixoticgeek same here. About 100 pages into the first volume, "why am I supposed to care about these horrible feudals again?" and "let's hope they kill each other and leave the downtrodden peasants alone", and gave up in disgust. And this despite having bought the first 3 books in anticipation (this was before the TV series, that I also found quite boring, but my wife loved it).
Charlie Stross
@quixoticgeek @fazalmajid So ... everything by Kameron Hurley or Nicola Griffith should fit; on consideration, there's queer coding (from an earlier generation) in most of C. J. Cherryh's work: I hear good things about Arkady Martine and Samantha Shannon. Any use?
Fazal Majid
@quixoticgeek @cstross in no particular order:
* Steven Erikson, The Malazan Book of the Fallen
* Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London (hat tip to Charlie)
* Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries
* Stephen Brust, the Vlad Taltos series
* Anything by Iain Banks
* Glen Cook, The Black Company
* L.E. Modesitt, the Recluce series
* Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher
* Neal Asher, the Polity series (avoid the foaming-at-the-mouth Brexiteer-inspired Owner series, however)
* Shannon Chakraborty, the Daevabad trilogy
Quixoticgeek
@fazalmajid @cstross have run out of banks... have been working my way through the murder bot series.
Am currently trying to find books ideally by women, ideally with queer main characters.
I realised I can't relate to most of the people in the books I read, and it's depressing. Also fed up with my to read author list being a sausage fest.
Fazal Majid
@quixoticgeek @cstross yes, I have. Can't say I loved it, but at least I finished the series (well, the first trilogy).
It's probably more fun listing the *worst* TV adaptations. My vote goes for the SciFi Channel adaptation of Ursula Le Guin's *A Wizrd of Earthsea*, which was thoroughly disavowed by her.
Quixoticgeek
@fazalmajid @cstross true. But doesn't help with my current search for what to read next...
Quixoticgeek
@fazalmajid @cstross I'm curious, have any of you read Robin Hobbs farseer series (and the following trilogies)? I read them before I read GRRMs stuff. And I feel like he's blatantly plagiarised her in places. But also her books are just so much better.
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