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.