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Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

Books tap directly into the imagination in a way that films (very) rarely do.

The most amazing special effects in the world can't match my imagination for fidelity and if they did, they'd still not be mine.

I've noticed that the book to TV/movies I like aren't because they are good adaptations so much as they are close to what I imagined.

It's rare that happens but when it does it makes the TV show a deeply enjoyable, Season 1 of Altered Carbon and all the seasons of The Expanse did/do it but not much else in the last 5 years has.

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If you see Dune in a theatre with good enough sound and screen (ex. IMAX), it’s an incredible experience in a way a book could not be. Not saying it’s “better”, it’s just different in a fundamentally incomparable way.

The movie is missing so much of the detail that made the book great, though. I agree, incomparable, really.

IMO, the best movies are NOT adaptations.

The best adaptations are short stories, like Predestination, from All you zombies. They also didn't meddle with the logic there, since the writers already found it perfect.

Yeah, it's a lot easier to do a faithful 100-minute adaptation of a 50-page story than a 300-page book.

The Mist comes to mind, a novella originally IIRC

I had read and loved The Expanse. I also loved it on tv. Lord of the Ring. Hmmm.

Some of us don't manufacture alternate visual realities in our heads.

But I think that's the point. In a book you don't "see" the visual effects, you just know that they happened.

When you watch a movie, your eyes and ears has to collect the information, and some part of your brain has to turn that into a log of events. You have to do a lot of work to do to keep up with whats going on.

When you are reading, you don't need to do all that work, the author has already decided what is important.

I think the two mediums aren't really comparable, they both just happen to be good ways to tell stories.

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