Four book adaptations we want instead of more Lord of the Rings movies | Hacker News Reader

Four book adaptations we want instead of more Lord of the Rings movies

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28 pointsBerislavLopac57 comments

Sanderson has such a following that I can only imagine nothing has turned into movies yet because he's not letting it happen...possibly because he's retaining a lot of creative control. If so, I don't blame him. Movies have become such a part of an author's legacy that even if your fans are clamoring for movies they need to be carefully managed if it's to go well.

Sanderson is very transparent and has weekly fan updates for what he's working on, and annual recaps and stuff. He's mentioned being in talks with Hollywood several times. So it's only a question of when, not if. But, yeah, I think he wants to keep right control on it.

The Chronicles of Amber would be amazing and TV special Effects budgets are more than up for the challenge. Not to mention Zelzany’s work can’t really be continued in written form but an adaptation for film could have license to change some of the more ‘60’s anachronisms.

One of those almost became a TV series.

Anne McCaffrey's Pern series almost got a show from Warner Brothers. They had cast it and were starting set building and were a few days from starting shooting. But WB requested so many changes in the final script that it was no longer really Pern (I've seen it described as a cross between Xena and Buffy). The showrunner, Ronald D. Moore [1], was a fan of the books and quit rather than going along with the changes, and the project died.

There have been some announcements since then I believe, with screenwriters hired, but the projects were never heard from again.

Here are some more. It baffles me that none of these have been made into movies or TV series.

1. Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" series [2]. As far as I know this has never even gotten into development for movies or TV.

2. Richard and Wendy Pini's "Elfquest" series [3]. Warner Brothers announced an Elfquest movie in 2008, but then cancelled it because they were developing another fantasy movie at the same time, "The Hobbit", and didn't want to competing fantasy movies.

3. Larry Niven's Known Space series [4]. One Known Space story, "The Soft Weapon", got adapted to the Star Trek universe to become an episode of the Star Trek animated series. As far as I know no other Known Space project has done anywhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_D._Moore

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fafhrd_and_the_Gray_Mouser

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfquest

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known_Space

Red Mars could be an epic TV series (or a multi-part film). But probably getting a bit geopolitically dated these days unless it does a For All Mankind cold war retro thing. Also I imagine having half the crew being Russian wouldn't fly in terms of media palatability at the moment, nor would an updated crew with more Chinese members.

Supposedly Martian fantasy is DOA in Hollywood thanks to Disney’s John Carter of Mars, which did very badly.

I'm sorry, but imho it would be a gigantic flop or cut and modified so much that no source material will not be recognizable afterwards. As much as I like Mars Trilogy, that's exactly the book which needs to be avoided as a TV source. It has all problems which we see in other shows packed together - sci-fi environment (high cost), big cast, slow pace (glacial pace even, and I did read all books twice by now, and plan to read again), too big primary cast, unrelatable problems for the majority of viewers, way too much new terminology and geography, etc. And it's too damn long, even cutting it won't help. Meaning abandoned after season 1 or 2 because expectations would be too high due to high cost.

Ugh, no, that's a bad idea. Fantasy adaptation on TV need to be based on a plot which is realistically complete in 2, maybe 3 season max. And by complete, I mean without any cliffhangers. Lore may exist for the universe, but should not be a mandatory pre-requisite. Preferably it needs to avoid large battles, big creatures and alien architecture, all that to lower production costs.

For example - Chronicles of Amber by Zelazny, super cool, I would very much like to see it on TV but honestly it would be a failure in production, butchered by the studio and abandoned after 1 or 2 season while needing 5+.

Another example - Memory, Sorrow and Thorn by Williams. Full medieval setting, minimum number of fantasy creatures and screen time with them, small cast. With liberally cutting out whole chapters it can be adapted into an inexpensive, optimally paced 2-3 season show or even movie series a-la LOTR. Diversity in built in, so there is possibility that director won't butcher existing characters for the sake of it.

So the source material to be adapted need to be carefully picked with TV constraints in mind, not just whatever is popular among readers.

I remember reading recently that Amber is being adapted.

Yeah, I read that too somewhere and dread the release day. After seeing Rings of Power and Wheel of Time (but especially ROP) my expectations for new fantasy TV is at absolute zero.

+1 for memory, sorrow, and thorn.

David Brin's "Uplift War" series about dolphins in spaceships would be cool, but perhaps hard to film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uplift_War

Did you know that the Enterprise-D in ST:TNG canonically has dolphin crew on board? Cetacean Ops: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cetacean_Ops

Or for a smaller budget: Zack Parson's "Liminal States", a weird western/noir/sci-fi horror story about immortals hunting each other: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12028255-liminal-states

Hyperion, Dan Simmons

They better do an amazing job with the Shrike if they ever do this adaptation. The Shrike and the story of Paul Duré still haunt my sci-fi dreams.

I really dislike the covers of Hyperion depicting the Shrike. Seems like something that should be left to the imagination in the context of the book format.

> the story of Paul Duré still haunt[s] my sci-fi dreams

Yeah.

Priest > Scholar > Consul > Detective > Poet > Soldier

I want to see a TV series adapted from the Liveship Traders [0] series by Robin Hobb. A perfect mixture of Game of Thrones and Black Sails.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liveship_Traders

Revenger / Shadow Captain / Bone Silence by Alastair Reynolds.

It's (IMHO) very well suited to a series adaptation. (Reasonable set of main actors, accessible, good places to stretch or compress content, few hard-to-visualise internal character mechanics.)

Ooh, yes that could be very good, and the age-of-sail/steampunk aesthetic would be a nice change from the usual gleaming-Imperial-navy/raggedy-Rebel-cowboy space look (Star Wars, Firefly, etc).

The Revelation Space series would be very interesting, but it would need an excellent director to bring home the brutal malevolence of that universe (and paging HR Geiger for the Melding Plague scenes).

TBH I think Revelation Space is the 180° opposite of Revenger in terms of TV/film adaptability. There are just so fricken many things that develop from character's internal views, it's a huge universe with a shitton of characters that randomly overlap, and high fiction to a degree of limiting the target audience quite a bit.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love nothing more than see a good adaptation of Revelation Space, but sadly I think the possible outcomes range between poor and horrible :-(

For sure, same as the Culture, but with more existential and body horror. RS (and the Culture) also have a bad habit of hopping across the universe in space, time which would badly disjoint a single series. They're more like Star Trek with separate series each.

But just imagine the Chasm we could have! Would look so good.

Chasm city could make a mini series but it could turn bad like Netflix Altered Carbon because what made it amazing is not just the book itself but knowing all the other events that came after.

I love Revelation Space series (including all the side novels like dreyfus emergency and chasm city) but I doubt we'll ever see an adaptation for TV with a budget high enough to do justice to the source material. That is because the story is not so mainstream for general audiences, it has a lot of gore / body horror, its very dark at times, and has no clear heroes. It's hard scifi to the point that it's so detached from our everyday reality so it will alienate viewers who aren't already fans of the genre. You can argue GOT wasn't close to our reality but at least characters had motives we are familiar with.

Chronicles of an Age of Darkness by Hugh Cook. It's not that well known, so few will be offended by an adaptation. It's got everything, magic, lore, heros, wizards, witches, giant insects, wars etc. It's written with a certain sense of humour that fits in with modern TV. The series follows different characters who cross paths as friends and enemies. I think it would be a good one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicles_of_an_Age_of_Dark...

The First Law is very, eh, brutal. I mean, GoT had some moments, but one of the main characters and subplots in FLT is a torturer.

There are no completely likeable characters in FLT.

*SPOILER*

IMO there isn't sufficient resolution to a lot of the story at the end, and not enough explanation of why certain characters matter. It could form the basis of a TV series, I suppose, but meh.

I don't regret reading it. I was successfully meta in its message: It was very nihilist in its feeling, and at the end of it, some people are dead and some people aren't. Some bad people are rewarded, some good people are injured, and vice versa. Shit happens.

Nonsense. The torturer (can’t remember the name) is paradoxically extremely likable. Atleast I was rooting for him. To be honest, I liked pretty much every character in that book.

I want to see the Xanth and Dragonlance series on the big screen. I know the later has been done in animation, but so was The Hobbit. Anyone know how I should set my expectations for these properties?

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson So glad they mentioned it. I want to see the training, fights, and battles in this series done with Matrix style CGI so badly!

Amazon's Lord of the Rings and Netflix Witcher were so bad that I would like Hollywood/US studios to stay away indefinitely from my favorite authors.

We really liked “The Rings of Power”. the storyline with the proto-hobbits was particularly interesting.

The usual suspects have been named, so here's some less obvious ones.

As series:

- Hawk and Fisher (Simon R Green) - excellent fantasy action

- Saga of the Exiles (Julian May) - huge scope

- Sinless (KC Alexander) - possibly too filthy

As films:

- Corvis Rebaine (Ari Marmell) - series, similar to Abercrombie

- Halcyon Drift (Brian Stableford) - old classic

- The Dark Lady (Mike Resnick) - interspecies mystery

I want to see _The Forever War_. And it’s short enough that a 90min movie could do it justice.

Charlie Stross' Laundry series. Good stuff, and could benefit from a rewrite-with-hindsight.

These were really good until he changed protagonists. I just couldn’t keep reading after that.

I do respect the recognition that leveling up the protagonist every installment eventually leads to godlike beings fighting each other at a level that humans would be vapourised by mere proximity.

The Dresden Files, say, appears to be running out of headroom for Dresden to be able to throw down without actually wiping Chicago from the map permanently.

Yeah, Bob leveled up a _lot_.

I'd love to see a treatment of the Laundry with a long slow build that turns out to be the ramp to an exponential progression to Case Nightmare Green.

So the actual Laundry Files?

My vote would be for The Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist.

Another series that would be basically a better version of LoTR would be The Belgariad and The Malloreon series from David Eddings. 10+ books worth of material from the two series.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen could be a good one.

And while personally I don’t think it’s a good reason in itself to adapt it, showrunners might like that it also ticks the diversity checkboxes without having to palette swap.

That would have to be more “20 seasons of a miniseries” than a movie adaptation, as dense as the books are. Plus, the magic system is… unique vs everything out there, so it’d be hard to make it understandable.

I would vote for The Crystal Singer by Anne McCaffrey.

Dragonriders for me. Dragon/human pairings need redemption after Eragon. Plus all the time travel and “regressed human colony” aspect.

Dragon/human pairings already got redemption after Eragon in "How to Train Your Dragon".

"How to Train Your Dragon" was good, for sure. I'd still enjoy a live action (as live action as you can get with CGI) version.

A good live action people with CGI dragons could certainly be done now. The technology is there. The 2014 "Paddington" and the 2016 "The Jungle Book" certainly showed that live action and CGI characters can interact really well.

On the other hand animators seem to have found that sweet spot for animated human characters where they are human enough that as long as you are somewhat interested in the story you can easily forget they are animated, but still different enough to avoid the uncanny valley.

Same with animated sets.

If someone were to do a Dragonriders of Pern movie I think I'd prefer fully animated, because Pern really needs at least a trilogy and I think it would have a better shot of getting second and third movies if the first were fully animated.

That's because a fully animated version could have a short at winning the Best Animated Feature Academy Award (at least if they ever change the rules to make the voting for Best Animated Feature sane [1]). A big award win would boost the sequel chances.

If it was live action with animated dragons it would not be eligible for Best Animated Feature.

[1] For Best Animated there are two voting differences from most of the other specialized categories. (1) Every member of the Academy can vote, as opposed to only members in the branches of the Academy related to the category, and (2) voters are not required to have seen all the nominees.

I've seen interviews asking members why those voted for the movies they did and with Best Animated Feature you see a lot of answers like "I haven't watched cartoons since I was 6, but my grandkids wanted to see <Some_Disney_Movie> so I took them. I waited in the lobby doing work on my phone while they watched. When they came out they seemed happy, so I voted for <Some_Disney_Movie", or "My kids streamed <Some_Disney_Movie> 10 times a day for 6 months so I voted for it".

Here's is recent video that goes over in great detail the problems with the Best Animated Feature award [2].

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S8zsRWst7U

A Gormenghast movie/series could be incredible.

That exist! https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0197154/

I remember reading about that...does not seem available for streaming.

The Squire's Tale series. At least some of the books are begging for a film adaptation - say, "The Lioness and Her Knight".

Cat's Cradle! Always surprises me that it doesn't have an adaptation yet.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Will also make a great series if done correctly

It already was a TV series, based on the original radio series.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

The Asian Saga by James Clavell as Shogun was already done very well…

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov would be great

There's a Russian miniseries that's quite good, if you don't mind subtitles. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0403783/

Yes, you are right, I have seen it and it is quite good, thanks for reminding me about it…

Edit: just the Satan’s Ball could be made much better

They can badly translate any of those or any books, put a big dosis of agenda and corrupt our good memories of them with the not subtle at all sponsored messages.

But if we will have to lose something anyway, why not try to make it a bit more challenging, like something hard to visualize by definition? The City and The City was already translated to tv series, and it wasn't good at all. But what if we raise the bet? There is No Antimemetics Division (https://qntm.org/scp) and all the antimemetics idea probably can't go to screen easily, and will probably fail, but if they manage to translate the concept well it could be a big win even if they don't follow closely the argument of the book.

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