Apr. 13th, 2013

F/SF Films

Apr. 13th, 2013 10:16 am
stoutfellow: Joker (Joker)
In the past week or so, word has come down about film adaptations of topnotch F/SF work. SyFy is talking about doing TV-movies of Niven's Ringworld and Clarke's Childhood's End, and some filmmaker I've never heard of is proposing a series of films based on C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine books.

Ringworld I can see. The real star of the story is the Ringworld itself; the approach to the Ringworld, Fist-Of-God Mountain, and the eye storm make for magnificent spectacle, and if there's anything Hollywood does right, it's spectacle. Even SyFy ought to be able to do this right. Lots of CGI, of course, even at the beginning with Nessus and Speaker. It'll probably wind up as mind candy, but it should be good mind candy.

Childhood's End.... Unh-unh. The story is thoroughly disjointed, as far as characters are concerned; the only character who's present all through is Karellen, who is after all not even remotely human. Still, Karellen's first visible appearance, the visit to the Overlords' home world, and the final destruction of Earth could be done well. I don't really see this not being a fiasco, though.

The Morgaine books might be doable. I wonder whether they'll be able to capture the spectacle of it (any scene with Changeling, but most especially Morgaine's confrontation with the qhalur in Fires of Azeroth) and the subtleties of personality. Morgaine herself is such a complex character; showing why she is the way she is might be difficult. And how well will they catch the nuances of the scene in which she finally tells Vanye to braid his hair, and when he is unable to (because of his arm injury) offers to do it for him. That's a powerful scene, and hard to do. (I've envisioned a flashback to Vanye's childhood, when he learned the importance of the braid....)

I'm interested in all three of these endeavors. I'm not really that hopeful for any of them, though.
stoutfellow: Joker (Joker)
So, I've had Skyrim for... close to a month now. (Really?) I finally decided that I needed a game guide, to help me plot out my players' progression. (My current Nord warrior will not be my last character!) A trip to Amazon was the result, and I ordered David Hodgson's Official Guide.

Of course, no one can eat just one. I wound up dropping nearly $200 on purchases. On the light end of things, I picked up the second Fables collection by Bill Willingham. (I read the volume that was nominated for the Hugo at the Reno Worldcon, and recently bought and read the first collection, which was fun enough to merit another purchase.) I also picked up Microcosmic God, the second volume of the collected stories of Theodore Sturgeon. (The first volume was a bit of a disappointment, but the title story of this volume was selected for the first SF Hall of Fame volume, and deservedly so.) Also, Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves (the sequel to The Stress of Her Regard), Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Fortress (I have Sharpe's Triumph and Sharpe's Tiger already), and Eric Flint's 1636: The Kremlin Games. Also, I'm taking a flyer on Sarah Caudwell's mystery novel Thus Was Adonis Murdered, with an eye towards the rest of that series if this one's good.

More seriously, I ordered Isabell Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration, which I'd seen recommended on Ta-Nehisi Coates' site (and been reminded of by [personal profile] al_zorra); Xiaoming Wang's Dogs: Their Fossil Relatives and Evolutionary History; Dava Sobel's The Planets - when she's on her game, she's one of the best at the popular history of science; Peter H. Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy (and damn, that war was such an unmitigated disaster; the only good thing about it was the Peace of Westphalia); and one more prize: Reveil Netz' new translation of Archimedes, The Two Books on the Sphere and the Cylinder. I've read Netz' account of his team's reanalysis of Archimedes' long-lost The Method; now I'd like to see what light that sheds on Archimedes' other works.

The light and the serious: of such is balance made.

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