re: #58 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

Many a sci-fi fan has awaited a major motion picture series to bring the books to life.

Film and Book are two very different story-telling methods. Ringworld is a decent enough action-SF Book but putting it on the screen could be a real mistake. Remember that all of the Ringworld “action” occurs in one very small part of the Ringworld itself, only a fraction onf the entire megastructure is realised in story terms. The visuals, meh, all you can see from the surface of the Ringworld itself is a line in the sky, the “Arch”. The rest of it is basically Larry, Curly and Mo shipwrecked on a desert island among hostile natives with bones through their noses.

Another problem is that novels have too much story in them — a good estimate of a book is that it represents about a minute of script per page of the original work, and Ringworld was a real doorstopper of a book. See also the attempts to put Dune on a multiplex screen. The alternative is to make trilogies but “streamers” aren’t keen these days on sitting through four hours or more to get a resolution to a three-act play.

SF I’d like to see on screen for the story, action and visuals? “Demon Breed” by James H. Schmitz is a wonderful novella, lots of Stuff Going On and a female main action character who out-Ripley’ed Ripley before there ever was a Ripley, plus giant mutant hunting otters (Spiff and Sweeting for the win!). With a well-written script it would run to 100 minutes, no more. It’s basically what Avatar should have been without the blue-painted Honky-will-save-us main plot.