The Best Sci-Fi Film Never Made

[grumbler]

Really?  I thought all the Foundation books not written in the 1950s were crap, and got crappier as he wrote more.

You thought wisely.  Asimov was never a great writer, though he was a great idea-man.  He had fewer good ideas later in life, but kept writing anyway.

[Neil]

It'd be way too much work to bring this to the screen.  Look at the pseudo-history that made up Foundation, and then look at Foundation and Empire- you'd have to heavily rewrite one to make them work as a coherent series; I'm not sure an audience would be up to a film series with formats as disparate as the Foundation books.  The only one I could see not needing a lot of material injected or rewritten is Second Foundation.

IMO the two best stories in the overall arc are the one with The Mule (I forget which actual novel that was) and Forward The Foundation.

I liked the early ones better.

[Ideologue]

Childhood's End 1% (137)

Meh, of all the Arthur C. Clarke books to make into a movie, this probably isn't the one I'd most like to see.  (It's not a bad book, but the end is a little bullshitty, and 3001 or Imperial Earth are better novels and the former would also be far superior in a visual medium.)

Stranger in a Strange Land would probably be a better film than a book because it would allow someone to lop off the last, crappy hundred pages full of extended dull denoument that ensue after Michael learns why people laugh, and also completely jettison the nonsense about angels.

I'd also say that The Possibility of an Island should be on that list, but evidently that was made into a movie, directed by the actual author, and it is meant to be just terrible.

[Razgovory]

Really?  I thought all the Foundation books not written in the 1950s were crap, and got crappier as he wrote more.

You thought wisely.  Asimov was never a great writer, though he was a great idea-man.  He had fewer good ideas later in life, but kept writing anyway.

I don't think any of the Big Three were that good as writers.  Their strength was a good grounding in science (which was absent in most contemporary sci-fi).  They often wrote about things that were theoretically possible while the field was cluttered with stuff about "anti-gravity" machines and the like.

[Ideologue]

Clarke was a good writer, with a clean style, real sense of wonder, good sense of humor, and, depending on what he was trying to do, capable of good characterization.  Heinlein was good, too, but suffered badly from bizarre writing tics, character types, and of course a all-encompassing ideological bias.

In fairness to their contemporaries, Clarke and Heinlein made a lot of shit up that doesn't even pass a cursory examination for scientific plausibility (e.g., telepathy in Childhood's, the alien evolution rays in the 2001 series, Martian God Mode in Stranger, TANSTAAFL in Mistress).

I've never read an Asimov book in my life, so I don't know about him.

[Razgovory]

I'm not saying they were bad.  They were certainly better then me, but they weren't great word smiths.

[DontSayBanana]

Actually, you know what I would have liked to have seen as a movie?  Jack L. Chalker.  Midnight at the Well of Souls.  Like Solaris with some action.

[Ideologue]

I'm not saying they were bad.  They were certainly better then me, but they weren't great word smiths.

I just wonder to whom you're comparing them?  Shakespeare?  Melville?  Fitzgerald?  I mean, I guess they don't rank that highly.  The only SF writers I can think of offhand that are treated to serious respect in literary circles (and even then not unanimously) are Orwell and Houllebecq.  Heinlein might be included in that number too--even though I find Clarke far more appealing.  I'm unsure as to how well-regarded Lem is.

Oh, and there's that pretentious chick who wrote The Handmaid's Tale, whose book I'll never read because the author isn't English-proficient enough to even understand what the words "speculative fiction" mean.

[DontSayBanana]

I just wonder to whom you're comparing them?  Shakespeare?  Melville?  Fitzgerald?  I mean, I guess they don't rank that highly... the only SF writers I can think of offhand that are treated to serious respect in literary circles (and even then not unanimously) are Orwell and Houllebecq.  Oh, and that pretentious chick who wrote The Handmaid's Tale, whose book I'll never read because the author isn't English-proficient enough to even understand what the words "speculative fiction" mean.

Verne or Wells ring a bell?  Also, I'm surprised you'd be willing to grant Heinlein but not Bradbury.

[Ideologue]

I just wonder to whom you're comparing them?  Shakespeare?  Melville?  Fitzgerald?  I mean, I guess they don't rank that highly... the only SF writers I can think of offhand that are treated to serious respect in literary circles (and even then not unanimously) are Orwell and Houllebecq.  Oh, and that pretentious chick who wrote The Handmaid's Tale, whose book I'll never read because the author isn't English-proficient enough to even understand what the words "speculative fiction" mean.

Verne or Wells ring a bell?  Also, I'm surprised you'd be willing to grant Heinlein but not Bradbury.

I did say "offhand."  Are Verne or Wells really considered giants, though?  Not merely SF giants, but literary ones as well?  (Not to draw an arbitrary line, but it tends to be drawn anyway...)

What little Bradbury I've read--Fahrenheit 451 (or whatever the number was) and a few short stories--was just kinda okay to me, and although I'm aware he has a large stature in SF, I'm not sure about "real" literature.

[Eddie Teach]

I did say "offhand."  Are Verne or Wells really considered giants, though?  Not merely SF giants, but literary ones as well?  (Not to draw an arbitrary line, but it tends to be drawn anyway...)

They invented a genre, that's pretty respectable. Much like Poe and Wilkie Collins.

[DontSayBanana]

I did say "offhand."  Are Verne or Wells really considered giants, though?  Not merely SF giants, but literary ones as well?  (Not to draw an arbitrary line, but it tends to be drawn anyway...)

What little Bradbury I've read--Fahrenheit 451 (or whatever the number was) and a few short stories--was just kinda okay to me, and although I'm aware he has a large stature in SF, I'm not sure about "real" literature.

Wells definitely (more for War of the Worlds than The Time Machine), but I guess Verne could be debated.  Bradbury I'd count, but I'd split his work into Fahrenheit 451 and everything else, at least for these purposes.  I figure there's a lot more store to be set by concepts and narrative methods than by a simple grasp of the language- at least that's the only way I can reconcile Conrad's standing.

[Ideologue]

I figure there's a lot more store to be set by concepts and narrative methods than by a simple grasp of the language- at least that's the only way I can reconcile Conrad's standing.

They probably are (and should be), which is why it strikes me as a little odd that the sci-fi ghetto persisted for so long, and to some degree still persists (although when Houllebecq is so widely read, praised, debated, and condemned, and Elementary Particles was framed as a biography of his creator written by a genetically engineered superman, and a third of The Possibility of an Island takes place in the year 3000 or so, it's hard to say that it still exists as recognizably as it did when Atwood and people like her shrieked at anyone who labeled Handmaid's science fiction.)

Also, I liked Conrad in Heart of Darkness.  It seemed like it consisted largely of pretty sentences to me.

Oh, another name occurred to me: Shelley might well count.  Although if my memory of Frankenstein is correct, that really is resting on the strength of the concept and not the actual prose.

They invented a genre, that's pretty respectable. Much like Poe and Wilkie Collins.

I guess so.  Although "writing about shit that doesn't exist but might" was pretty much inevitable.  "A(n) Indian/German/Martian builds a submarine/airship/spaceship and declares war on the world" are pretty easy plots to come up with too, even as much as I like the stories. :p

[jimmy olsen]

I don't think I'd even heard of Houllebecq before this thread. Does that make me an uncultured barbarian?

[Ideologue]

I don't think I'd even heard of Houllebecq before this thread. Does that make me an uncultured barbarian?

Yes, and choosing Harry Turtledove and John Ringo over the finer options available to you doesn't help.

Seriously, he's a reasonably new author.  He's only written four novels; the first, Extension of the Domain of the Struggle aka Whatever in its utterly lame English-edition title was published in 1994.  That said, he's really pretty famous.  He was sometimes hailed as the new Camus, which I suspect is probably a reasonably accurate prediction of his legacy--he shook shit up, to be sure, and I personally think he's a better writer, but I don't think he'll have as large a place in literary history.  He writes a lot about fucking and meaninglessness, though, so he was bound to be my favorite author.