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"The Chronicles of Amber" and "The Forever War" For TV
DarkRabbit writes "i just noticed at the Futon Critic that the Sci-Fi channel announced April 2nd that amongst other popular pieces of fiction, Zelazney's "The Chronicles of Amber" and Haldeman's "The Forever War"
will be getting the mini-series treatment by them sometime in the next year. I'm sure their adaptions will be just as contentious here as was their version of "Dune." Oh, and "Tripping the Rift" arrives as an 'Edgy-South-Park-esque' half-hour cartoon series..."
Zelazney's "The Chronicles of Amber"
I sure hope they let Corwin keep his black and silver leisure suit. It goes so well with the sword.
And I also hope that Eric's beard is "moist" throughout the entire series, because that and the fact that Corwin hates getting little hairs down his shirt are quite possibly the most bizarre details included in the whole series.
--saint
"Never underestimate the power of a dark..."
Well I thought it was a great book, good story.
But I don't see how they could make it a miniseries.
You can't communicate the same sense of irrelevance on TV that you can in a book.
For me the fact that the characters felt so separated from the world, "They didn't know what they were fighting for".
This is a common concern in books & movies, and would be lost. (Enders game, he goes and spends a month in his boat, Armageddon, they go out for a wild party)
I just don't see it working.
They'll cut it out.
Forced sex & conscription? That will be good, might as well get the pleasure platoons out. (Moon has a harsh mistress - heinlein)
Star Ship Troopers was a decent book, but the movie just skipped all that "stuff" that didn't make a flashy movie.
Heck they didn't even have battle suits in it.
"Tripping the Rift" will be Sci Fi's first animated series. Produced by Cine Groupe and Film Roman, the show is about a misfit group of cabinmates aboard a spaceship. Created by Chuck Austen and Chris Moeller, the series "will have the kind of edgy feel that makes 'South Park' a hit on Comedy Central," said Hammer.
Will it have an animated piece of fecal matter called "captain's log"?
Actually, I think Forever Peace would have been a much more "TV friendly" novel. It's a bit less deep, and the soldierboy sequences would have been amazing!
Finally we get to experience the REAL power of a dark clown! Now let's hope they show it here in the UK. I doubt it'll happen, but someone's bound to record each episode and put it online. Maybe they'll even release a DVD!
It's great to see an underground(ish) cartoon like Tripping The Rift get some real recognition instead of them just showing another program invented by a major TV company 'cause their marketing stats say it'll do well.
You've got mail. Pattern baldness. - Crow
My God, how the heck will they get that on TV? The original animation had enough sexual innuendo to give any Conservative American a heart attack. Mind you, it had some excellent quotes:
Why don't you fight without using your faggot clown powers, son? -- Chode
Come on you lipstick wearing felch monkey! -- Chode
Never underestimate the power of a dark clown!! -- Darph Bobo
I'm looking forward to it!
Dr Fish
wasn't Forever Peace, but Forever Free.
Both very good books, IMHO.
Part of the feeling of irrelevance came from Joseph and Marygay's feeling of being stranded in time. ST:TNG touched on this topic one episode, though with a different treatment - the soldier who fought for a society, and is no longer able to return. In Forever War, the alienation is from cultural drift exaggerated by time dilation. In ST:TNG is was from the violence conditioning the people received in order to become soldiers.
Which brings us back to Forever Peace, in an odd way.
I also preferred the SciFi Dune miniseries to the old movie. I hope they do good treatments of both Forever War and Amber.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
In either case it will suck.
Compared to this one Lord of the Rings is a child's play. I just do not see how you can make the Courts of Chaos or the GhostWheel in a movie today. Even having the budget for all Star War flicks combined with the budget for Titanic and Independence Day.
I still get shudders remembering how did they vandalise Heinlein's "Starship Troupers". Dunno about Forever War but a miniseries on the Amber Chronicles will make that debacle seem like a work of high art by comparison...
Shudder... Shudder...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Wow, great! Forever war was a really good book. I also liked the sort of seqel, Forever Peace.
;P
I'm a fan of the spinoff show, Forever Knight
I first read the Chronicles of Amber in the 3rd grade. I did a book report on it. And one of those shoebox things (diorama?) My diorama was from the cover of the first (second?) book: Corwin, sword in one hand, bloody severed head of talking shadow cat in the other hand.
I can remember being puzzled why my third grade teacher kept asking me if anyone had tried to touch me in an uncomfortable way....
I hope that the Sci-Fi network keeps this up. Whatever one's opinions about particular TV adaptations, I think that it would be a very good idea for Sci-Fi network to make bringing classic SF literature to television as part of their mandate.
That's a lot better reason for the channel to exist than to show continuous repeats of the same old serieses.
I'm not sure about this one. I'm usually pretty skeptical when it comes to series/mini-series/movies based on books I've read and liked. I'm not saying thy are all worthless of course and some very decent adaptations have been made, yet I'm allways a little disappointed. I read a lot and love the way imagination is used when reading, something that is totally devoid in videos/TV etc...
Because of this, I'm dissapointed when I see a movie after reading the book and at the same time I'm usually not as enthralled when reading the book after seeing a movie (as it was the cas for Jurassic Park for example).
What I'm trying to get at is that these series are cool, yes but who are they targeted to? The readers who may be dissapointed? or the people who hav'nt read the books (lots of them running about) and that may be dissapointed if tey decide to do so after? Or probably your average viewer who hs'nt read the book, will like the series and will not read the book?
Who's a winner in this situation?
how does one change his
Imagine Amber as a 2-hour mini-series. It is enough to cover the first *book*, maybe. If anyone had the feeling that Lord of the Rings was rushed, this will be ten times worse.
Then 'Forever War'. One word: Battlesuits. Certainly the special effects technology is up to showing them... but *you can't see the actor's face* in a battlesuit. My bet is they'll throw away any part the book which doesn't relate to combat action, and botch that by throwing away the suits. Result: a 'Starship Troopers' clone. Enough Said.
WHY can't the movie industry *build* on the great SF out there? Imagine "Snow Crash" done with the technology used for "Final Fantasy". Imagine Lord of the Rings as a *series* - say, 5 hours for each book. Imagine a production of "Bridge of Birds" on the same lines as "Princes Bride". I could go on for *hours*.
Maybe "we" ("the guild of paying movie-goers and ad-watchers") don't deserve any better. Even when a good production gets made (by accident or thanks to the courage of some producer), it tends to be a commercial flop.
Take for example the animation move done based on "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle. Can you believe it? serious fantasy, in animation, not targeted at kids! In a word: a flop. You probably never even heard of it, but trust me, you won't regret seeing it, even if you've read the book.
BOOK. That's the answer, *read a good book*. Come to think of it... it doesn't have ads, it costs very favorably compared to a movie ticket, and you don't need Tivo to time-shift it!
Just been bought FW for by birthday. Not bad, some interesting stuff, but it didn't seem like great or anything. Just another Vietnam-era "fighting-a-pointless-war" thing, plus teenage male fantasy stuff with compulsory promiscuity. Interesting ideas in changing society over time, but nothing outstanding ("Brave New World" but gay).
Trouble is, most SF authors are good at coming up with ideas but crap at writing. Witness Clarke, Asimov, Bova, Bear (and Crichton just about makes SF too) - all got great ideas and concepts, but lousy execution.
Off the topic, anyone know anything about Laurence M Janifer? I've got his book "Survivor", and that seems pretty good - pretty well-written, decent characterisation, basically an intelligent SF action book. Anyone know what his other stuff is like? I reckon that kind of thing would translate pretty well to screen.
Grab.
Star Ship Troopers was a decent book, but the movie just skipped all that "stuff" that didn't make a flashy movie.
As was said at the time: "Starship troopers: Based on the back of a book by Robert A Heinlein"
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
I guess I can hope against hope that they will do the same for Daniel Keys Moran's _The Continuing Time_ series, starting with Emerald Eyes...
There was once an Infocom-like game based on the Chronicles of Amber; does anyone recall it?
I've been a Roger Zelazny fan for a long time, somewhere around 1985 when another student gave me "Lord of Light" to read. About that time, after reading the Chronicles, I adopted "Dworkin" as a BBS handle (and that has since morphed into my present moniker).
Though the first Amber novels are good reads, I think his true talent was in the short story. Pick up "Unicorn Variations" if you'd like a fairly representative anthology. And of course, read "Lord of Light", one of the seminal (heh heh, he said seminal) novels of Science Fiction.
And if you are a Chronicles fan, stay far away from the Second Chronicles -- they're horrible. There were some really interesting ideas in it such as the Ghostwheel -- a hyper computer that was designed with the assumption that different laws of physics applied, but they were written near to his end, and I think it shows.
Anyone know if they're doing the entire series, or just the first five?
I think it would be a better series if they stuck to Corwin's story. It's more complete (was the tenth book supposed to be the last? If so, it's the worst ending to a series I've ever read), and it's easier to produce (sure, you've got the Trump effect and the shadow creatures and the Pattern, but all that Logrus/Ghostweel crap is gone). Besides, it's just a better story that way. Merlin's story has always seemed tacked on, and the second-generation characters are far less interesting.
No, wait, I got it -- it's the "War on Lame War Metaphors Used for Political Posturing". That's a Forever War.
>Just been bought FW for by birthday. Not bad, some interesting stuff, but it didn't seem like great or anything. Just another Vietnam-era "fighting-a-pointless-war" thing, plus >teenage male fantasy stuff with compulsory promiscuity. Interesting ideas in changing society over time, but nothing outstanding ("Brave New World" but gay).
The book is really about how the experience of war seperates the poor bastards made to fight in it from the rest of society. The time-dilation plot device (tours of duty last a few month subjectively, but hundreds of years pass back on earth) is just an exaggerated metaphor for what the author felt like after returning from his own stint in Vietnam.
I found it to be a really moving, an rather well written book. Definitelyone of the best anti-war novels I have ever read and a good contender for a place in the top ten SF novels.
The Amber Chronicles have been reprinted, as
_The Great Book of Amber : The Complete Amber
Chronicles_ [Eos (Trade); ISBN: 0380809060], which
has all 10 books in it.
Of course, I wish they'd done it as two separate
books for the Corwin and Merlin series, since I
think the former is *far* superior.
Personally, I couldn't stand Zelazny's prose, so by the end of book 5, reading it had become a tedious chore. I never even cracked book 6. I might like the miniseries somewhat better... Lots of gratuitious action and dialogue, which will translate well to the screen. And the books are fairly short -- all ten combined are shorter than the Lord of the Rings trilogy -- so I don't see screen time as being too big an issue.
Besides which, pulpy novels are easier to adapt. Amber is pure pulp sci-fantasy, so it will be much harder to screw up than something as weighty as Dune.
With the exception of NPiA, I didn't even like the books. But I'm looking forward to the miniseries.
They could easily make the Forever War without battlesuits. The point of the war was that it was dehumanizing, utterly violent, depressing, futile and unnecessary. That could be conveyed without the battle suit, although they do need something better than the Starship Troopers movie.
Also, the aliens need to be reflexively repulsive. Like a spider on your desk, they have to be something you would shoot on sight without thinking...
The part I'm interested in seeing is the changes in earth's culture each time the time-displaced soldiers return home. Particularly: How are they going to handle the homosexuality aspects? That plays a large part in the book.
Finally, it wasn't clear to me at the end of the book, did the humans and aliens merge into one race, or had the aliens actually won the war and taken over humanity? I'd like to see thier take on that.
Read a good book lately?
The initial DVD of LOTR: FOTR will be the normal 3 hour cut, but a subsequent one coming in November will have a FOUR hour cut, which should be pretty close to your wish. FYI.
The Chronicles of Amber were some of my favorite books growing up. Yeah, Merlin's chronicles weren't as good... There were good ideas, but they ended up getting drowned in a lot of not-so-good ideas that really changed the entire premise of the series. Still, Corwin's story was excellent. Why do I think the series would fit in a big (or small) screen format? First, the books are short. Really short. Teeny, in fact. I'm sure that the entire Amber series (Merlin's series included) doesn't even reach the length of some of the books in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (I mean, Lord of Chaos was what, 1000 pages?). The problem with most movie adaptations is that the source material is much longer and richer than could ever be put in the standard 2 hour movie format or in a mini-series of reasonable length (reasonable to the networks, not to the viewers). Now, not only are the books short, a huge portion of those books are taken up by descriptions. Somebody up above mentioned Eric's "moist" beard and how Corwin hates getting hairs under his shirt. Stuff like that fills the books (unfortunately, it has been so long since I've read them that I couldn't think of my own examples, but oh well). You know how they say that a picture is worth a thousand words? With a good director, this would be more than true. What about the rest of the book? The stuff that isn't description? Stuff happens, and it happens rather quickly - to the reader at least, if not in the book itself. Take the plot of the first book (ummm... *SPOLIERS*... yeah...): Corwin wakes up, escapes from a mental hospital, goes to Flora's house, beats the crap out of some shadow creatures, goes on a drive to Amber and sees lots of strange stuff on the way (wasn't there a big guy eating cars or something?), gets attacked by Julian's men, runs down to Remba, gets laid, walks the pattern (and lots of flashback scenes), heads on over to the castle, gets in a fight, runs to Bleys, builds an army (this would take, what, one or two scenes?), attacks Amber, and so on. This is pretty much one action scene after another, and with Corwin's initial memory loss, it wouldn't be so awkward when another character gets to explain the Nifty Science Fiction/Fantasy Laws of Physics (tm) to him. Pacing could be made quick without any huge spans of time (like the armies getting built) seeming to vanish due to time working differently in Shadow. Of course, that somewhat changes when Corwin gets thrown in the slammer, but it still could be done very well in a TV or movie format. My only fear is that all the sword fights will be filled with Crouching Tiger meets The Matrix special effects.
I don't think the Second Chronicles were as bad as you think they were. IMHO, the worst of Zelazny's writings were better than the best writings of many more widely read authors.
I'm reminded of an old review (written by Harlan Ellison, IIRC) of the movie 'Field of Dreams.' In it, Harlan claims that most literature (at least that written by men) is about a man's search for his father. The reasons for this are fairly obvious and I won't bore you with them. By extent, there are portions of such fiction that are autobiographical. It's certainly obvious that this theme is pretty prevalent in both Amber chronicles. Read a little deeper and you just might find that the Second Chronicles is worth your time.
Of course the end of the Chronicles is disappointing. It was meant to be. I think Zelazny made a decision not to tie up all the loose ends. The end of a real story is never wrapped up entirely. Merlin, and Zelazny, get the same ending we all do. We turn and head back to Chaos.
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I was really hoping B5:LotR would get picked up as a series.
While the Legends of the Rangers tv-movie wasn't the greatest thing ever committed to screen, I thought that like pizza, not so great B5 is still pretty good, and MUCH better than anything Trek has put out lately.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I hear "Zelazney book made into movie", And I think "Damnation Alley"
Horribe movie, after which Zelazney said he would never want any of his works to be a movie again.
Of course, now that he's dead, his estate can throw all respect to the wind and cash in!
Papas dead CHaCHing!
sheesh.
by the way, Damnation alley is a great sci-fi book.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Finally, it wasn't clear to me at the end of the book, did the humans and aliens merge into one race, or had the aliens actually won the war and taken over humanity? I'd like to see thier take on that.
Humans started creating clones and using them to crew their ships. The Taurans were clones without the concept of an individual.
The other point was that it was the humans who started the war.
Battlestar Galactica was perhaps one of the worst things ever to happen to science fiction, or to television. It completed the "cutification" of science fiction as a genre (can anyone say "daggit," Noah "Boxey" Hathaway, and mock swearing?), a process begun by Star Wars, and also elevated non-actors to dubious stardom (Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict). It took a B-grade actor from a fondly remembered Western series and tried to invest him with somber grace (Lorne Greene), all the while borrowing its storyline from Mormon mythology.
Complete, utter crap, unless filtered through the non-discerning lens of a 6 - 12 year old's mind.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Although the acting left a little to be desired, it wasn't horrible. Many people will disagree with me on this, but I preferred how House Harkonnen was portrayed as an arrogant aristocracy in this series than the filthy pigs in the original, 1980s version of the movie
It was the movie that had the "happy ending". An inexplicable planetwide monsoon.
How are they going to handle homosexuality? I'm more interested in how they're going to handle HETEROsexuality. They seemed to be having sex about every night, at least at first, and that's something you definately can't show on TV.
Re: the end of the book. As the above reply said, the Taurans were all just clones of a single individual. As humans started using clones to fight the war, they somehow managed to establish a rapport with the Taurans (I think that part was a little fuzzy), and in communicating established that the Taurans had never attacked humanity, early human ships were simply very accident prone. Furthermore, had the war continued indefinately, humanity would eventually have won, because the Taurans were much less used to fighting.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I've read Dune upwards of 10 times now. I've seen the 4 hr movie, the horrifically hacked 2.5 hr movie, and Sci-Fi's miniseries.
If we could've had the costuming and actors of the movie with Sci-Fi's adaptation it would have been a helluva mini-series.
I will never forgive the original movie for turning the "wierding way" into "wierding modules" quite possibly one of the stupidest ideas in an adaptation. That and the final battle scene..."This is Paul Atredies on a sand worm." "Here's the rear view of Paul Atredies on a sandworm" "Sand worms are REALLY BIG" "Here is yet another shot of Paul Atredies on top of a really big sand worm" "Did we show that sandworms are really big?" It was pathetic. They could've cut 30 min of worthless footage from the movie simply by paring down that scene.
On the Sci-fi side, the Bene-Geserit costumes were laughable, and the guild navigators looked like ET gone horribly wrong. I also expected the foam sound-stage rocks to come tumbling down if one of the actors leaned on them. Costuming and sets aside, the actual way they adapted the book was pretty good. Giving Irulan a larger role was necessary to allow the audience a better understanding of who both she and Feyd were. You get a glimpse of just how slimy Feyd was.
I've read the Amber series a couple of times, so I look forward to Sci-Fi's adaptation with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation. Watching Corwin on a Star Trek (the original) style set pathetically trying to pass as one of the more bizarre shadows of amber would be positively painful to watch.
"That's no moon"... Obi-Wan Kenobi
I agree, the first five Amber books seem pretty feasible in terms of technology. They're not even all that long. Herewith I express guarded hopefulness. It really depends on whether they preserve the "attitude".
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"
That will be good, might as well get the pleasure platoons out. (Moon has a harsh mistress - heinlein)
Can't see either "The Moon is a Harsh mistress" or Ben Bova's "Moonwar" (which is very similar) being made into a movie or a miniseries right now...
I think Moon is one of Heinleins better books.
Although he has an obsession with the super intelligent quick witted character.
Um ... what you may not realize is that The Forever War was the first "Vietnam-era 'fighting-a-pointless-war' thing" to be done in SF, and for that matter one of the first significant Vietnam novels in any genre. Haldeman wrote it just a couple of years after he came home, and his tour of duty was one of the worst I've ever heard of.
... I can understand your criticism of the prose styles of Asimov, Bova, Bear, and Crichton, but if you really think Haldeman and Clarke are "crap at writing," then I have to wonder what writers you consider good stylists. Haldeman, particularly, writes with grace and precision which other writers in all genres would do well to emulate.
As for "lousy execution"
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Having recently read the re-release of the book, the ending (spoiler):
Humanity breeds to a perfect individual, and then decides that since that individual is perfect, they'll just make clones of that person so that humanity will be as efficient as possible.
Once a sufficient portion of humanity is made up of clones, they begin to form a group mind.
The human group mind contacts the tauran group mind (to me, implied telepathy) and they discover:
a) the taurans have been all-clones and group mind for a long time.
b) the taurans didn't start the war. Actually, some humans who wanted to profiteer off of producing war-time goods started the war.
c) the taurans are more than willing to bend over backwards to achieve peace now that they can comprehend 'human' thought.
Also, haldeman has brought out two pseudo sequels fairly recently, neither of which measures up to the first, but both of which do help to explain some of this stuff better.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Actually, I'm not too sure about Vinge yet, having only just discovered him, but so far he's incredible.
HTH!
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
You must not have been looking very hard. You can get all 10 Amber books in one large volume, The Great Book of Amber. I've seen this in Barnes and Noble as well, and a relative bought a copy for me for Christmas.
And I found Heinlein's style to be all over the board--some of it is good, some of it is just abysmal. At this point in my life, Heinlein holds little draw for me. He's light on advanced science, and Iain Banks does a better job with advanced societies. IMO, of course. YMMV, &c.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Check out Rama for a really clunky read. I know there's some decent Clarke stuff. But to me it all seems too clinical, too much like he'd prefer to be writing a paper on it instead of telling a story.
I see what you mean about FW being the first out - sure, there wasn't anything to judge against. But I'm not sure it stands up too well against later versions of the theme (cf. Lord of the Rings which compares favourable to any other fantasy book).
Grab.
Yeah, Herbert's good. I used to like Heinlein at school, but since I've started re-reading, it all looks a bit too space-opera with added male-fantasy elements (nudity, freely-available sex, freely-available guns and knives).
Donaldson's Gap series is good in parts - trouble is, he really does tend to go on a bit! And the same old phrases crop up throughout which makes it a bit repetitive sometimes. But on a characterisation and plot level the Gap series is outstanding, with a dozen main characters, each with their own agendas and all trying to work out what the others are planning. Pretty awesome, if you've got the stamina to work through it.
Grab.
Phage Press is not defunct, or at least it wasn't two years ago when I met Eric Wujcik in person. Rumors had been going around about the death of his company for a couple of years thanks to one of the major catalog companies claiming that it was dead. The truth of the story is that this company had not paid Phage Press for a shipment of the Amber DRPG and its suppliment "Shadow Knight." Since Wujcik was holding off on another shipment until they paid for the first, this distributor told all the stores that were trying to order more that Phage Press was out of business and continued to refuse to pay Wujcik.
Since Wujcik does not have enough money to fight them in court, this rumor persists to this day even though you can still get the game through other channels.
I just wish I could remember which company it was...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Well, yeah, Rama was an info-dump, not a novel. But works like The City and the Stars and Fountains of Paradise (if I'm remembering the titles right -- it's been a while) are masterpieces of style as well as of ideas. And his short stories, which are numerous, tend to be even better than his novels.
... well, I honestly can't think of any works along those lines I've enjoyed as much. I'm fond of David Drake's work, but it's very different in tone from Haldeman's, and he's not the stylist Haldeman is by any means.
As for FW not stacking up well against later variations on the theme
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I think I'd rather see somethind done along the lines of "Eye of Cat". No large amounts of cash needed; only Cat requires computer animation (and perhaps some of the delusional scenes later in the book).
Although I doubt 95% of the audience would actually get the ending without it being explained to them....
Still, it's chock full of action, character development, and even does the Hollywood Politically Correct thing by putting Native Americans in a good light.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?