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Scifi Channel to Make Ringworld Miniseries
Snaller writes "The Sci Fi Channel has listed its programming for the upcomming year, it includes the Farscape miniseries already mentioned by Slashdot, it also includes a miniseries based the legendary scifi story by Larry Niven: Ringworld. In the far future 4 travelers crash on a ring around a sun in a distant system. Shall be interesting to see how they depict the Puppeteers."
I for one have been waiting anxiously for someone to do a movie or miniseries on Ringworld. Hopefully they'll treat it as well as they did the Dune books.
DeviantArt Page
NSFWWell, a rendition of one, anyway:
/ br ain.html
8 94 803247/002-9348466-3390413?v=glance
http://students.biology.lsa.umich.edu/bio208_11
The image is taken from this book, which is definitely teh awesome:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Also on that page was this:
...)
ALIEN APOCALYPSE: Another Bruce Campbell action fest, this time with Campbell playing a deep space explorer who returns to Earth years after leaving it, only to find the planet has been invaded by an alien race and mankind reduced to slaves. Campbell and his fellow astronauts try and mobilize a rebellion.
Aliens, an invasion and Bruce Campbell? They might aswell rename this 'Duke Nukem: The Movie'. Should be cool. (Tho knowing Sci-Fi
Last I heard, OSC was working on a screenplay for Ender's Game. No URL's, but it was up on his website. I'm sure google will point to this.
-- DrZaius - Minister of Sciences and Protector of the Faith
Ringworld? Good lord, why? With its cookie-cutter characters and trite plot, the only thing it has going for it is its mildly interesting setting. Yes, the ideas of dyson spheres and artificial worlds are neat, but Niven does a terrible job at using them in a novel.
Instead of devising an interesting and meaningful story to occur within the setting, he instead makes the setting the story and throws in some hackneyed and stereotypical characters with an inane plot to act as placeholders. This doesn't make for very good sci-fi, in my opinion.
I'm sure this series will have plenty of good opportunities for fancy special effects, but that's really the only redeeming feature of Ringworld. It has zero literary value otherwise.
In the open scenes of Ringworld, Louis Wu travels around the Earth for his 200th birthday -- using transporter booths to jump to the next timezone and have a 48-hour long birthday party. In the very rare first edition of the book, he travels from West to East, which is the wrong direction. Later versions corrected this.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Please see this one.
Apparently, a pair of ostriches. But.... maybe not.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Can't wait to see the museum on the Kzinti Homeworld. I want to see how they display a stuffed human. The only human ever to invade the Kzinti royal palace and who tried to kill all inside the compound. (It was a revenge thing) This was during the Man-Kzinti wars before Man became the victor. And I wonder what revelations will be made of the altered genome that causes all humans to turn into "Protectors" --Tnuctipun?-
I'm wondering exactly how much material from the books they're going to include.
The original Ringworld book doesn't really end with a tense climax. It's a satisfying ending for a book, but I think it would fall a bit flat in a movie/miniseries.
Ringworld Engineers ends with a good fight scene, but including that would mean they'd have to explain Pak Protectors and a lot of other things. I don't think that much material can be adequately handled in a four-hour miniseries.
Ringworld Throne just wasn't very good at all, so let's not go there.
And how faithful will they be to the books? Will they have the "invulnerable" General Products hull? Will they have the Slaver shotgun? Will they include the Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds?
This has so much potential to be great or awful.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
It will be interesting to me how they imagine and portray the scope of the Ringworld. All the great science-fiction that inspired me let me "see" things I'd never seen before. To see thousand-mile high walls, oceans the size of planets and the curve of the Ringworld in the sky would have to be mesmerizing.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
Niven seems to have had this problem across the board.
I really loved his books The Legacy of Herot, and The Mote in God's Eye... but a couple of years later he wrote sequels to both that were just terrible. He undermined the stories of the originals and filled the sequels with mindless drivel.
That said, I highly reccomend the first book of both of those, and Lucifer's Hammer. All three of those books are imaginative, gripping, and well worth the read.
Gratuituous cross-species sex to seal contracts is not part of normal human behavior, it's just some guy with weird sexual hangups playing out his bizarre fantasies in print.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Think of Matrix: II (so crappy, I forgot the subtitle!)
We don't need a gratuitous scene that does NOTHING for the plot of the movie.
I mean, really... I remember sitting there thinking, "Finish up already, I want to get on with the movie!" during that whole scene.
Hey!
This guy brings up a legitimate point. I don't think he deserves to be modded "troll."
I loved Ringworld back in the day; it was one of the first grown-up genre SF novels I read, and I flipped head over heels for it and Niven's other stuff. I read it and the other "Known Space" books many times.
Now, I wonder what the heck I was thinking. It's heavy on sense-of-wonder, but there really is not much to the story.
The setting itself turns out to be kind of shabby: Niven had to add all sorts of kludgy patches to keep the poor Ringworld together and viable. If your aim is to create lots of secure living space, you are far better off building lots of self-contained space habitats.
Looking back, I suspect I was blown away by the Big Thingness of it, and the intricate background material that added versimilitude. I know more about people now, and more about science and engineering too. Ringworld just doesn't cut it for me any more.
Before I'm accused of having "too small a mind" to appreciate it, go read another book I first read way back when but still respect: Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker.
That non-novel fictional future history is utterly lacking in interesting characters, but dang, talk about scale! Talk about scope! Star Maker details the rise and fall of galactic civilizations over a span of billions of years. There are battles involving mobile planets and nova bombs. Dozens of bizzare races. Water-filled artificial worlds full of aquatic sapients linked together with webs of nervous tissue. The good guys have something like the Prime Directive. Their big ultimate project runs so long that it is threatened by the heat death of the universe.
And, hey! This Stapledon guy? He INVENTED the Dyson Sphere . . . go ask Freeman Dyson*. The far-future super-civilizations in the book use enveloping spheres to gather every bit of sunlight from the few remaining stars.
Stefan
* Or, if you don't have his email address, go read Disturbing the Universe, where he directly credits Star Maker for the "sphere" idea.
I know, now we'll make him dumb as a brick, a horrible klutz, and give him a "life debt" so he feels compeled to serve white male humans.
Damn, you're right, what might those ultra liberal politically correct maniacs be smoking.
It's kind of like how everyone thinks Sci-Fi did such a great job with Dune. While both mini-series were better than most of Sci-Fi's original garbage, I actually perfer the four hour feature film to either. And even then, I think Dune just doesn't work in non-book form. Of course, a few short years ago, people were probably saying the same the about the LOTR books.
I'm not trying to sound elitist, in fact I don't read much at all (especially compared to mighty KFG), but the six Dune books (I'm not counting the new trash, heh) were not really about sci-fi. Sci-fi was just a good excuse for Herbert to share some cool ideas about politics, drugs, the meaning of life, etc.
And on the subject of reading, I did read the online version of Life Without Principle you linked to once. While it was interesting, it seems like most of those ideas are better expressed in some of your posts, as they apply to this century a little more.
OK, I better stop this KFG fanboy stuff before I scare you off slashdot. Bye! Heh.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I'm less interested in seeing a Puppeteer than I am in seeing a kzin. Maybe they should rent the team who did Sully in "Monsters, Inc."
I had forgotten about the alien sex part (it's been 20 years since I read it). I was thinking of Louis Wu, Teela and the zero-g bed. However, Niven was never that graphic about it anyway.
As for "weird sexual hangups", there is a (possibly apocryphal) tale about an early sex researcher who, when defining various sexual behaviors, categorized everything he personally did not like as "abnormal" or "perverted".
And just because they are "weird" doesn't mean they are "wrong".
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Check Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestials for a pix of a Pierson's Puppeteet.Let see how they do Speaker To Animals (C'hmee),A Kzin (8 ft tall organge cat with hands.(carnivore)
Geek Hillbilly
And, while I appreciated the Sci-Fi Channel's rendition of the novel, particularly that they more or less stuck to the story, the sets all had a very Star Trek feeling to them. In scenes that were supposed to be out in the open desert, it was obvious that they were on a soundstage with a wooden floor under their feet. In 1977, Star Wars did a better job of convincing me that the deserts of Tatoonie (sp?) were real than this did.
I suppose that I should be happy for any true-to-the-story rendition of a novel that I like, but I've gotten so used to epic-scale visuals in theatrical movies that watching "made for TV" productions is hard.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
The Louis Wo character is over 200 years old.
He may be over 200, but due to the spice treatments (NOT DUNE SPICE, this spice mearly reverses/stops the aging process) he looks about 25-35. He is also very good at solving problems.
What I really want to know, is how they are going to portray the Kzin "Speaker to Animals" (I can't remember his original title). I hope they have the Jim Henson company make him a giant mupet or something similar. A CG Kzin wouldn't look very good at all.
As to what a Pierson's Puppeter would look like. A ball with two leggs, two heads and two long necks. each with it's own mouth and eye. The mouths dubble as hands and the necks as arms.
Now the really big question is, who is going to play the 25 (i think) year old univers's luckiest girl? (and yes, i do know what happens to her later on.) It's the chick that is going to make this flick popular.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
People are so damn PC these day's they'll make the idiotic mistake of calling black people from anywhere african-americans. I just wanted to yell at this one girl who asked durring a Q&A with german exchange students (all white) if they had any african-american students at their school. 'Black' may be offensive to some people(certanly less offensive than some other things), but 'african-american' is stupidly PC and confusing (charlize theron, teresa heinz-kerry). We're all just americans(although the canuks and mexicans dont like that either) some of us are brown, some of us are peachish, and so on. I'll start calling 'black' americans african-americans when everyone starts calling me, a 'white' american, a belgian/irish-american... [/rant]
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
At any rate, I may be desensatized to it by Heinlein, but I don't find Niven over the top in that department. Also, while I agree that everything you named is a cliche now I'm not sure how cliche they were back when he wrote it. I certainly think the puppeteers where original, especially when you take into account the irony of their cowardice given their immense power, and the way the puppeteer in the book was viewed by his fellow aliens back home. And really, a LOT of good books can be made to appear simple if their details are stripped away. Tolkein's books all start looking like simple "quest" plots. Star wars ditto. Really, it seems to be the case with most any author that puts the kind of thought and detail into the world of their books that authors like Niven and Tolkein do. In these books, the scenery is what makes the book interesting, not so much what happens. If you don't like those types of books, fine, but there are quite a few that do.
Surely some one should be able to adapt these books into a series
... Miss Jolie perhaps?
More than enough material...
Who to play Angelina though
Hmmm
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
Well, of course, the mass comes from dismantling a jovian or two -- Jupiter has 318 Earth masses.