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'Stranger In a Strange Land' Coming To TV (ew.com)
HughPickens.com writes: EW reports that Paramount TV and Universal Cable Productions are teaming up to develop Robert A. Heinlein's classic 'Stranger in a Strange Land' into a TV series on Syfy. The 1961 sci-fi book, set in the aftermath of a third world war, centers on Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised by Martians, who, as a young adult, has returned to Earth. The true driving forces of the novel are religion and sex, which Heinlein's publisher at the time wanted him to cut out. But as the author noted to his literary agent, if religion and sex were removed from the text, what remained would be the equivalent of a "nonalcoholic martini." "From my point of view, Stranger in a Strange Land isn't just a science fiction masterpiece [...] it also happens to be one of my favorite books ever!" says NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment Chairman Bonnie Hammer. "The story is timeless and resonates more than ever in today's world. As a fan, I can't wait to see it come to life as a world-class television event." A previous attempt at adapting Heinlein's novel came in 1995, when Batman Returns' Dan Waters penned a script designed for Tom Hanks and Sean Connery.
Stranger in a Strange Land is really like two novels. The first part is good, classical Heinlein. The second part is some kind of rambling political pamphlet that always manages to bore me. I read somewhere that they were written with several years difference, and it shows.
I hope they base it in the first part, really. Well, probably, if it's a typical TV product, they will take the basic idea and massacre all else, so why do I care?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Surprised to see all the hate (or lukewarm meh-ness) for Stranger in a Strange Land on here. Maybe it's younger folks that never understood the social shifts and conflicts occurring at the time, I don't know. But the novel actually had a major affect on culture when it came out. I found it to be incredibly insightful.
Updating it for current times might be a good idea for the series. Someone from Mars with no contact with human culture comes to earth. Religion has taken a backseat and sex has exploded into polyamorous and fluid gender orgies, with more labels than species of frogs. And group politics has divided humans into pools vying for elevated victimhood status while countries with world-ending nuclear arsenals fight proxy wars over energy pipelines. Could be quite entertaining.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I'm not sure why this is modded down, but it is 100% correct. Most Space Nutters get their "knowledge" from scifi, not reality. The reality is that engineering is tough, very tough. I am not talking about programming either. Anyone who has engineered anything even moderately complex knows we are not going to be living on Mars.
There is no breakthrough technology needed to put a colony of humans on Mars. And I've been heavily involved in a lot of engineering. The questions are method, cost, and will to do it, not inventing new things.
This might be thought of as submarine level technology, not so much on the details, but on the concept of keeping humans alive and healthy in a hostile environment. In fact much of putting people long term on a planet like Mars is in many respects easier.
Questions of "should we?" are valid, and always worth discussing. Questions of "could we" have already been answered. We can.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Then you're not much of an engineer.
You've decided to stop making sense? What technology needs to happen that does not exist already?
This isn't even a concept that we shouldn't incorporate new technology as it happens, merely that the whole thing could be accomplished today, without any new inventions.
Imagine the work that had to happen to create say, the F1 engine. This was applied science, but a lot of new things had to happen to pump out that much power from a single engine. And we've built on that since then.
So we can get into orbit and leave Earth's gravity well. We can build structures in space that can maintain human life indefinitely. We can move those structures. We can get to Mars, We can land things on Mars. Questions remain about growing food, but no deal breakers are seen so far. All with present day technology.
And as new technology is learned/developed, it can only get easier.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You're wasting your time. To the GP, the only technological development that will ever matter to achieving space has already happened; the only engineering that will ever matter to achieving space has already been done. It's wholly loony, but it's not uncommon.
Eventually, we'll be all over the solar system. The available space, energy, manufacturing conditions and natural resources all better (and in some cases, dwarf) those we can achieve on earth. Market forces will make this happen. Assuming we don't get hit by a comet or an asteroid, or the ecology doesn't collapse, or we don't nuke each other into glowing dust, of course.
The tech to get into space is known. The tech to live in space is known too, although it is true that the engineering has yet to be done.
The "space nutters" are actually the ones that claim we'll be indefinitely planet-bound. It's a pretty clueless assertion.
Chemical rockets can bootstrap this, though the cost is high; something like a space elevator would change the entire picture, but we're still working on the material science for that, and again, no engineering has been done (because no materials as yet.)
Anyway, fear not the nay-sayers. They know not of what they speak. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The technology that allows humans to survive in radiation fields that exist outside the Van Allen belts for more than a few days does not exist. The fact is that the combination of adequate shielding and power to boost ratio for moving that amount of mass is beyond what we can now accomplish with existing technology. Putting a structure in low earth orbit, where it is protected from the balance of solar radiation and moving that same structure outside the protective fields provided by the Earth's magnetic fields is not trivial. Nor do we know how to do the technology yet that will allow us to do so. A two week trip to the moon gave Apollo 14 astronauts 1.4 rem in 2 weeks. Exposure getting to Mars would be 15 times the allowed exposure, provided there were no unforeseen radiation events, such as a solar flare. On the planet itself perhaps we could build underground to prevent excess exposure, but that would still mean severely limiting time on the surface, perhaps so much so that little actual work could get done.
So no we don't have all of the know how we need to do Mars yet.
The movie is a left wing cartoon. The book is only considered fascist by people who don't believe that citizens have a responsibility to serve their country and the common good. It is quite obvious that no one involved with the movie have any idea of what it is like to be in a military organization, how armies actually fight, what kind of tactics a real military uses, or any of that. TO them a military is basically a bunch of people running around in a mob doing violent things.
Like I said a left wing cartoon.