ussnimitz1968
Wish I wasn't a big giant boat.
I have yet to see it mentioned (in fact I'm actually really surprised GoT took so long to get mentioned as it's my understanding it's almost universally considered to be superior to ASoIaF) but most certainly The Martian was better adapted into a movie than it was in its original novelized form - and don't get me wrong, the novel is still one of the top three books I've read this year so far (not a small feat as I'll get into very shortly). But it does show how even a skilled writer is still vulnerable to the pitfalls of self-publishing and a lack of editorial oversight (yes that's right, the book was originally self-published) and the film does much to clean up and streamline a lot of narrative issues for the sake of effective pragmatism. Namely, what you'd think would be the very first chapter (the scene the movie chooses to open with) is something like Chapter 8 in the book. There's little justification for this non-chronological order other than it probably didn't occur to the author originally that it might best be served to simply start chronologically.
That said, I do like the novel's ending better (the novel even pokes fun at a would-be Hollywood depiction of this ending, which is exactly how Hollywood in its infinite wisdom inevitably chooses to end it).
Oh, I haven't seen the movie but I have heard of (and read) the book. I've heard the movie isn't all that great though. As far as being a "Hunger Games Clone" The 5th Wave is one of the better ones by far but having to overcome the "Hunger Games Clone" stigma is a very uphill battle, especially now with a saturated market and that saturation coming to bite back at the Divergent and Legend series hard (BTW for what it's worth I've also read all of these named books).
Again, that's definitely a consequence of skilled Hollywood writers and directors knowing what translates into film and what doesn't. Not everybody is skilled at this by a longshot (see movies where they insist everything has to be a literal translation - LOTR/Hobbit excepted - or movies that are barely a resemblance to their source material at all).
I could say more of the same but I'm also going to add that by now SyFy probably knows how to hire people who not only actually know the classic era sci-fi genre but know how to translate it to television and understand what audiences want. I've seen The Expanse S1 and it's overall a good show (the whole "evil corporation wanting to unleash an equally evil virus/mutation/whatever" at the end kind of lost me, I was really enjoying the twists and plot development aspects it tended to intensely focus on and to resort to what's now become a dangerously near-overused trope feels like a letdown) and given the previous spectacular failure of Ascension I can see SyFy going through a bit of a creative shake-up to make Expanse happen the way it did.
That said, I do like the novel's ending better (the novel even pokes fun at a would-be Hollywood depiction of this ending, which is exactly how Hollywood in its infinite wisdom inevitably chooses to end it).
Oh, I haven't seen the movie but I have heard of (and read) the book. I've heard the movie isn't all that great though. As far as being a "Hunger Games Clone" The 5th Wave is one of the better ones by far but having to overcome the "Hunger Games Clone" stigma is a very uphill battle, especially now with a saturated market and that saturation coming to bite back at the Divergent and Legend series hard (BTW for what it's worth I've also read all of these named books).
Again, that's definitely a consequence of skilled Hollywood writers and directors knowing what translates into film and what doesn't. Not everybody is skilled at this by a longshot (see movies where they insist everything has to be a literal translation - LOTR/Hobbit excepted - or movies that are barely a resemblance to their source material at all).
I could say more of the same but I'm also going to add that by now SyFy probably knows how to hire people who not only actually know the classic era sci-fi genre but know how to translate it to television and understand what audiences want. I've seen The Expanse S1 and it's overall a good show (the whole "evil corporation wanting to unleash an equally evil virus/mutation/whatever" at the end kind of lost me, I was really enjoying the twists and plot development aspects it tended to intensely focus on and to resort to what's now become a dangerously near-overused trope feels like a letdown) and given the previous spectacular failure of Ascension I can see SyFy going through a bit of a creative shake-up to make Expanse happen the way it did.
Last edited:
