And now for something light

[rhu]

OK, let's get a good discussion going here. :-)

The other night, introverte and I were discussing film adapations of science fiction stories that originally appeared in print. We were unable to come up with a single example of a story that meets all these criteria:

• Science fiction (not fantasy) (excluding, for example, The Lord of the Rings and The Wizard of Oz)
• First appeared in print (excluding, for example, 2001: A Space Odyssey)
• Movie adaptation remains essentially faithful to the print story (excluding, for example, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I, Robot, etc.)
• Both the original print story and the movie adaptation are generally accepted as great (excluding, for example, well, most others).

The closest I could come up with was Farenheit 451 but I'm not sure the movie really qualifies as great. But I figure that if there exists a true example, you, gentle readers, will let me know.

Comments

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Correct. I'm testing the hypothesis "No great SF print story ever survived adaptation to the big screen."

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

Personally I would focus my attention on short stories and novelletes. I don't think a novel can map to a 2 - 3 hour movie while remaining true to the original. The natural home of the cinematic version of a novel is a miniseries, IMHO.

[cheshyre]

I would disagree.

In a foreign language class, a professor remarked upon the (avowedly sexist) remark that "translations are like women, they are beautiful or faithful, but rarely both."

I've generally applied that to film adaptations of print works. There are certain film adaptations that manage to capture the emotional spirit of the original without being slavish to every detail. Likewise, those that are slavish (such as Kevin Costner's version of David Brin's "Postman") don't make good film.

But expecting a movie adaptation to be both beautiful and faithful -- that's tough in almost any genre. Maybe LOTR (I wasn't a fan of either book nor film to judge), though I generally point to "Princess Bride" as one of the few, and that was written by a filmmaker who also did the adapted screenplay, so had an unfair advantage.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I like your comparison of prose-to-screenplay adaptation with (lingual) translation. That's apt. Although here we're not necessarily seeking beauty (rather "general excellence") nor slavish faithfulness (rather "essential faithfulness"), so perhaps a satisfactory compromise could be achieved.

And yet... we have but a handful of candidates. In other genres, this obstacle seems to be insurmountable only 98% of the time. Several examples of fantasy have been cited here; there are others in other genres. Is it really harder in SF, and if so, why?

The reason I worded it as "No great SF print story ever survived adaptation to the big screen" was party to be provocative but mostly because that's the kind of hypothesis that can't be proven but can easily be disproven by counterexample --- and it's the counterexamples I'm wanting! (And getting....)