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]

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....)