[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

That's a question posed by Kevin Drum on his blog at The Washington Monthly.

[dvandorn]

Just as an addendum, as to the specific paucity of films being made from sf novels -- those that are being made are being made from *old* novels and novellas. Like that Will Smith abortion of an excuse for an Asimov robot story ("I. Robot"), or even the Tom Cruise vehicle "Minority Report" (based on a Phil Dick novella from the '70s).

I think one reason why you don't see many films lately based on *recent* sf novels is due to changes in the printed product over the past several years. For example, let's say you want to film a novel of David Brin's. You have three choices -- you can film "Earth," you can film "The Postman" (which they did -- badly), or you can decide just where and how you want to try and bite film-sized chunks out of his Uplift saga. Do you make a single film out of it? Set up a series of films? Do a regular TV series? Or maybe a series of mini-series specials?

You have the same problem, in spades, if you want to try and film any of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan saga... way too much story for a single film.

I think that the publishing industry, in pushing book series (three, five, seven, eleven books long -- the longer the better, these days), are making it a lot harder for the format of the feature film to be able to glean much out of the printed genre...

-the other Doug