"Unfilmable" genre series

[Famous Mortimer]

https://www.theringer.com/year-in-review/2021/12/22/22849412/the-end-of-unfilmable-ip-dune-foundation-wheel-of-time

Pointing out that some boring-ass mainstream news source uses "unfilmable" to describe something that hasn't been filmed yet is a pretty weak excuse for an article.

"Foundation" seems eminently filmable, even if it wouldn't perhaps be all that exciting, "Dune" has already been made twice, and...well, I've never read "Wheel Of Time", but I'm not sure it's any more or less filmable than any other long-running fantasy series. Honestly, aside from its length I never got the feeling that WoT was much more than just pulp entertainment, with even fans of the series telling me it got really slow in the middle, and had hack-extraordinaire Brandon Sanderson wrap it up.

I am perhaps a little bored of so much time being spent on sci-fi and fantasy of generations ago. I loved the Foundation series as much as anyone, but I don't remember anyone being desperate for a TV adaptation of it, other than perhaps a TV exec nerd a bit older than me. "Wheel Of Time" is a blatant attempt to ride on the coattails of "Game Of Thrones", and I'm sure that decision was more a "what can we get the rights to for a reasonable amount?" rather than any concerns over filmability.

What sci-fi or fantasy do you think would be genuinely unfilmable?

[Dayraven]

The Culture books may be possible (there was a planned Amazon adaptation), but they have almost every possible demand on the budget at once. And, if you want to make them into a TV series, they helpfully have almost no recurring characters.

SF stories that have heavy focus on completely non-humanoid aliens, or very abstract events as a big part of the story, might be difficult. Then there are books too fundamentally dated to be worth adapting, though that's a slightly different issue.

[mothman]

I've often thought that Terry Pratchett's books would never be filmable in a way that do them justice - it's not just what happens it's how they're written. Nothing I've seen if the various adaptations disabuses me of that notion.

Once upon a time I thought that the structure and final twist of Banks' Use Of Weapons would make it very difficult to adapt. Now, given what people have done in recent years, it'd probably be a doddle.

[Jerzy Bondov]

It's stunning that the Malazan Book of the Fallen started out as a film script because they would make terrible films. It's more impenetrable than Dune, has a massive cast, will happily just fuck off to a totally different part of the world with no familiar characters, has important events take place in spin off novels written by a different bloke, loads of boring scenes where people just sit around talking about philosophy, even before you start thinking about the obscene special effects budget it would require. I love them but I have no interest at all in seeing them on telly or in a film.

Any book I've read by hack extraordinaire Brandon Sanderson could be adapted very easily and I suspect they're written with an eye on that. I quite like them though.

[Endicott]

The Culture books may be possible (there was a planned Amazon adaptation), but they have almost every possible demand on the budget at once. And, if you want to make them into a TV series, they helpfully have almost no recurring characters.

I think they'd suit a mini series per book. 4 to 6 episodes each.

After what's been achieved in the last 20 years I'm not sure here's anything inherently unfilmable anymore.

[mikeyg27]

I read Children of Time and Children of Ruin this year, and I'd be pretty impressed if a film-maker managed to get the audience to empathize with a species of genetically-modified super-spiders (though someone is going to try, apparently).

[Pranet]

The Book of the New Sun.

[Brundle-Fly]

The Wasp Factory.

[Alberon]

Greg Egan's more recent books which come across more as dry examples in a popular science book than actual novels. Some of them present worlds where the laws of physics are so different they might be literally unfilmable.

Hannu Rajaniemi's trilogy starting with The Quantum Thief. Borderline incomprehensible in novel form let alone as a TV show or film.

[Ron Maels Moustache]

The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant is probably still the ur-unfilmable fantasy series. I think even post-GOT a studio might blanche at the idea of signing off on a long-running saga where the central character is a

Spoiler alert

rapist.

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[mothman]

Another one with a significant plot twist about the main character and unreliable narrator that could make an adaptation challenging would be Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World. Unless they filmed two versions of the flashback stuff, one showing what supposedly happened and then revisited it showing what really happened.

[Dayraven]

I'd be pretty impressed if a film-maker managed to get the audience to empathize with a species of genetically-modified super-spiders

Thought of Children of Time as a possible example. Might work if the human and AI threads were emphasised and the spider ones downplayed for much of the length of the film? Though I know that gets away a bit from what makes the book special.

Children of Ruin is easier, since it's got humans interacting with the spiders throughout. And they're the same few spiders rather than the multiple generations of the first book, so easier to characterise.

[greenman]

The Book of the New Sun.

Yeah that definately stands out as one with the status were it might be considered but it wouldnt be easy to do.

Plot wise I spose you could argue it is naturally quite episodic and focused on one character but the content is quite extreme and perhaps moreso than that I think a lot of the attraction of the book is unpicking the way its written, if your directly seeing events I think some of that would be lost.

[Mister Six]

Would be good if people could explain why they think a book is unfilmable, in spoiler text if need be, instead of just dropping the title and buggering off, like they expect people to read an entire novel (or series of novels) just to understand what was suggested in this thread.

[mothman]

Noted. Sorry Sixxy.

[greenman]

With Book of the New Sun often the new nature of the setting or events were seeing is obscured by the prose, if you can see for example that...

Spoiler alert

The towers in the citadel were the protagonist lives are actually ancient rocket ships, its going to remove some of the sense of revealed mystery earlier although I spose in that case you could obscure such elements more in the design work

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[Pranet]

Would be good if people could explain why they think a book is unfilmable, in spoiler text if need be, instead of just dropping the title and buggering off, like they expect people to read an entire novel (or series of novels) just to understand what was suggested in this thread.

Yes sorry I did think that when did my post and thought about writing more but unfortunately I could not be arsed.

But what greenman said. Also the narrator is unreliable. And related to what greenman said at times it is tricky to work out exactly what is going on. It was made for re-reading apparently- when I retire maybe I will return to it. It is great.

[Dayraven]

A film that works like a Gene Wolfe novel might be a better goal than actually adapting a particular Gene Wolfe novel.

[Bently Sheds]

Michael Moorcock's sprawling Eternal Champion series is technically not unfilmable, I just think nobody would want to make - or watch - a 134 series story.

Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber would have been difficult to do pre-CGI, but these days the moving through shadows and inter-tarot teleportation would be simple for any studio.

[mothman]

I think that at the stage CGI is at, pretty much any visual, any character, structure or landscape can be created. So for me "unfilmable" means that the story itself relies on the way it's written, and which would be impossible or very difficult to translate to screen.

[Alberon]

Greg Egan would probably disagree. Here's the blurb for one of his novellas.

Seth is a surveyor, along with his friend Theo, a leech-like creature running through his skull who tells Seth what lies to his left and right. Theo, in turn, relies on Seth for mobility, and for ordinary vision looking forwards and backwards. Like everyone else in their world, they are symbionts, depending on each other to survive.

In the universe containing Seth's world, light cannot travel in all directions: there is a "dark cone" to the north and south. Seth can only face to the east (or the west, if he tips his head backwards). If he starts to turn to the north or south, his body stretches out across the landscape, and to rotate to face north-east is every bit as impossible as accelerating to the speed of light.

Every living thing in Seth's world is in a state of perpetual migration as they follow the sun's shifting orbit and the narrow habitable zone it creates. Cities are being constantly disassembled at one edge and rebuilt at the other, with surveyors mapping safe routes ahead.

But when Seth and Theo join an expedition to the edge of the habitable zone, they discover a terrifying threat: a fissure in the surface of the world, so deep and wide that no one can perceive its limits. As the habitable zone continues to move, the migration will soon be blocked by this unbridgeable void, and the expedition has only one option to save its city from annihilation: descend into the unknown.

[Zetetic]

How expensive can a cone be?!?

[13 schoolyards]

One of the problems with filming The Book of the New Sun (which is excellent imho) is that many of the mysteries in it are so mysterious Wolfe had to go back and write The Urth of the New Sun to make some of them plain.

I think it'd probably be pretty easy to film the series to the level of a standard adaptation and it features a lot of stuff that'd be fun to see on screen (loads of big battles towards the end!), but you'd definitely lose the heart of what it's actually about.

When Severian sees those weird walking statues on the ground of the Autarch's citadel he tries to describe them two or three times in increasingly different and alien ways and gives up each time because he can't express their essence; in a movie they'd just be big walking statues.

[greenman]

One of the problems with filming The Book of the New Sun (which is excellent imho) is that many of the mysteries in it are so mysterious Wolfe had to go back and write The Urth of the New Sun to make some of them plain.

I think it'd probably be pretty easy to film the series to the level of a standard adaptation and it features a lot of stuff that'd be fun to see on screen (loads of big battles towards the end!), but you'd definitely lose the heart of what it's actually about.

When Severian sees those weird walking statues on the ground of the Autarch's citadel he tries to describe them two or three times in increasingly different and alien ways and gives up each time because he can't express their essence; in a movie they'd just be big walking statues.

The drive of a lot of fantasy/sci fi adaptation seems to be to realize the books setting as plainly as possible but really in that case if you do so I think you lose a lot of the books attraction.

I spose you could argue maybe the way to go would be to make the film/series visually quite obscure, something like Marketa Lazarova comes to mind, I'v not read the book its based on but its meant to be built on willingly obscure prose and I think the film does go some way to replicating that disorientating style.

Your maybe not going to get the budget for something that arty but still I think I could imagine a version thats visually more obscure to try and replicate some of the feel of the book, were elements are either half scene or are more obscured by age, rocket ship towers that arent obviously so.

[chveik]

The Rediscovery of Man

[Replies From View]

The special 32-Bit SNES that my Dad brought back from America might be unfilmable.

[MojoJojo]

Any book I've read by hack extraordinaire Brandon Sanderson could be adapted very easily and I suspect they're written with an eye on that. I quite like them though.

Particularly notable with Steelheart - in fact I think there were some talks about it. And he started that series about a boy going to magic school - he abandoned that one, presumably after someone told him it had been done.

The Stormlight archive would fit a GoT type adaption, although even many fans think it would be better animated, rather than the compromises live action would impose.

[purlieu]

I've never read "Wheel Of Time", but I'm not sure it's any more or less filmable than any other long-running fantasy series.

There are some scenes that would probably be literally unfilmable -

Spoiler alert

those in alternate realities where physics doesn't work the same as we know it

[close]

- but given that The Color Out of Space became a film, there are clearly ways around it. It's certainly not strange enough to not be malleable without losing the general idea. There's also the fact that one of the strengths of the books - early on, especially - is how developed the world and magic systems are, and there's no way you could really put that stuff into film (the latter especially, most of which is explored in characters' heads), so by cutting the stronger stuff, you end up with more focus on some of the more derivative aspects.

Not a series, but David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus would be pretty bloody difficult. I know there's a student film from the '70s, but I find it impossible to believe some of the barmier concepts in it would be remotely satisfying on screen.

[willbo]

I think super bizarre, surreal stuff like Arthur C Clarke's City and the Stars, Moorcocks Dancers at the End of Time, etc may be hard to film. In fact, I think Discworld "as described" is pretty much unfilmable. I know its been filmed a few times, but some of the "beyond description" stuff got toned down.

here's one - any crappy thriller that relies on the reader not being able to see that 2 characters are the same person using different names in different lives/times

[mothman]

Westworld season 1 managed it.

Spoiler alert

Though given we actually know what Ed Harris looked like 20-30 years ago - a younger Ed Harris, unsurprisingly, but nothing like Jimmi Simpson - it could be said they cheated a bit.

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