I was going to put this one in the Amazing Untrue Records thread, but then decided it was a fairly interesting topic.

My thought is, what SF film adaptations have made a silk purse movie out of a sow's ear book (or other source), and vice versa. (Bad film adaptations of bad books don't count; nor do good film adaptations of good books.)

My own contenders are:

2010: Odyssey Two. Took a remarkably dull going-through-the-motions Clarke novel and made it into a film which I found moving, exciting, fascinating, and which generally had much more of an impact than the book.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The books (and radio series, and every other version) count among some of the finest popular SF of all time. Yet the movie was an abomination.

"Sphere", while not exactly a good movie, it was IMHO much better than the book (which I managed to end at the third attempt of reading).

A bad adaptation of a good novel... the last versions of "The Time Machine" and "War of the Worlds" come to mind.

Hitchcock's The Birds, based on a mediocre short story by Daphne Du Maurier.

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Lets get the easy ones out of the way.

Good source, poor movie: Starship Troopers.

Great source, poor movie: Wing Commander.

Poor source, great movie: Dune Messiah/Children of Dune Part 1.

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I think you're exactly wrong on two of those, though while I don't care about the third, I'll totally take your word for it rather than subject myself to the movie (or the video game!) to find out for sure.

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"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Starship Troopers was a good book, though not my favorite Heinlein novel. The movie was terrible and trampled all over the story.

The Wing Commander games were great fun. Wing Commander I and II are two of my all time favorite computer games. Still, they had "comic book physics" models and, while there was actually a story surrounding the games (they made it feel like you were in a movie, a novel concept at that time), it was necessarily pretty limited. The movie did a lot of silly stuff and the characters were often different from the games in important ways. While I liked it, that was partly because of nostalgia for the game. It was definitely a B movie, but I didnt expect too much out of it.

I've never cared that much for Herbert, so haven't read these books. I watched the mini-series, but didn't find it terribly impressive.

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The last version of The Time Machine threw out almost everything from the original story. There wasn't much recognizable except the concept of time travel and the terms "Eloi" and "Morlock." I didn't sit all the way through that movie. I just couldn't stand it.

Anyway, another good book/bad movie example: The Lord of the Rings trilogy versus the animated LOTR movie.

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"When Worlds Collide"
George Pal was off his feed when he filmed this one (compare his "The Time Machine"), but the book was a very good read.

"Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea"
Was a terrible movie, but the novelization was excellent (Of course, Theodore Sturgeon wrote it, so what would you expect?)

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My understanding that the 2005 film version of the Bradbury short story A Sound of Thunder was particularly loathsome.

Hmmm... mayhaps I sould check Netflix to see if they have it. The blue screen effects in particular were supposed to boggle the mind.

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

Surely you mean "A Sound of Chunder?" I wrote a review a while back that consisted almost entirely of a group of studio execs sitting in a boardroom discussing their new blockbuster:

"Well, the hero gets back, and a few hours later it’s 90 degrees outside and dead fish are washing up on beaches everywhere. Every couple of hours a big time wave comes out of nowhere and changes everything!"

"Jesus Christ! A time…wave!? Wouldn’t everything just change when he got back? I can’t believe this bullsh…

"Shut up, Mike, this is my idea! Yeah, a time wave! They come in like big tidal waves, altering the present as they pass by! The first one causes big flesh-eating bugs to come out of nowhere and makes cars crash. The third one is the big one, and all hell breaks loose! Most of the human race is wiped out, and monsters rule the world."

"What sort of monsters?"

"Terrifying ones, the kind never seen before! Giant eels with teeth a foot long, monstrous bats, Velociraptors with baboon faces!"

"Is this all because some guy stepped on a butterfly 65 million years ago?"

And on and on this went. I couldn't force myself to write a "formal" review of it. Even my brother-in-law hated it, the same person who insisted that Sky Captain was a cinematic achievement par excellence.

Along the same lines, the comments for Nightfall suggest the movie was terrible. (I'm not going to bother to find out for myself.)

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For a '50s 'flick I thought it was pretty good, though I haven't read the book. Admitedly, George Pal's The Time Machine was better.

Yup, that was horrible no matter how you slice it.

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Which one? I thought the original movie was pretty good, but wasn't too crazy about the recent re-make.

There was a BBC HHTTG TV series (we'd probably call it a miniseries) that has sometimes been edited into a movie-like feature, but technically there is only one HHTTG movie. I liked the TV series, and as the first version of HHTTG I was exposed to, I tend to prefer it over the books and the radio series, though I liked them as well. I hated the movie.

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I consider the combined mini-episodes to be a movie when combined, although that may not be technically correct. They are certainly presented as a single movie in the two copies I bought, one on VHS and later on DVD. I was upset that the VHS one was recorded in EP mode, but getting the DVD made up for that. It's a bit like the original Doctor Who shows, what would you consider an "episode" to be? They were all shown in 22 minute segments or shows, but a "episode" or story would comprise of 2-6 "shows". I saw most of the original HHGTTG in the original segmented version, but missed some "shows". I also read the book but after I saw it on TV.

I still can't forgive the recent movie for not including my favorite line from the original. That was the one that went like "The slightest thought of the mere possibility hadn't even begun to enter my mind"

did anyone mention I, Robot yet.

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There is no "I, Robot" movie!

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well the one named I, Robot.

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Most people consider the two bases for the movie "I, Robot", which were a book with the same title and another called The Caves of Steel, to be better than the movie... although I wonder how many of them have read them and how many are repeating the refrain about the book being better because everybody knows that's just what you're always supposed to say.

I have just about given up on written fiction, because most authors have verbal habits that annoy me (not due to grammar error nit-picking, but as a matter of style) or make their writing too much of a personal soap box. I consider writing to be the superior form for conveying non-fiction information, and video to be the superior form for telling stories. So I don't have a lot of examples of book/movie overlap that I've personally experienced both forms of.

But one that does stand out to me is The Lord of the Rings. His more anthology-like stuff and short stories are great, but Tolkienn was absolutely awful as a writer of novels, blathering on and on about things that just don't matter to his own characters and story, stretching out a small things as if to meet a page-count quota and then going back to drop more extra things in between them as if after finding out that despite all the stretching he still hadn't met the quota, seeming to change his mind several times about what kind of story to write and its big overall themes as well as the little details but then not going back to clean up the contradictions and aimlessly meandering tone switches... ugh. Other than almost any movie scene with Arwen in it, the movies were mostly a matter of Jackson fixing things Tolkienn had screwed up.

It's Tolkien, one "n" and "i" before "e".
I know you remembered the latter but many don't.

As for I, Robot I really liked the short stories, which where mostly SF mysteries, and have to admit that I haven't managed to make myself watch the movie named after the collection, as the trailer showed it to have no recognizable links to the stories other than the title.

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Actually I have read all the Asimov robot series, and I think that the movie picked only a few elements from the Robots universe (I don't see any similarity with The Caves of Steel, by the way).


Here we disagree a lot. And besides, although usually classed as a novel, it is not a novel strictu sensu. The nearest models for the Lord of the Rings are the epic poems of the old norse, the Beowulf, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (by the way there is an horrible movie adaptation).

The big problem with some of these movies is that they try to trade on the name of the book. They could actually be very enjoyable as standalone features.

Specifically, Starship Troopers (a great B-movie / guilty pleasure with fine sfx), I, Robot (actually pretty good, but nowhere close to the books), and WotW (again, good on it's own, although I was hoping the hero would meet a horrible fate).

By invoking the name of a classic, the producers hope to draw in a ready-made audience. But, by being less than faithful to that classic, they alienate that very audience five minutes in.

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Eh. I've seen it (Nightfall), and while it would be fun to give it the old MST3K treatment it deffinatly doesn't sink into the Worst. Movie. Ever. catagory.

But I admit I may be a bit too lenient on it having never read the short story it's based on.

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

Interesting responses.

The great thing about BAUT is that you can thoroughly disagree with someone and still keep it polite. So, with that in mind...

I hadn't thought about Caves of Steel although the underground motorway scene certainly fits.

I totally disagree with everything else you say above. Asimov is one of the most read SF authors of all time. A vast number of people have read his robot stories, and found them to be intelligent entertainment.

As for "the book was better" thing, people tend to say this because it tends to be true. Not always, but often - which is why I started the thread. When people think a film is better than the book they tend to come out and say what they think.

FWIW, when I saw the trailers for I, Robot, I decided not to bother seeing it. I found the books to be intelligent entertainment, as I said above; from what I'd seen in the trailers, I guessed it would be a dumb cliche-ridden action movie. Later, when the film was shown on TV, I saw that my initial impression was accurate.

Whilst I tend to agree that writing is a good way of conveying non-fiction (though not the only good way) I feel the exact opposite when it comes to fiction - particularly science fiction. If the verbal habits of authors annoy you, I have to wonder what sort of range of authors you've read. Whereas, when it comes to video, the habits are far more prominent and annoying. At one time, if you watched the British police drama The Bill, you could be sure of seeing the following scene in almost every episode: policeman tells young suspect he's under arrest; young suspect pushes the policeman and runs; policeman gives chase; suspect runs down alley, finds his way blocked by a fence, starts to climb fence; policeman catches suspect mid-climb.

In action films, you're sure to see whatever was thought to be cool in the previous action film - and often the same actors, whether they are appropriate for the role or not. One of the reasons I didn't want to see I, Robot was because someone told me that at one point they had Will Smith shooting with two guns as he executes a motorcycle leap. That's about as appropriate as a custard pie fight on a submarine in Hunt for Red October.

In science fiction, if it's set in space you'll have the same mix of characters (including a hot babe who beats up men), and everything in the universe has Earth-normal gravity.

To an extent I can see what you mean here, although the page-count quota is certainly not how it came about. In those days, thousand-odd page fantasy epics were not the norm.

Arwen grew on me in the movies; her place now seems appropriate and highly effective.

TBH it comes across as a bit silly to consider the TV series a movie when it clearly isn't one. There has only been one movie; asking which movie calls for unnecessary clarification.

No, the naming convention wasn't quite like that.

An episode was a single 22-ish minute segment - or a 45-ish minute segment in some cases, including the new series and parts of the reign of Peter Davison and Colin Baker in the old series.

A story consists of one or more episodes. If it is more than one episode it is called a serial. The longest serial in the original series was The Dalek Masterplan, which was a whopping 12 episodes long (or 13 if you include the prelude, Mission to the Unknown, which did not feature the Doctor or any of the other regular cast members, but did include the Daleks).

I still can't forgive the recent movie... period!

You're talking about events. I'm talking about how those events are described.

One way to bug me with how things are described is excessive repetition of description that's already been given. For example, there's a set of books based on Boba Fett and the other bounty hunters from a scene in "The Empire Strikes Back" which keeps on calling tough characters (such as bigshot bounty hunters) "barves". "He's a mean barve... that's one tough barve... that barve will kill you if you let him have the chance... don't trust that barve... I thought this barve was a really barvey barve but that other barve outbarved him this time..." I did finish the books and I loved them in every other way, but any more of that word would have made ME barve. The best example, though, is Terry Brooks. I don't remember a lot of the Shannara stories in terms of characters, places, things, or plots. The biggest memory of the books that stands out to me is the phrase "Keltsett's massive frame". Brooks likes to refer to tough, imposing characters' bodies as "frames". It's a good literary choice at times, but he kept doing it at those times and all the other times too. And Keltsett was a Troll, so he got it much more than other species like humans. Pretty much every time he even moved a little bit was written like "Keltsett settled his massive frame down by the fire... Keltsett's massive frame pushed the rock out of the way... not a word or a hint of agreement or disagreement with the other man's story came from Keltsett's massive frame... the Gnome took one look at Kelsett's massive frame and thought wow, that's a massive frame..." AAKHCK! It even beat out, for the position of worst thing about those books, the habit of repeatedly calling people's eyes dark or bright according to their mood even though they were also described as literally bright or dark as a part of the people's physical descriptions... which had led to the sentence "His dark eyes were bright". No, I'm not kidding on that one. (It's not a matter of overuse, but just an example of not making sense.)

She was a fine character and the actress was well suited to the role and did a fine job, but the problem was that the story and lines surrouding her didn't make sense. Tolkien had given at least three contradictory answers for the issue of what becomes of human/Elf mutts in terms of (im)mortality, and Jackson could have picked one or tried to resolve two or more of them together, but instead, he hinted at one or two of them, then invented one or two MORE that made even less sense than Tolkien's self-contradictions, and made it a nonsensical mess that contradicted not just some of Tolkien's "factual" details but also the overall mood/tone of the issue of (im)mortality, which was supposed to be that mortality was a gift to humans that Elves aren't entitled to, not the other way around.

You sound like a guy who have read Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle Earth before reading the books.

It's as much about style. Smouldering glances over the top of sunglasses, lengthy set-piece choreographed fights, and much else.

I've never encountered the word before; I even wondered if you'd mistyped "braves".

Ahem. You've cited a Star Wars spin-off series of books, and Terry Brooks - a man who is, shall we put it, not exactly highly acclaimed. (One critic likened his writing to a war crime. I don't like that sort of exaggeration because it trivialises war crimes; however, I think the point is well made.)

Re the Star Wars books, keep in mind these are books that originated in the video medium and are therefore more likely to work as video.

I cannot tell from this how broad your reading is, but I'd be interested to know what you think of other authors who are highly regarded and who write specifically for the written word medium.

I agree - most people consider 2001 to be a classic movie and 2010 to be mediocre or downright bad, but I always liked the latter movie better. On the other hand, I thought that 2001 was a much better book than its sequel(s).

In regard to Starship Troopers, I thought that the movie was OK in a cheesy kind of way, but I've never read the book. I've heard the suggestion that the movie was actually intended by its director as a sort of parody of the book rather than an accurate rendition.

No, he's right. I've heard the term "barve" used in other fictional works.


Oh God forbid a little allegory just puts your boxers in a bunch...

For the movies, perhaps, but lets be aware that there are a LOT of Star Wars books out there now. Some crap (Courtship of Princess Leia), some genius (I, Jedi), and very few would likely translate well. The series from which the term "barve" was discovered (I believe it was the Bounty Hunter trilogy that took place both before episode IV and after episode VI).

The most celebrated of whom write technical masterpieces that run the gamut from somnolently boring to inspiring.

Orson Card - Boring
Roger Allan - Decent
Micheal Stackpole - Amazing
Timothy Zahn - Typically awesome, but he can slip badly.
Frank Herbert - Legendary, but extremely challenging.
Arthur Clarke - Legendary, until he writes a sequel.
Isaac Asimov - Great, but dry. His short story anthologies are better than his novels.
Ray Bradbury - Hit or miss. He can be real good or he can be real
Alan Dean Foster - Great.

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