I’m listening to the Dune soundtrack as I write this, if you care.
It’s been a long butt week, and it’s the end of a long butt month, basically. In a bit more than a week I shall be turning 30, and I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s kind of weird. I’m planning to be reading my favorite book that weekend, though I also have a few books that I’m picking up from the library soonish.
Also side note: we do realize that something being pulled from a curriculum isn’t the same as it being banned, right?
Anyway I’m doing what might be my last Saturday Note about the adaptation of books to different mediums. I might definitely come back to this again at some point! But right now I think I’ll call it quits after this.
THE STONES ARE HATCHING BY GERALDINE MCCAUGHREAN
Okay, this book is weird. It’s very weird. I learned about it in a discussion with friends built off of “What is the weirdest book you read as a kid?” And this book delivered, alright. Set during World War I, it’s about an eleven-year-old boy who finds himself on a quest to fight the Stoor Worm, and all the monsters hatching from the stone eggs it laid hundreds of years before. As the monsters become more and more common the people in the British countryside are more and more giving up the civilization they’ve built up to try to find a way to deal with it.
The book is aimed at children, and there’s nothing in it that I don’t think is all THAT inappropriate for children, but only because I don’t think any of the violence in the story is explicit. But it is WEIRD. Like, really, really weird. I could very easily see a movie of this being weirder than The Green Knight.
I’m tempted to say that this should be a miniseries, because there are several episodic bits–encounters with creatures and figures that would work fine on their own, rather than being part of a movie. Either way, I would absolutely adore seeing this made, just because it’d be so out there compared to anything else on television.
LIONBOY BY ZIZOU CORDER
I just reread this book and I think these would make great children’s movies? Honestly, I would not be surprised if someone made a movie out of the first book, and it never making it big enough to make a sequel. Fine. I don’t care. I think it would be really neat to see a movie about a boy who talks to cats going across Europe with his lion friends.
Our story goes like this: in the near future, Charlie talks to cats. His parents are scientists in London. And then one day, they’re kidnapped for a discovery they’ve made, and so Charlie goes on a quest to go find them, with only the cats he comes across to help him. He finds himself on a circus boat and meets a group of lions. Befriending them, they come up with a plan to escape! But also Charlie’s still on a quest to save his parents, and even in this future it’s hard to smuggle lions through Paris.
This is explicitly a future in which the world’s supplies of oil are low, and pollution has gotten very bad, so there are very few gas vehicles, and absolutely no air travel. I’m also curious to know how this story would be changed with the arrival of technology like smartphones and mass surveillance. There’s already so much that feels like relevant commentary even around two decades later, on pollution and greedy capitalists and corruption, but the little tweaks to make it even more modern would make the story shine, in my opinion.
But more importantly, I want to see a bunch of talking cat characters, including the lions.
THE LIONS OF AL-RASSAN BY GUY GAVRIEL KAY
Guy Gavriel Kay’s fantasy novels, other than the Fionavar Tapestry, run on a principle: take a historical event that’s not that well known in the Anglophone world, and then make a fantasy version of it. It’s not always a one-to-one comparison–Song for Arbonne is only inspired by the Albigensian Crusade, from what I can tell–but this one? It’s definitely about the Reconquista, with in-universe analogues to Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the setting.
I debated picking this or The Fionavar Tapestry but I decided that I would rather see something about the Reconquista. I want to watch our not-at-all-thinly-veiled version of El Cid on screen kicking butt and taking names. I want to see a story about medieval religious conflict, featuring a lead character who is not from either of the two clashing sides–Jehane, a Kindath doctor who finds herself sympathizing with people from both sides.
Kingdom of Heaven is nice and all, but it’s still almost entirely from the point of view of the Crusaders. This story would feature three different points of view of the conflict. And I would very much like it if the characters were accurately cast with Spanish, Middle Eastern, and Jewish performers.
AND PEOPLE WHACKING EACH OTHER WITH SWORDZ!
CASTAWAYS OF THE FLYING DUTCHMAN BY BRIAN JACQUES
Brian Jacques’s non-Redwall series is about Ben and Ned, a boy and his dog who were the only souls worth saving on the ghost ship The Flying Dutchman. They were castaway, but made immortal (and the dog made intelligent), and wander the world helping people as commanded by the angel, never staying in one place long enough. After giving us the backstory, the book tells of a town they visit that’s close to being destroyed to make room for a factory in the Industrial Revolution, and how Ben and Ned help the people of the small town stand up for themselves and keep their place.
This would be a Hallmark movie (at least, in tone), but set in the 1800’s. And that’s fine! It’s perfectly fine. We need warm and fuzzy movies sometimes. I wouldn’t even worry that much about the backstory–it could easily be shortly summarized at the beginning, and then a lot of the details be done through flashbacks. Ben and Ned in the books very clearly have trauma flashbacks about their time on the Dutchman so I don’t think it’d be hard to work that in.
Yeah, it’d be simple, but that’s fine. I could do that every so often.
AGE OF UNREASON BY GREGORY KEYES
I like alchemy. I like Enlightenment Era drama. And now here’s a story that mixes both! The premise is that instead of pursuing science, Isaac Newton’s experiments in alchemy turn out to be more fruitful, and so there comes a technological revolution based on alchemy. But that attracts the attention of otherworldly beings who don’t like humanity very much, and they start using King Louis XIV (whose life has been extended by alchemy) to try to enact their plans.
Also one of our leads is young Ben Franklin.
Alchemy! Battle! Politics! Drama! Philosophy! So much cool stuff!
It would be cool to see live-action versions of some of the strange, alchemically-run devices that are featured in the books, from the strange firearms to the airships. And with the number of characters, the international intrigue, and the scale of the battles, these books could easily be turned into an epic television series.
I don’t have much to say I just think it’d be awesome.
1632 BY ERIC FLINT
Actually the series is called Ring of Fire, I think, but no one will know what I’m talking about. If you don’t know what I’m talking about anyway, it goes like this: the modern small West Virginia town of Grantville is somehow transported into Germany during the year 1632, which is smack dab in the middle of the Thirty Years War. Now not only have they got to survive, but the world is still figuring out how to deal with both newer technology and knowledge of the future that comes with this small town.
Make this a series. A long-running series. It would be hard to cover all of it, because as the series goes on, there are multiple books per year dealing with how different parts of Europe (and the rest of the world) are changing in this new timeline. Obviously with a long-running big-budget series you could make it so that you juggle multiple storylines.
It would be dark, I think, in that it has a lot of violence, as befitting the Thirty Years War, but not overwhelmingly so. Because a fantastic element the books have is a fearless optimism about how the world can be made better, and how a small town, even if it’s not perfect, could find its footing and help build a better future.
GOBLIN EMPEROR BY KATHARINE ADDISON
I considered putting this in ‘animated’ but I think it would work fine as a live-action miniseries. The story’s about Maia, the forgotten half-goblin son of the King of Elfland, last in line for inheritance and shunted off to an estate in the middle of nowhere, who suddenly finds himself the only heir after his father and brothers are killed in an airship “accident.” And he’s Emperor now! So we get Court Intrigue: Elfland Edition.
There isn’t actually that much that’s changed in the novel because it’s in a fantasy world, other than that there are weird names and titles all over the place, and the geography is fictional. That, and the difference between elves and goblins in the novel appears to be not a matter of species, but of race. They’re different cultures, but aside from skin color they’re still the same species. And I think it’d be really interesting to depict the story as essentially someone who is mixed race finding himself becoming ruler of a nation, and dealing with a court that’s all white, and how that plays out.
There is a lot to love about The Goblin Emperor and I think there would be a lot to love in a miniseries adaptation. There wouldn’t be that much action or violence. The book features no massive fantasy battles, even off-page. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be a satisfying drama on its own merits.
KING RAVEN BY STEPHEN LAWHEAD
So there are Christian streaming services that have series like The Chosen and I wonder if one could pitch a three-season adaptation of King Raven to them? Obviously the budget’s an issue, but it’s a Christian-themed Robin Hood story, but featuring Welshmen in the reign of King William II. If not I’d be happy to see it elsewhere, just thought it’d be neat.
What makes King Raven stand out to me is not just that it’s a Celtic Christian-themed take on Robin Hood, but it’s also really good at having its lead character play up his own reputation. By the end of Hood, everyone things that the King Raven is a sort of forest demon, because he’s dressed as a giant bird and leaving animal guts all over the forest for the villain’s henchmen to find. Those parts of the story would almost play like a horror film, I think.
And in general, I want to see a Robin Hood story that’s overly critical of the English monarchy. Many Robin Hood stories seem to think the English king is good, as long as it’s the RIGHT English king. King Raven throws out that assumption because our characters aren’t English, they’re Welsh, and they know that the English king is a bully who doesn’t care for them. Their aid to William is because they think he can bully their enemies to get what they want. It’s weird that stories about a famous outlaw end up lionizing the establishment, but this one wouldn’t do that if it wanted to remain faithful to the story.
CREATION BY GORE VIDAL
Again, miniseries.
Want a crash course on religion in the ancient world? No? Suck it, because Creation is a book in which Cyrus, the grandson of Zoroaster and BFF with Xerxes the Great (okay the dates there don’t quite match up) travels around the Persian Empire and beyond trying to find the answer to the question that really grinds his gears: how did the world come to be? He ends up meeting several famous figures, such as Lao Tzi, Buddha, and Confucius, and tries to work out if he thinks they’re right.
I like depictions of the ancient world, but I often feel as if it’s generally limited to specific places like Greece and Rome. So I want to see places not often displayed in movies, especially not sympathetically. Ancient Persia, ancient China, and ancient India. And those latter two through the eyes of a foreigner, yes, but a Persian foreigner, not a white one, and he’s not some kind of White Savior hero, he’s just trying to learn more about different cultures and religious beliefs.
Again, this isn’t a war epic. It’s a travel story, in which our hero meets people throughout his travels and learns about their points of view, while trying to reconcile them with his own. Like in the book, one could make this have a framing narrative of how Cyrus is telling this to his nephew Democritus in Greece many years later.
THE BLACK COUNT BY TOM REISS
Another book I just read! I know this isn’t fiction, but if The Butler can be a movie, I think the life of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas can be one as well. This can be a single movie, and instead of covering his whole life it can just cover a certain campaign. Or you know what? Set it during his imprisonment, where he reminisces on his life and military career. Or have his son telling the story, or learning the stories, as a framing device, because Alexandre Dumas very clearly idolized his father.
When we see dramas about the French Revolution, it’s not generally about the military, and definitely not from the point of view of the French. And I think it would make a good movie to tell the story of a man who, despite facing discrimination because of the color of his skin, reached among the highest ranks in the French military and fought wholeheartedly for the ideals of the Revolution, and seeing the mixed results of how those ideals are implemented by his fellow revolutionaries.
And I want to see Dumas fight a bunch of people like a BEAST. And all around I want more people to know and appreciate Thomas-Alexandre Dumas.
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