Posted on 07/20/2004 9:43:06 AM PDT by jalisco555
Isaac Asimov was the steak-and-buffet restaurant of American authors: What he lacked in quality, he made up for in volume. If you didn't like what he was serving, you could wait a few minutes for him to bring out something else. By the time he died in 1992, at the age of 72, Asimov had published more than 470 books, ranging from science-fiction classics to annotated guides of great literature to limerick collections to The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, a defense and celebration of lechery. "His first 100 books took him 237 months, or almost 20 years, until October 1969, to write," his New York Times obituary observed. "His second 100, a milestone he reached in March 1979, took 113 months, or about 9 ½ years—a rate of more than 10 books a year. His third 100 took only 69 months, until December 1984, or less than 6 years." By the end, Asimov achieved the Grand Slam of book writing, turning out at least one volume for each of the 10 classifications in the Dewey Decimal System.
The thread that connected this prodigious output was Asimov's role as a teacher, "the greatest explainer of the age," as Carl Sagan called him. Whether the subject was science, Shakespeare, or the Bible, Asimov was a popularizer who wrote with clarity and concision. Even in his science fiction, the work for which he will be most remembered, Asimov was as much an explainer as a storyteller, an advocate for science and reason over mysticism. In fact, the rap on Asimov the fiction writer is that his stories are too simple, too obvious, too easy to be the stuff of great literature. In Wired, the science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow recently described Asimov's work as "proto-fiction … from a time before the field shed its gills and developed lungs, feet, and believable characters." True. But if Asimov is so easy, why do so many people—including Alex Proyas, the director of I, Robot, and the movie's screenwriters, Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Vintar—keep getting him so wrong?
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.msn.com ...
I have the opposite take. Read the book and saw the movie. I liked the movie much better. Of course the book was written decades ago, so it needed a little updating to come to the screen. The plot of the movie holds together better, though.
Considering what was done to "Starship Troopers" I shudder to think about it. And let's not even mention the movie version of "Nightfall".
Okay - it really didn't have anything to do with the Asimov universe but it was still cool.
The level of detail was great! I also appreciated the relative lack of gutter talk and gratuitous sex. And you have to admit that the robots were neat.
Best sci fi novel-to-movie recently: Starship Troopers!
I had almost forgotten about "Nightfall." Thanks alot for reminding me. Argh!
OTOH, these guys make my vacuum cleaner. I like that use of the title...
I read the books many years ago but I have to say my gut feeling was that Asimov would have been appalled to see something so violent with his name (implicitly) on it.
I'm glad to see this review expressing my feelings about it. (Well, I guess sometimes feelings make sense :-) ).
D
Supposedly the screen play had already been written, but didn't have a title or support for production years before I Robot became available for purchase. When the studio bought the movie rights to I, Robot, they slightly rewrote the plot, incorporated the Three Rules and used the I, Robot" title.
I haven't read them all but I know that I've read at least 200 of his tomes.
I remember the first time I saw the trailer in a theater, I turned to my friend and said, "What the hell is this? It has nothing to do with the book." Now I know why.
well, maybe I won't be too disappointed since I don't like reading these kinds of stories and therefore have never read Asimov.
Besides, I like Will.
I believe they're also making Enders Game into a movie as well.
You're kidding, right? That sacrilege? That horror perpetrated on possibly the best book written by the greatest SF writer ever? (It's by Robert Heinlein, not Asimov)? The "based on the front cover of the book with the same name" movie adaptation of Starship Troopers
Rose, thought you might like to charm in on this later.
Besides, some great sci-fi would NEVER make a good movie, DUNE movies have all sucked royally. Ok, there was LOTR, which by all accounts shouldn't have worked, but it was a labor of love, so he pulled it off in grand fashion. Some of my favorite books have been optioned out for the big screen, but I cringe at the thought of them actually making a movie. Ender's Game anyone (our buddy Orson Scott Card)? Childhood's End (Clarke) was optioned out nearly 40 years ago I think. No studio dare touch it at this point.
I have come to the point where if I decide to see a movie based on a book that I have read, I totally FORGET the book first, and try to judge the movie on its own merits.
Just a thought--if the movie were the same as the book, why bother with the movie.
They just purchased the title and grafted it onto a script called "Hardwired" as per the Internet Movie Database.
My favorite short story was "The Final Question." The question that Multivac couldn't answer due to insufficent data was, "Could entroy be reversed?"
I can't agree more. The movie version of "Starship Troopers" was an abomination to anybody who read and enjoyed the book. I wish Hanks and Spielberg had made the movie version ala "Band of Brothers".
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