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 seem to remember reading several sequels to the Foundation Trilogy that were extremely "mystical"--Gaia hypothesis or some such nonsense.
I've just worked my way through all five seasons of Babylon 5 on DVD and am planning to take up Firefly soon.
"Hunt For Red October" is a great example of the movie following the book closely and I enjoyed both reading the book and watching the movie tremendously.
I have this compliment (I am assuming it goes to Asimov): it made me think not so much about robots, but about totalitarianism.
He tried to unify his Robot and Foundation story lines toward the end. It didn't work very well. He should have left well enough alone.
Could it be because they are arrogant and stupid?
I believe Wolfgang Petersen, who did Das Boot, is supposed to direct it. I hope they get it right.
Did the computer graphics clearly indicate proper usage of nested for loops? (Hoaky arrays of objects.)
Did the computer graphics clearly indicate proper usage of nested for loops? (Hoaky arrays of objects.)
Which model do you have? And, how well does it actually clean?
How about selling a music production with a book? Some of the best music is written for movies and recalls various passages in the book.
I have to agree. I liked how the show combined the American West with Space Travel..
Hey, I know who wrote Starship Troopers. I just said I liked it! I thought at least some of Heinlein's major concepts got through and camp part didn't bother me. Let's face it, most of the time the author's essential point never makes it to the screen.
Paycheck, Minority Report, Total Recall. Vaguely entertaining movies but not the best adaptations.
But the robots are still cool.
As for other sci fi being handled poorly ...I agree. An example: Although Alien is considered a classic film sci fi thriller, it author, O'Bannon, was furious about the rewrites for the film.
That series is in print in Arabic and is titled "Al-Queda"!
Surely you jest. That was a criminal adaptation of a great piece of sci-fi literature. There should have been executions over what they did to Starship Troopers.
The Lord of the Rings series was fairly easy to transcribe to film because there's so much action and character interaction in it to move the plot logically along. The biggest problem was technological - being able to recreate Tolkien's vision.
I have a tough time trying to imagine being able to pull off a transcription of, say, the Foundation series in the same way as LOTR because most of Asimov's plot movement takes place in-between character interactions. It's always been remarkable how little the plot moves in quotation marks in most of his books.
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