Best Book that is not a movie

[James]

We have seen various bloggers lists.

Let's make our own.

I nominate Citizen of the Galaxy by Heinlein.

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Note: Citizen of the Galaxy is the anchor because posts require one.

[Russ]

Sure. This could be an excellent movie. Just thinking about it, one starts to note that very.. very few movies are about slavery and begging/beggars. I am thinking this has much to do with how hard it would be hitting those that are running America's movie making industry. Slavery - street urchins ! Yes, that hits right here at home in the good old USA. Children were chattel merchandise in America. Slavery was part of our history. Our country was begun on the backs of slavery - our first 'president' was a slave owner. Much more recently - now in fact, the corporations running the show here - off-shored their slaves. We used to have.. 'street urchins'.. poor, homeless kids, very like Thorby. THEY were subject to dying of starvation or disease or freezing to death. Many were used as nearly-slave labor. Just to exist. So now the children of India.. Vietnam, across Indonesia, etc, are sewing the clothing & stitching up the sneakers. Very sick.

So - I'd say the book's review depends on how much the reader is aware of in America & our history. It was a great book. And requires a bit of imagination from the reader also. The reality being, no matter where one looks, it is going to have 'people' that have no thoughts except how to squeeze the most profit out of other - people. They care not who live or die.. I don't think even Michael Moore would dare make THAT into a movie. The corporations might put out a hit order !

[Jim]

One of the very few Heinlein books even worth considering. Not great, but given how low he set the bar with his entire output, passable. And easily adapted.

[Nicholas]

Thorby would have been a great cine charecter 30 years ago, maybe now he would need making a bit more 'Street smart'. I am a confirmed fan of RAH, but any film adaptations of his early works would need tweaking.

[Gary]

If there's a Heinlein book that could be adapted into a film without changing too many elementary aspects of the story, then I think this one is it. It's not a great book, but it's passably good, and people have done well with far lesser products.

I don't know if it would be a particularly entertaining thing to watch, though. The story is, essentially, the Tarzan tale retold as a sci-fi context, and that might be more readily obvious in a visual adaptation, especially since the audience is more likely to be familiar with that inspiration.

I would be curious to see how an adaptation might characterize the starship combat as portrayed in the book. Somehow I think the Chess game kind of battles wouldn't really play in the modern film. I doubt Heinlein's interpretation of how that would work would survive even the first draft of a screenplay adaptation.

The third act is more than a little cliche... and the weakest part of the book by a pretty wide margin. Ending a movie on a business deal is pretty dull. However, I think it could be pulled off with a little bit more dramatization. The politics and social values are, as usual for Heinlein, trite and hamfisted, but if all that were replaced with a sort of office drama thing, it might work.

The end of the book is an abject snore, and that would piss off a lot of audiences, so it would have to go. I think any film maker worth the ink in his veins would probably want to end on an action sequence, so they'd likely want to make their own added content.

So, yeah, I'm not hating the idea of a film adaptation of this book. It's not the kind of original that is of such great quality that film makers should feel obliged to stick to the original, but I don't think it would require a whole rewrite.

[Michael]

Gary wrote: "The third act is more than a little cliche... and the weakest part of the book by a pretty wide margin."

I tend to agree with Gary on this. In print there is a certainly amount of tension in the last third of the book, but I don't think it would translate well to the big screen. The earlies scenes on Jubbulpore and abord the Sisu have the potential for some big screen SF excitement, but again the central themes running through those parts again might be hard to translate into a movie.

I think if I had to pick one of his books, Tunnel in the Sky might have the potential for a good SF movie. A group of students stranded on a strange planet due to a transport malfuntion. Sort of a mix of SF adventure, Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies.

[Stevensrmiller]

I agree that Citizen of the Galaxy would be a superb film, but only if it were shot as Heinlein likely envisioned it. Today, it would probably be made to look like a Transformers film, or some other CGI horror. No way to know, but I'd have expected Heinlein to see it as much more rustic, with a kind of "Indiana Jones" look to it, working harmoniously with largely self-contained spacecraft that hid most of their tech from the camera.

[Richtoven]

I think it's good enough: It'll be made one day.

It's got all the hollywood formula ingredients, (slavery may be a +ve topical and angle with emotive leverage rather than an obstacle).

The last 3rd is in need of a major re-do to convince. Given the quality of films with a 'corrupt-business' theme, seems like plenty of ways of doing it well!