Denied

[ellestra]

Would you like to become Eysium citizen? Here's your chance to speak with a Border Agent. Enjoy your experience.

If that's not enough corporate insanity for you - Syfy is developing 12 Monkeys as a TV series. I know it's possible that it'd be great - it happened with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - but chances for that are pretty low. 12 Monkeys was a perfect "time loop" film but how you make a series that doesn't screw that up? I bet they will change the rules for time travel so you can change the past.

Zadie Smith is writing SF novel. It even has a plot. It will either be really cool or present a concept already done multiple times as something she just discovered. We'll see.

Comments

[novin-ha.livejournal.com]

The Zadie news is cool, although I'm not sure how much she can be trusted to actually do it - she's abandoned projects before (as writers are wont to do), and had said to be done "writing herself into the English tradition" only to publish the very modernist-inspired NW (she says it's French existentialist, but I'd say there's a bit of Woolf to it, but then again, might just be me).

I'm not worried about her re-doing a trope because both On Beauty and NW do that - well, On Beauty re-writes an entire novel ;D I'd hazard a guess that she's an avid enough reader to get a feel of the field before joing in, so she will use bits and pieced but with her own spin. For me her books are mostly about characters, not the plot, so I might like whatever she produces.

Then again, I'm biased because Zadie and Alice Munro are my favourite writers in the whole world. *Draws hearts*

[ellestra.livejournal.com]

I was very exited at first too but then I read the piece and she says Game of Thrones TV show "That is a masterpiece. The last episode, after it finished, we just sat in the dark for half an hour... Literary novelists would do well to learn to plot from these people." and then I got snarky. I'm usually pleasantly amused when I meet people who just encountered sff for the first time and tell me how much fun it is but not when they say they are writing it.

She also said the book will have plot and that's something she doesn't normally do so it's hard.

I'm willing to wait and see how all that will turn out but I am little worried. Mostly because this is going to be a book that a lot of people who never read sff will read and then judge the whole sff by it.

[novin-ha.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's to be taken all too seriously XD I've read her novels and there is a plot to them, it's just that they are not plot-driven ;) I find the GoT accolades to be annoying (also because I'm so very much over the show, I follow out of curiousity and because I like Tywin Lannister, and that's it), but I'm wondering whether that could be promotional ;)

Mostly because this is going to be a book that a lot of people who never read sff will read and then judge the whole sff by it.

Is that what happened with Atwood's sci fi novels? I haven't followed it too closely.

[ellestra.livejournal.com]

It's not Atwood (especially since everyone in sff community always considered her genre writer). There is also plenty of mainstream authors who grew up on sf like we did and write great genre books and great books with sff elements in them. However, there is unfortunately also a make sff mainstream worthy thing that ends up rehashing things that have already been done over and over again and presenting them as new twist. I'm to tired to look up the discussion about it again but some of it makes one think they have no idea sff isn't all Star Wars on paper.

I don't think that's the case with Zadie but those two parts of the story really pushed the wrong buttons so I went from very excited to cautious. I know that my way of expressing myself doesn't really shows it but I do want to read that book. I'm also generally for waiting to get something before judging it (except maybe extreme cases like Tyra Banks writing fantasy novels - some things are just too much).