What book would you like to see become a movie/mini-series?

[Bedrockgames]

Has anyone done Ringworld? I'd love to see Ringworld on the screen

 

[Yora]

Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn.

 

[Dioltach]

It's been decades since I read the Darksword series by Weiss & Hickman, but from what I remember it could be turned into a visually stunning television series.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Once completed, Evan Winters' The Burning series would be something I would absolutely love to see brought to life. Heck, even just the first book, The Rage of Dragons, would make for a great movie.

And if I could go back in time, why not an adaptation of Bellairs' Face in the Frost, animated by Rankin Bass & Topcraft?

 

[Mad_Jack]

The other, which I think would need an animated treatment, is the Malazan Book of the Fallen.

The first couple books focusing on the Bridgeburners would totally rock if done as an animated tv series, particularly done in the old style of the Rankin/Bass films...
I'd personally do either a tv series or a series of two-hour movies, as it'd probably take at least eight or nine hours of run time to truly do the story justice and get in all the important characters.

I'm hoping that HBO does a new I, Claudius.

I haven't seen it in decades, but I think there's currently enough A-level actors out there willing to do tv these days to remake it well enough to do justice to the original.
I think it's one of those projects where they'd have enough people looking to jump on the project that they'd be able to find the right combination of director/producer/writers/actors to do it right.

 

[Ryujin]

There's also "Lesmen." Can't decide if it should be visually updated for today or played straight to the original descriptions. Globe and teardrop shaped ships might not work well with today's audiences, but they'd be efficient.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Victor Milan's CLD (Collective Landing Detachment) would be a good book to see get a video treatment... It's one of those things where there are no good guys anywhere in the story, and only the fact that the world they live in is so much worse than the protagonists themselves makes them somewhat sympathetic characters.

The "deathbirds" of the CLD are convicted criminals (everything from petty thieves, rapists, and murderers to political undesirables) sentenced to serve as expendable shock troops in the Collective's drive to subjugate the universe in the name of the Universal Will, subjected to a training course that routinely kills half the participants (if they're lucky) before being shipped off to "liberate" alien worlds for the benefit of society.
But one such mission goes horribly wrong, leaving the CLD stranded on a hostile alien world with no support.
Which is when the CLD decides they don't feel like being "expendable" anymore.

One review describes it as, "Visualize Starship Troopers redone as a Stalinist dystopia with good elements of Warhammer 40K, Bill the Galactic Hero and the RPG Paranoia. It is dark, spikey, nihilistic, political, and amazingly funny. The characters are nearly all repulsive, the setting is so much worse than they are that they come off as mildly sympathetic and everything that happens is bloody, horrid and futile."

Honestly, it's something to offend everyone, which would make for some really good tv.

 

[Ryujin]

Victor Milan's CLD (Collective Landing Detachment) would be a good book to see get a video treatment... It's one of those things where there are no good guys anywhere in the story, and only the fact that the world they live in is so much worse than the protagonists themselves makes them somewhat sympathetic characters.

The "deathbirds" of the CLD are convicted criminals (everything from petty thieves, rapists, and murderers to political undesirables) sentenced to serve as expendable shock troops in the Collective's drive to subjugate the universe in the name of the Universal Will, subjected to a training course that routinely kills half the participants (if they're lucky) before being shipped off to "liberate" alien worlds for the benefit of society.
But one such mission goes horribly wrong, leaving the CLD stranded on a hostile alien world with no support.
Which is when the CLD decides they don't feel like being "expendable" anymore.

One review describes it as, "Visualize Starship Troopers redone as a Stalinist dystopia with good elements of Warhammer 40K, Bill the Galactic Hero and the RPG Paranoia. It is dark, spikey, nihilistic, political, and amazingly funny. The characters are nearly all repulsive, the setting is so much worse than they are that they come off as mildly sympathetic and everything that happens is bloody, horrid and futile."

Honestly, it's something to offend everyone, which would make for some really good tv.

Sounds like the sort of thing that you'd want Johnny Knoxville to star in.

 

[Richards]

Ooh, Mad_Jack's response above prompted another idea: James Alan Gardner's "Expendable." It's a kind of anti-Star Trek: there is a Federation (the League of Peoples), but there's no interstellar wars or anything because anyone who has murdered another sentient being has their heart stop as soon as they leave their home system - this is done by the "first race" in the Universe, the first to evolve beyond physical bodies. Mankind is spreading out among the stars, but they've discovered people get really upset when good-looking members of the human race get killed exploring new worlds. The solution? Send in the disabled: anyone with any kind of deformity, no matter how minor (the protagonist of the first book, Festina Ramos, has a wine-colored birthmark on one cheek - that's it), gets more or less drafted into the Explorer Corps (AKA "The Expendables"), because it's much easier to get over the death of a crewmate if said crewmate was kind of ugly.

There's at least seven books in the series, but I'd really just like to see what they do with the first book - it's arguably the best of the lot.

Johnathan

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Given this question a significant amount of thought, and am plumping for Alan Dean Foster's "Commonweath" novels. Not because they are great literature, but because they are and alternative to Star Wars and Star Trek that is neither grimdark nor hyper-serious. And most importantly, doesn't have a cult following of rabid fans who will object to anything that is remotely different to the novels.

Or you could do the same with Poul Anderson's Technic setting.


Another idea would be Larry Niven's Ringworld. But a very loose adaptation, focusing on the survivors' adventures trying to cross a very very large world with a myriad of different cultures. An episodic structure that would be well suited to steaming TV.