Oh God, no, don't tell me they're going to make a movie out of The Stars My Destination.

Hollywood could not, period, end paragraph, end chapter. The final scene alone would send anybody west of Anaheim into gibbering fits. They couldn't even make District 9. The best they could do would be teleporting into naked women's bedrooms and Gully Foyle arriving at the party in a railroad train. Oh, and lots of gosh-wow fireworks, which are important to the story but not the central bit.

At least tell me it isn't being made by Californians. Please? Anybody? Bueller?

Regards,
Ric

It was written in 1956. I read it serialized in Galaxy and I definitely wasn't seven years old.

They'd better never make Out of the Silent Planet or Perelandra, either. It might be okay for them to make That Hideous Strength, but the irony would be lost on them, I fear, so best to let it stay between the covers.

Tin cans not usable? One can at least defend this one. Tin cans are called that because the steel cans are lined with tin - or were when that book was written, anyway. Very cold temperatures would destroy the lining, causing very acute corrosion problems inside the tins after the tins were warmed up.

The Demolished Man is a lot more film-able, in some ways (ie, saner and more like a formula mystery/thriller, at least most of the time). But I have to say that the spectacle value of The Stars My Destination is pretty amazing. The problem is that it would be awfully hard to make the flick without making it a paean to violence... I guess in many ways it's just hardboiled in an ultra-Mickey Spillane level of violence, though.

I dread another "Starship Trooper" level debacle.

The suits that make the decisions are NOT SF fans; hell, I doubt if any of them read anything other than Billboard and Insider.

Pray.

A great, great novel. I found an on line e-book version, complete with all of the text graphics, but I did not write down where I found it. I sent a copy to Gerald a couple of years ago.

Gerard,

I normally don't disagree with you about much. And I've loved that Alfred Bester novel since I first read it 30+ years ago. But I will state for the record that E. E. "Doc" Smith pwned the space opera genre with his Lensmen series. If you want to argue novel versus series, that's fine, but I think that Smith's work is far and away the best of this particular type of fiction.

Tangentially related: last week I was on a cruise with my wife and I saw a guy with some serious facial tatoos that immediately brought to mind the protagonist from TSMD. I did think that this tattoo removal, should he ever seek it, would be somewhat less painful. Lasers probably sting a bit less than needles dipped in salicylic acid which, if memory serves, is how the ink was removed in the novel.

Now I need to go pull out my copy and read it again.

The best SF novel ever written? I'd dispute that, but whether or not it's so...some of us are still pitching.

Fell out of bed fleeing down. This has brightened my day!

Fell out of bed fleeing down. This has brightened my day!