WhenWords Collide Science Fiction Stories, Novels & Movies - Versions of Vision
By Stephanie Foster - Edited and Illustrated by Steve Dunkley
One of the things I love to discover is different versions of a particular science fiction story. It is fascinating seeing how a short story can transition into a novel or a movie. But my own favorites are the novels. There’s just something magnetic about them that keeps me coming back. It’s common for Authors to sell their works to movie companies. Some are even successful. But the transition is seldom true.. How many times have you hear people say,
It is similar for Asimov’s Nightfall. The subject is a world with five suns that has never known night... except once every couple thousand years. The inhabitants do not believe in night, save for a few religious crackpots, of course, but scientists are discovering evidence that something indeed happens. Again, the short story simple explains the situation and the story progresses in Asimov’s matter-of-fact manner of story-telling. His novel goes into further detail as to the discoveries of the approaching night as well as the aftermath, when much of the world has gone insane from the unfamiliar darkness - as you might expect it would. But I also enjoy finding stories that are not so well known.
“It’s not as good as the book.”? Perhaps it’s because the imagingation is so individual and no-one can see the picture that novels create in your mind like you can. My own favorites are the novels. Two of the best-known stories that went from great short story to brilliant novel are Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Both were excellent stories in each instance. The fascination comes in being able to see how the short story brings out the situation quickly, then resolves it, while the novel brings out the details, information, and characters that bring the surrounding story to life. There’s simple more room in a novel for the story’s resolution to be so detailed. In Ender’s Game, for example. The short story is about a young boy who goes to Battle School, and saves the world from alien invasion without knowing it. It’s a fairly simple story with scant details - The story more or less romps cleverly from one event to the next. The novel explains how he gets into Battle School, more about his training, and what his family is doing. Much more depth and detail - and not only did this make sequels possible, it allowed for more novels focused on one of the other children from Battle School. A great outcome for Card’s growing fanbase.
Eric Frank Russell’s Plus X and variants thereof, for example. This is an interesting case, because I like the shortest version best. EFR’s strength was definitely in shorter stories. His works are hard to find, appearing rarely in bookstores, but what booklover minds an excuse to haunt the local used bookstore? I like best finding books that have been made into movies, not movies made into books. It’s interesting to see where movie-makers have made changes to conform to how things went in the book, while a book can stay more true to a movie. Frank Herbert’s famous epic, Dune is a prime example. The novel is a brilliant example of univers-creation. His society is so detailed. The movie... depends on which one you like best. Some prefer David Lynch’s version, others the miniseries that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. You can read reviews on each and get extremely different opinions. Star Wars is another version that set standards. It’s a movie that has spawned a myriad of novels for what has become the Star Wars universe. It’s almost a genre of it’s own within Sc-Fi. Regardless of the movie/TV version you like or dislike, most readers of the novel love it. While a book can unite fans, a movie of that story can polarise that fanbase into varied camps with very different views on the result. g social/life 7