Bice
Ed Stasiak
The stories have won multiple literary awards but to each his own,
Yeah, the reason I read them was because I was working my way through
all the Hugo winners, and both Green Mars and Blue Mars won the Hugo.
So I read the entire trilogy. I actually thought the first book, Red
Mars, was the best of the three. I'm a big sci-fi fan, so given the
books' premise (a trilogy about terraforming Mars) and the awards, I
was really looking forward to reading it. But I found the books way
too dry, and had trouble connecting with any of the characters.
I consider the "Mars" trilogy (there's a fourth book of short stories, "The Martians")
the 2nd best sci-fi ever, after the "Dune" novels and while I can understand some
finding the descriptions of Mars boring, I thought they were well written and gave the
reader an understanding of life on Mars but IMO the characters are very well written,
with each having a realistic and unique and memorable personality and their interactions (over 100 years) being fascinating.
And from an environmental and political perspective the "Mars" books do a far better
job of getting the point across, which is something Cameron is trying to do with the
"Avatar" movies and failing, as he seems to have wholly disregarded the actual story
and thinks the CGI can completely carry the movies. It can't.
In the first "Avatar" flick, the plot is driven by humans wanting to extract Unobtainium
and being predictably mustache-twirling bad guys about it while in the new movie, the
plot is;
uhagvat nyvra junyrf gb rkgvapgvba gb rkgenpg zntvpny oenva syhvq sebz gurz, juvpu
nyybjf uhznaf terngyl rkgraqrq yvsrfcnaf, while being predictably mustache-twirling bad
guys about it...
Something the "Mars" stories have already done and in an actual scientifically realistic
way and more importantly, addresses the political and social fall-out from this tech.
Ironically, I thought the destruction of the space elevator in the
second book (or was it the first one?) would make a visually
specatacular scene in a movie. And then that TV adaptation of
Asimov's Foundation books included a sabotaged, collapsing space elevator...even though nothing like that ever happens in any of the Foundation books. Wonder where they got the idea.
"Foundation" is pretty much unfilmable IMO, as most of the story consists of the characters
standing around talking about events happening off-screen but the tv series didn't even bother
with an adaption, following the usual Hollywood route of completely shitcanning the original
books and make up it's own stupid and predictable story.
It seems Hollywood has become fundamentally incapable of actually _adapting_ an existing
story, the process nowadays is always to loot the IP for the title and characters then hire
no-name hack screenwriters to write a new and inevitably shitty story.
The "Godfather" movies for example (the first two) is almost a word-for-word adaption
of Mario Puzo's novel (which is why they considered by many to be the best movies ever
made) while "Game of Thrones", despite the show runners having five novels of 1,000+
pages each to work with, is almost all original content and utter trash.
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