Hi,
First - thanks for writing these books! They are causing me to lose a lot of sleep because I just cannot put them down. (In fact, I've had to stop reading more than once because I've worn out the battery on my tablet!) And then I came to the web site and really like the additional information, like the ship designs and the log, that really enhance the experience.
I saw on one of the site pages that there's maybe some talks with Hollywood. (Yay!) For what it's worth, I think the saga would make an OUTSTANDING television series. On the other hand, I'm not sure movies would work well. I'm afraid that the story would get too compressed in order to fit into two (or four or six) hours, similarly to how I felt about Ender's Game. It was okay, but to me the biggest thing was you lost the sense of time, everything was too rushed. (I had other issues as well, though I liked the movie in general.)
Anyhow, eagerly awaiting Ep 12!
Peter
I suspect there probably is a fair bit of room for compressing the novels to able to make movies out of them without too much loss of detail. Though the overwhelming (in a good way) expected number of books seems to make it rather unlikely that all 75 episodes would be made into movies.
However, a TV series made from 75 books would would probably run around 500-750 episodes*, which would be upwards of 10 episodes a book. That means probably 10-30 episodes in a season to prevent it from catching up to the book series. Otherwise, the TV series ends up giving out spoilers for the book series or the plot lines of the two media types may start to drift apart. Overall, that means that the series could be made into movies over 30+ years or so while a series could keep pace with the book release schedule as long as book releases aren't delayed too often.
*Based on roughly 1 page of movie script being roughly 1 minute of the movie, a roughly equal book page to movie script page conversion and some estimates about the average number of pages per book in the series.
I think a TV series or a movie series, either one.... heck maybe even both... could be great. Each book covers far more than 1 epsisode of a TV series would cover, possibly as much as 3 so given a 4 month production schedule, which Rick seems to have gone to, he could easily keep up with a television production cycle of 10 episodes /year which seems to be becoming the norm for Book-to-TV series.
Witness Game of Thrones and a few other books that have gone to TV series.
The key would be getting with a producer that's willing to stay as true as possible to the series.
Movies would also work, each book would roughly translate to 1 2.5hr movie, which translates to, currently, 22 years worth of movies.
Personally I'd prefer a HBO style TV series that sorta-kinda keeps pace with the books because, honestly, I don't want to wait 30 years to see the last episode on the big screen 😉
I keep one thing foremost in my mind here: Books and TV/Movies are a different media. What works in one doesn't always translate well. They are just different. So I enjoy these books, and I'll (probably) enjoy whatever gets turned out by the hollywood sausage factory, but there isn't much connecting the two.
For those that follow it, John Scalzi's 'Old Man's War' series was being turned into a movie. Not any more. Now someone else is turning it into a TV show on SciFi.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/08/05/in-which-i-interview-myself-about-the-old-mans-war-tv-series/
Just shows how fickle The Beast Known As Hollywood is.
Gee, Hollywood did such a great job translating Damnation Alley into a movie. They actually kept the last name of one of the characters and threw out the rest.
As a fan of Firefly and Babylon 5: Crusade (Damn you, FOX!), I'm all in favour for a TV series set in the Frontiers Saga Universe. Note that I say "set in", and not "based on the books". For example, the story could revolve around the Pentaurus Cluster as it struggles with all the political and economical turmoil that's left in the wake of... you know what(not gonna spoiler here, just in case someone is not finished with that story ark yet).
Or it could be a prequel, leading up to the occurences surrounding the CV-01. An epic tale of intrique, espionage, political struggle...
Oh, and don't get me wrong, if the TV series were an adaptation of the books, I would watch the hell out of it.
^^^ Seconded
As a fan of Firefly and Babylon 5: Crusade (Damn you, FOX!), I’m all in favour for a TV series set in the Frontiers Saga Universe. Note that I say “set in”, and not “based on the books”. For example, the story could revolve around the Pentaurus Cluster as it struggles with all the political and economical turmoil that’s left in the wake of… you know what(not gonna spoiler here, just in case someone is not finished with that story ark yet).
Or it could be a prequel, leading up to the occurences surrounding the CV-01. An epic tale of intrique, espionage, political struggle…Oh, and don’t get me wrong, if the TV series were an adaptation of the books, I would watch the hell out of it.
Something set in the universe might be interesting as well depending on what the angle is. Might be a good idea to create a list of subplots/side-stories that could be used for that purpose.
I think this series lends itself more to an episode based tv like structure. Netflix has been really branching out in exclusive content and I think this series could really mesh well with what they are doing.
I agree on the part of, better not condensing the story into for a one of Movie (like Enders Game) and cutting out important parts.
That would be very sad indeed.
It's been quite some time since a really good SciFy TV was made and the story of "The Frontiers Saga" would deserve to become the next great influencer of a generation. Just like Star Trek once was.
Each Book could probably be a double episode.
With an Extra long episode as a Pilot and an extra long Episode at the end of each Season.
Though, set in the Universe as mentioned by McDiel would also be cool.
If there would be a kick starter project for a Sci-Fi,... i'd be giving some money to that.
With perks starting from x$ for an autograph from Ryk, up to xxxx$ for a guest role with a single sentence.
