Blogging Challenge: Books That Should Be Made Into A Movie

Right, so, the usual bit of context: Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. Hit their homepage to see the current week's responses, and add a link to your own if you're so inclined.

This week's challenge is "Books that should be made into a movie, and why."

...Where to even start???

...Especially after Amazon Prime finally came through with Good Omens?

...Apparently I'm not going to focus on individual books so much as Authors That I Wish Producers Would Look At. Yeah.

Okay, first up: Martha Wells has recently gotten some (extremely overdue) attention and awards for The Murderbot Diaries (four novellas and a novel that's due out in 2020), about a cybernetic Security Unit trying to find/make its way in the world. I've spent about the last year recommending this series to anybody who wanders into shouting range, but because of the way it's laid out I think it would actually make a better series than it would a movie.

But the Murderbot Diaries aren't the only possibilities in Martha Wells' writing. Her Ile-Rien books, and in particular Death of the Necromancer, would make excellent movies. (Death of the Necromancer is a sort of reverse Sherlock Holmes story with magic. Just read it, you'll see what I mean.)

Then she has several stand-alone books. City of Bones was the book that got me interested in her work, and would make an excellent movie all by itself.

But the one I really want to see? The Books of the Raksura. Five books and two story collections, so there's plenty of material for a series, and it's set in a fantasy world that's based more in Nature Channel documentaries than, say, medieval Europe. It's sword and sorcery with a matriarchal society of were-dragons and nary a human to be found.

Next up is someone I (also) consider one of the great underrated writers of modern science fiction and fantasy: Walter Jon Williams. He's probably best known for the cyberpunk novel Hardwired, and honestly that would make a great movie. (High-speed armored hovercraft battles, come on!) The other logical choice would be the Metropolitan books, which I'd classify as Science Fantasy; the basic idea is that if magic were a natural resource, then it would be measured and monitored and taxed and there'd be a whole bureaucracy surrounding its use. This is the story of what happens when somebody sets out to upend those power structures.

But the one I'd really like to see on the screen is Aristoi, set in a far future where nanotechnology has created technological systems that border on magic and the Aristoi are carefully selected to guard its design and development (after an early mistake went viral and the nanites devoured Earth). It's a careful balance, until one of the Aristoi discovers evidence of a conspiracy to subvert it.

The third one I'm going to recommend is Lilith Saithcrow, and in particular the Bannon and Claire books. Give me an Elizabethan setting where the power of the empire is sustained by a balance between sorcerers and mentats (essentially mad scientists), and then force a sorceress and her half-feral guardian to work with one of the mentats (who gets twitchy around too much magic) to solve various mysteries and find solutions for various disasters. Also, if this ever gets made into a show, or a series of movies, then maybe I'll finally get to read the other novels that would have been written if the series had done better. (But I'm Not Bitter.)

But okay, maybe Elizabethan Urban Fantasy Adventure sounds like too much of a niche? (It wouldn't be. Done right, it would establish its own genre. But for the sake of argument...) Maybe you just want a classic genre topic, like zombies? Welcome to Road Trip Z. Want more of a classic fantasy? Try Steelflower (and the sequels) for a sword-fighting elvish anti-heroine and her unlikely contingent of found family and friends. Want a stand-alone cyberpunk for an intriguing movie? She-Wolf and Cub. And these are not the only possibilities.

And that's passing over a huge number of things that informed my childhood... just to offer a couple of examples, let's do a series (either movies, or a show) based on Barbara Hambly's Darwath series, which blends Tolkien-esque fantasy and Lovecraftian horror. (Or her vampire novels, beginning with Those Who Hunt The Night.) Or any of several Roger Zelazny items that colored my youthful imagination.

But I really need to stop here, because otherwise I'll be thinking of new things to add right up through Wednesday morning, and that way madness lies...