However, some push back against the idea of any story being “unfilmable” and there are some books that, while it would be incredibly difficult to take from page to screen, would actually make great movies. Here are five such books and while their adaptations probably would have to make some careful and significant changes, the stories are so good we’d still like to see them come to life.
Most people consider House of Leaves to be more horror than sci-fi, but one could argue that it truly has elements of both. The book has a complicated structure (more on that in a moment) but the core of the overall novel follows a family who move into a new home only to discover that their house is larger on the inside than the outside and, soon after this discovery is made, the family finds that a strange dark hallway has appeared in their living room leading to an endless maze with strange and catastrophic implications.
It’s a very cool story and would make for a great movie, but functionally it would actually be pretty difficult adapt to film in the way the book presents it. The book is presented as an academic text that covers a documentary film, The Navidson Record, that itself tells the story of what happened with the family. The academic record is further annotated by someone named Johnny Truant, who found the manuscript after it’s author’s death and is editing it for publication. His footnotes make up his own story which tells a further story. The actual text of the book is full of typeface changes, color changes, different structures and more making it a wildly unique experience.
A post-apocalyptic sci-fi story, The Gone-Away World is set in a world that is the remains from the Go-Away War, a war which weapons that entirely destroyed their targets and any evidence that they had ever existed are used. However, the matter that made up the targets still exist and when that matter comes into contact with humans, the matter comes back in forms dictated by what people present are thinking about — sometimes to horrific effect. The story follows the narrator and his best friend who are on a mission as a group of troubleshooters to deal with a catastrophic event caused by this surreal side effect.
Realistically, adapting The Gone-Away World probably wouldn’t be too hard from a story perspective. There’s something about the consequences of war coming back to haunt humanity in a tangible way that makes for a good sci-fi tale to be sure. The trick is that the world created within The Gone-Away World is just so surreal and strange and absurd it would be difficult to bring to life, visually, in a way that would truly do the story justice.
Time travel makes for great sci-fi and it’s a key component of This Is How You Lose the Time War. The novel follows two enemy time travel agendas as they weave back and forth through time to alter history for the benefit of their warring empires. While they are forbidden from interacting with one another, the two agents start leaving one another messages and, over the course of these message fall in love, an act that has dire consequences.
A star-crossed, time travel romance sounds like a fantastic sci-fi movie, but the problem that people feel makes This Is How You Lose the Time War unfilmable is it’s format. The story is told entirely through letters and messages and there is very little direct action. It would take a very creative director to figure out how to tell this story and preserve the things that make it great.
Another time travel story, The Man Who Folded Himself tells the story of a man who inherits a special time belt that lets him travel through time. He ends up using this belt to essentially hang out with himself — and even form sexual and romantic relationships with versions of himself, something that has disastrous results. Some consider this book to be the ultimate time travel story and indeed, it’s a fascinating one.
The problem with making The Man Who Folded Himself a movie — other than the general weirdness of him having a relationship with himself — is that you’d have to find a way to have one actor be pretty much countless characters and on screen pretty much the entire time.
Hyperion might be the sci-fi book that fans want to see made into a movie the most, but it’s been trapped in development hell and is considered to be largely unfilmable. The first novel in the Hyperion Cantos, the story is set in a distant future with war looming across the galaxy. The story follows seven pilgrims’ journey to Hyperion and it’s Time Tombs with the pilgrims’ stories each told in distinct voices that make for a unique, genre-spanning experience. It’s been compared to The Canterbury Tales for its complex storytelling structure.
And it’s that complex structure that makes it incredibly difficult to translate to screen. There are a ton of characters, many timelines, stories within stories, and rich, detailed lore. There’s so much in Hyperion and the Hyperion Cantos more broadly that it would be incredibly difficult to adapt without losing a lot in translation, though the story is good enough that fans might just be willing to accept that risk.
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