So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[Kertrats47]

Finished Plagues of Night. I've since posted my review if you'd like to know what I thought!

[Snaploud]

I recently read Star Trek: The Last Stand, Star Trek: Rogue Saucer, Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night, and the Crystal Spheres (a short story). I'm also half-way through Redshirts: a Novel with Three Codas.

[Violet.Phoenix]

As of late, I read two Star Trek: Typhon Pact novels and am now taking a break by reading something of an epic fantasy.

Typhon Pact novels:
Zero Sum Game: fantastic novel. I had a hard time putting this one down, really great pace and story.
Seize the Fire: an interesting story, but it does feel slow in terms of pacing. There were some minor plot developments that I found really interesting, but overall I feel like more could have been done, and there was one plot element near the end I really wish had been fleshed out. *sigh*

Now I'm reading A Game of Thrones by GRRM. So far I'm about 30 pages in and the descriptions are fantastic. I'm also really happy to see that the television series is staying true to the books (so far ).

[JD]

There really weren't any huge changes from the book in the first season of Game of Thrones. I can't comment on the second season though, since I have to wait for the the DVDs.

[Sho]

^ Season 2 diverged from the book quite a bit, and - I think that's the consensus now - not always successfully or explicably. It still hits most of the right notes, but there's a few real missteps there too.

[Christopher]

I haven't seen the show or read the books, but I read a post on io9 about some changes in the show's second season that they considered improvements on the second book.

[Sho]

I agree with some of those points, in particular Charles Dance and Maisie Williams perform so brilliantly together that any of their scenes easily compensates for many ills. OTOH, I think Robb's love story was cheesy and diminishes the choices the character makes in the book, and the Winterfell arc was badly butchered with the removal of entire layers of story and important characters. This is especially annoying when time is instead spent copiously on characters that don't even exist in the book and have for some reason been kept around despite their exposition-carrying function from season 1 no longer being upheld. And Cersei's doing an odd little hot and cold dance vs. her rather more consistent portrayal in the book, and a lovely bit of finale-defining ambiguity is culled from Jon's story, and Tyrion's shining, key moment of the story got cut (leaving him with rather little to actually do despite copious screen time), and Stannis is behaving very out of character - even for the series - in the Battle of Blackwater, ...

I'm not a purist; I don't expect an adaptation to cling to the books page by page. In fact, I thought the first season did a tremendous job at picking the best bits from the book, and adding its own, complementary beats that didn't contradict the book but instead showed events from new, interesting angles or gave new insights into characters. Season 2 is far less successful at this - it got jumbled up in the picking-the-best-bits stage and didn't even get to adding much in the way of complementary stuff.

Ultimately, I think Clash was just a little too big for one season. I'm happy they're doing Storm in two seasons - it's even longer and higher-density than Clash. All the potential is certainly still there, it can easily recover (at least for now, when the changes haven't snowballed into insurmountable problems yet).

[JD]

Yeah, I know I read an interview with Emilia Clarke where she said they were changing things more dramatically as it when on. I just wasn't sure how drastic the changes were.

[Christopher]

I think it's best if a show does diverge from the books it's based on once it establishes its own identity. For one thing, you never know which actors will break out from the pack or turn out to have chemistry. If the heroine's love interest in the book turns out to be played by an actor she has no chemistry with at all, while the minor supporting character turns out to have great chemistry with her and steals every scene he's in, it would be wrong not to have the heroine leave the book love interest and hook up with the supporting character. The show has to be its own entity and do what best serves it as a show.

[Sho]

^ I would agree with that actually, except that I think in this case some of the changes that were made were not for the better of the story, nor easily explained by production pressures. IOW, so far they have been better when they have been closer to the books.

[Snaploud]

I finished Redshirts: a Novel with Three Codas.

[Travis Chesser]

Christopher wrote:

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I think it's best if a show does diverge from the books it's based on once it establishes its own identity. For one thing, you never know which actors will break out from the pack or turn out to have chemistry. If the heroine's love interest in the book turns out to be played by an actor she has no chemistry with at all, while the minor supporting character turns out to have great chemistry with her and steals every scene he's in, it would be wrong not to have the heroine leave the book love interest and hook up with the supporting character. The show has to be its own entity and do what best serves it as a show.

In theory I agree with this..... having read all of GOT long before the tv show and having watched the series, I don't think that could work for this show as well. I don't mind the changes they're doing, or what they're adding, in fact I love the show in its own right, but only because they're still not changing the overall plotline or where its headed and I don't think they can. In a series like this, where who people fall in love with are critical to what happens books later, couples can't really be changed up on a whim. You can't really change the overall direction of the book's plotlines and still have things work out. That being said - I do love the show, changes and all, and don't quibble about them. There were some things that surprised me, but I liked them.

[Christopher]

^But that's just it -- after a while, once the show has established its own identity and direction, it wouldn't be trying to follow the same storyline as the novels anymore. It would be constructing its own version of the universe that might draw on elements from the novels but would put them together in its own distinctive way. It's just natural that over time, the two versions of the work would diverge more and more as the differences increased.

To offer sort of an inverted example, consider The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This started out as a radio serial and then a couple of record albums before it became a series of books. The first book was pretty much a straight adaptation of the first few episodes of the radio series, albeit with an altered ending so that a cliffhanger moment in the radio show had a more conclusive resolution in the book. That meant the second book had to shuffle things around, still incorporating a lot from the radio series but putting it together differently, leaving out some bits, and adding other bits. It ended in much the same place that the first "season" of the radio series ended, though. But then the third book ended up going in a whole different direction from the radio series, with only a few points of commonality (in fact, I think it was largely based on an unused Doctor Who pitch), and later books just diverged more and more radically, so that most of the material in the second "season" of the radio series never got adapted into prose (or indeed any other format as far as I can recall).

[Joel_Kirk]

Currently reading:
*Goodbye, Mr. Shaft....(after reading Shaft Has a Ball, which wasn't too bad).

[Travis Chesser]

Christopher wrote:

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^But that's just it -- after a while, once the show has established its own identity and direction, it wouldn't be trying to follow the same storyline as the novels anymore. It would be constructing its own version of the universe that might draw on elements from the novels but would put them together in its own distinctive way. It's just natural that over time, the two versions of the work would diverge more and more as the differences increased.

To offer sort of an inverted example, consider The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This started out as a radio serial and then a couple of record albums before it became a series of books. The first book was pretty much a straight adaptation of the first few episodes of the radio series, albeit with an altered ending so that a cliffhanger moment in the radio show had a more conclusive resolution in the book. That meant the second book had to shuffle things around, still incorporating a lot from the radio series but putting it together differently, leaving out some bits, and adding other bits. It ended in much the same place that the first "season" of the radio series ended, though. But then the third book ended up going in a whole different direction from the radio series, with only a few points of commonality (in fact, I think it was largely based on an unused Doctor Who pitch), and later books just diverged more and more radically, so that most of the material in the second "season" of the radio series never got adapted into prose (or indeed any other format as far as I can recall).

I understand - its just hard to discuss since you have not read/seen it. I would be very interested in having the discussion once you have. It just wouldn't work with this series. Now what would work - is a tv show based on the world with an all new plot and characters. But if you were going to change the overall plotline, you would have had to change the beginning as well. There is stuff happening in the prologue that sets up events in book 5 and so on. What the show is excellent at doing is adding in new scenes with various characters, showing their POV that you don't get in the book, fleshing out a lot of details, and definitely changes its fair share of details throughout. I'm just speaking in broad terms of the general direction the show is driving (the overall main plot) - is still staying consistent. How things get there are changing (which upsets some fans, me I don't care) but the destination in the end remains the same.