Wishlist of SF/Fantasy series not yet being developed as TV/movies?

[Greg Cox]

Not sure about the Pern novels as a series, but I'd give it a chance. My choices ?

Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars etc.
Larry Niven's Ringworld
Alasdair Reynolds Revelation Space
Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat

The Stainless Steel Rat has been optioned frequently, but never escaped from Development Hell.

A few years back, I was visiting the Warner Bros. lot when I spotted the entire series sitting on a bookshelf in the Writer's Building, so clearly somebody took a stab at it at some point!

 

[eschaton]

Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars etc.

Red Mars was supposed to be developed into a TV series by Spike TV in 2015, with J. Michael Straczynski as the showrunner. He left the position as showrunner after only about three months, and the project has been put on hiatus.

I maintain that the Mars Trilogy is basically unfilmable. So much of the appeal likes in Robinson's prose, which you cannot translate to screen. He also just doesn't write in a "cinematic" style - so many of the chapters are long monologues, infodumps about terraforming, in-depth discussions about the Martian constitution, etc. Add to this the lack of any personified antagonists (other than Phyllis I guess), the relative lack of plot structure (the third book having no plot whatsoever), the timeline stretching across decades while the characters visibly age, and the series being chock full of radical anti-capitalist politics, and I don't see how any TV studio would do an accurate adaptation.

 

[JD]

Any of Brandon Sanderson's writings would make for excellent television, especially his 'primary' "Cosmere" series Mistborn and The Stormlight Archives.

According to Wikipedia DMG Entertainment bought the rights to the Cosmere back in 2016, but as far as I know they haven't actually done anything with them yet.

 

[John Clark]

I'd really like to see John Birmingham's WW2 series Axis of Time turned into a series (About a 2020's battlegroup which is transported suddenly into the Battle of Midway in WW2 and a very different timeline emerges)

RM Stirling's Emberverse as well. NBC kind of borrowed the concept for Revolution where electricity was prevented... but the Emberverse had been around for years before that and it went further with Gasoline, Gundpowder, etc... all no longer functioning so the US and other countries had kingdom's emerge with old technologies and swords and bows the main weapons.

I'd like Axis in Time too. I haven't read the emberverse yet though have been looking at them.

Pretty sure I wrote the cover copy for some of those books when they were first published by Ace.

Got paid 90 bucks apiece for them.

For the one I picked up, Company at least was published by Legend over here. I'd have to dig out the others to check the publisher for those. I suspect a couple of them will have been imports given the shop I got most of them at.

A Myth series (again by Asprin) might be fun too.

 

[nutshell]

Terry Brooks’ Word and Void series, but only if they keep it far away from the people who ruined Shannara!!!

 

[FreezeC77]

Terry Brooks’ Word and Void series, but only if they keep it far away from the people who ruined Shannara!!!

As long as you don't read "and MTV is adapting this fantasy novel series for television" it's a better start.

 

[Enterprise is Great]

Bio of a Space Tyrant by Piers Anthony could be interesting. I haven't read them in decades so I don't know how they hold up 30+ years later. Ditto with Incarnations of Immortality by the same author. I remember liking both series.