— Alan
Sounds interesting, though his movies haven’t really been that strong lately.
Bill G really liked Seveneves, so he picked up Neal Stephenson in his Tesla and they got burgers.
The chance of someone making a Kerbal Space Program mod just went up a few hundred percent. I tend to like, even love, Stephenson’s books. I tended to like, even love Seveneves, especially when the palindrome finally started making sense.
How many years have they been trying to make a Snow Crash movie, and Seveneves just waltzes into pre-production? I guess as far as disaster movies go, this has plenty of global destruction, and its setting ranges from pre-apocalyptic to post-apocalyptic with all points between. Audiences might want to check that out, especially if it’s packaged more like Armageddon than Deep Impact. But this story is far nerdier than Gravity and the Martian trapped in space together, with an epilogue that makes the end of A.I. look like, well, like Snow Crash.
Anyway, I hope it’s actually made. Fantasy casting: President Hillary Rodham Clinton to play President Julia Bliss Flaherty, Neil deGrasse Tyson to play astronomer and science popularizer “Doc” Dubois Harris, Malala Yousafzai to play famously wounded activist Camila, and Paul Allen or Elon Musk to play billionaire astronaut Sean Probst.
The first and second parts of Seveneves was great. The last third, not so much. If it’s just the one movie, I expect it to be mostly about the first two sections, since that’s the meat of the story.
That was my first thought as well. If it were going to be a 6-episode HBO thingamajig, then maybe they could cover the whole book.
As for casting, the timing of my read of Seveneves coincided with binge watching Veep, so I can’t not see Julia Louis-Dreyfus as President Julia Bliss Flaherty.
I had difficulty getting through Seveneves, in fact I finally put it down halfway through, although I do intend to get back to it soon. Quite honestly, the book is so padded with ridiculous detail on the most minor things that it, at least for me, ruined the narrative flow of the book. I can see a movie working well, because the story was good but honestly, Stephenson has never been more in need of a brutal editor than when he wrote Seveneves. A movie is, by necessity, streamlined and should flow better than the book did.
Yeah, just finished it this week, and the 3rd section seemed like it ended halfway through. It really feels like it should have been a 3-book series, with a real ending.
Also, there’s a part where smart characters do really dumb things, for the sake of plot, and it annoyed the heck out of me. Ending of part 1 and notes on part 3:
Not just spacing Julia right off the bat for illegally coming to the Swarm. IMHO, Tekla would have done that, based on her character, as would Dinah and the lifeboat protocol rather demanded it. It would have rung a little more true if it had been Ivy and Dubs, but it just rings as a contrived plot point for the rest of the book. As to the incomplete part 3. Wanted far more information on the pingers, and to create a war, and then leave it was pretty damned stupid and lazy, even if the grains of how it would end were there.
I’ve only read it once, and it’s been a while. But I think I came to enjoy the long epilogue in retrospect by reframing the book as “the story about how the human race was split apart and how it was put back together.” This could be chopped down for movie purposes as making explicit that this is “the story about some people survived the desolation of the Earth, saving humanity,” which is still a pretty epic story and does solidify that the entire human race (or human species, or whatever) now descend from those specific seven Eves. A movie script might make clear that in their version of the story, the Mineshaft Gap folks died, and the mermaid folks died, because survival was very difficult for everyone.
Give me Anathem and we are talking
Wow, this one went into production hell pretty quickly. IMDB’s latest update was January 2017.
I guess Ron Howard was too busy working on seasons 4 and 5 of Arrested Development.
I don’t really think there is much of an audience for the second half of Seveneves. Not without a crazy re-write.
I’m a Neal Stephenson fanboy, so feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt; but I think the last part of the novel is a completely necessary and integral part of the whole. Everything up to that part is setup; all the struggle and tragedy to carry on the human race. What is all that without knowing what the result is? Do they succeed? What effects do their choices have on the civilization that arises?
I wonder if part of the problem is the change in tone between the two parts: the first part is a hard scifi adventure, filled with orbital mechanics and whatnot, interspersed with the really brutally tragic story of the downfall of the human race. The second part is a mystery/adventure, with more speculative and fantastic elements. But the great thing about the second part is how the mystery ends up entangled with everything that went before; and serves to explore the question of how humanity survived, and what that survival cost.
I think any movie/series based on Seveneves that doesn’t do both parts does a disservice. I don’t even think splitting it into two movies would work, because it is one thing.
I agree with this, that it is essential, but I also think Seveneves is a terrible novel and would make an even worse film, at least from the standpoint of the plot. Maybe the effects would be good, I guess, but otherwise?
nealstephenson.txt
Well, obviously I don’t agree that it’s a terrible novel, but I do suspect it would be difficult to make a good movie out of it. But I liked the movies they made out of Cloud Atlas and Watchmen, so maybe (again) nobody should listen to me.
I liked them too!
Josh, you are an ok fellow in my book.
Well, they seriously need to hurry so Neil deGrasse Tyson can still play himself in the movie.