Wow, forgot about this till the thread resurrection. Yeah, I think it’s a terrible novel, one of Stephenson’s worst, but put that aside.
More importantly, it’s an novel with no ending, a large multi-POV cast, and major sections that aren’t really related. The movie plot would have to be utterly different from the original book to fit into the required Hollywood act structure and provide anything like a satisfactory ending. Then, too, the main mystery is never explained (it’s moreover totally antiscientific without an explanation), and the final section is full of problematic quasi-racist totally specious genetics, so the content would have to be revised for the movies too.
I assume the final result will involve a bunch of exciting civilization-destruction scenes which unfortunately have now been done repeatedly in any number of other disaster movies, as much of the book’s anti-establishment techbro libertarian spin as the director can stomach, and some square-jawed astronaut heroics to go with the seven eponymous women who there won’t be enough time to properly characterize in just two hours. No doubt it will have Tesla sponsorship.
I can see why a big Hollywood director would be attracted to the property. Think about the big set pieces and sequences that are involved. There’s a scale to the book that hasn’t been done a lot in film.
But yeah, once you dig into it I think getting a 120-page screenplay out of it would be tough. Which is probably why there’s been no movement on this for more than three years.
It was there, if you knew it, but not called out like in the book.
Which, fine. I know why they did it. So while they don’t really explicitly say why he retrieves the RTG, and what that means for power consumption and safety, he still does it. Why he does some of the botany things, such as retrieve desiccated poop are lightly commented, if at all. The rationing and stuff is there, but less detailed. The liquefaction of the food payload on the Chinese rocket excised completely.
So yeah, definitely lighter than the book, but also the actions still occur that way. You just see them, rather than get told why.
@YakAttack clearly you are a disco fan (movie reference)
Or compare to the movie Gravity, which has some similar plot points to Seveneves, but is otherwise full of junk science.
I’m not familiar with the disco reference, but I know there is a brand of outdoor wear with the same name. I’m guessing it is super expensive like Patagonia or North Face, and part of the Pacific NW “uniform” people are obligated to wear there.
Finishing this up now, and yeah, I love Stephenson’s work but this one falls short of greatness for sure. It’s readable, and parts are damn good, but unlike The Baroque Cycle, where the scope is massive but so are the books and Stephenson takes his time doing everything right, or like Anathem, where the story is a nice balance of deep background and scifi thriller action, Seveneves sort of falls between the cracks. It’s both too sprawling and too empty, at the same time.
I honestly don’t even understand how you could make it into a movie because the novel has a bunch of just massive swerves into (in my mind incompatible) genres. It starts as a disaster/race to space combo, then it becomes a 28 weeks later style cannibal plot, then it becomes a fantasy where a single wizard performs the 10 to 20 greatest feats of science in human history by herself despite being one of the last few humans in a small space craft, then it becomes a Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space style single system space opera (or something, honestly I Wikipedia summarized the end of the novel because I hated it so much that it’s the first novel I haven’t finished in like 20 years).
In a very long novel you can spend a lot of time trying to stitch those different genres together into something, but there’s no way you’re doing that in a movie and not creating massive whiplash.
