Capstone Week 3: Adaptation, Adaptations, and First Notes on Genre

My endgoal’s morphed twice in the last week. I started out wanting to write a vague script of some description, and I moved to adapting Asimov’s “Nightfall” properly and trying to do it some justice (which the two extant adaptations have apparently failed at). When it turned out I was about two decades late to avoid copyright trouble, so I’ve had to turn to older material. I’ve decided I do want to work on adaptation, partly because I’ve always enjoyed the intellectual challenges involved with translating stories between media and partly because it’s so difficult to do well that I want to understand what I need to avoid.

So, for right now, I’m trying to get Cory Doctorow’s permission to use one of his modern Creative Commons short stories for the project’s sake, and if that doesn’t work out I’m going to look through what the public domain has to offer. Until that’s ironed out completely, my research will be in how adaptation works and how to write science-fiction screenplays in general.

While the ILL delivers some meatier sources, I have found something to discuss in the “Science Fiction” chapter of Jule Selbo’s Film Genre for the Screenwriter.

There’s always some contention in defining science-fiction about where it falls on the speculative spectrum and how we keep it separate from fantasy (or don’t, in the case of bookstores). Selbo argues the rules of the genre are simply that there must be some extrapolation of existing scientific thought, focusing on asking and answering one or more what-if questions. Fantasy is about creating a new rule for the setting whenever you need one, while sci-fi is about following a handful of rules to their logical conclusions.

(Funny enough, the book lists Twister as a science-fiction film, which is accurate even though it’s the exact opposite of what someone would expect when they hear the term. In much the same way, Donnie Darko is one of the best fantasy films of the 2000s.)

More than that, the central technique for any screenwriter working in the genre, the author advises, is the creation of a sense of wonder. The audience needs to be shown “the world of scientific possibilities and how mankind can be/is affected by mankind's fascination" (166), which is at the heart of this kind of narrative even when it plays out darkly in works like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

That sense of wonder is what I’m courting. It’s what endeared SF to me, and made me interested in both reading and writing. Whatever I adapt, I want it to be the sort of thing that would’ve inspired me as a kid.

Work Cited
Selbo, J. (2015). Film Genre for the Screenwriter. 147-169. New York: Routledge.