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buggeryThe SciFi channel is officially on my shit list.
Last night and tonight, I've been watching Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. It's fantastic, as good as the four seasons of the series ever got (not going to be spoilery now, may write up a review later) and visibly benefitting from a considerably larger special-effects budget than they've previously had to play with.
But. The so-called "miniseries" is only four hours long. At least 40 minutes shorter than that, actually, what with the commercials. Actual run time, we're talking more like three, three-and-a-half hours.
In other words, it's a longish film.
On the bright side, I didn't have to figure out whether to use a 6- or 8-hour tape, or some combination thereof.
On the other hand, three or four hours is no replacement for the full fifth season of episodes that SciFi was under contract to buy from Farscape's production company, and screwed them (and us) out of.
Don't even get me started on the dren SciFi paid for with the money they stole from Farscape.
And then there's Earthsea.
Adapting a novel, or a series of novels, to screens large or small is always a challenge. It's impossible to keep everything in, and, particularly in the fantasy and science fiction genres, there can be numerous story elements which are either impossible or prohibitively expensive to depict. Some elements of a story will inevitably need to be truncated, or portrayed/narrated/explained in a way different from the original text.
None of these factors have any bearing on why I'm so ripshit over the way Sci-Fi is adapting Ursula K. le Guin's Earthsea books. (Yes, apparently they're condensing at least two of the books into the one four-hour microseries, but I'm not going to declare that's a mistake without seeing the thing first.)
Here's the problem.
Ursula le Guin made a point of populating her world of Earthsea with mostly non-white peoples: a wide variety of brown skin shades, a wide variety of cultures. There were a few characters we'd call white, but only a few. This wasn't just an affirmative-action gesture; it underlies, and is crucial to, many elements of the story.
SciFi cast everybody white. Everybody, with the two exceptions of Danny Glover as the Token Mystical Other (a blatant perversion of his character's status in the source material) and Kristin Kreuk as... a white girl played by a half-white, half-Asian girl who has demonstrated over and over again her inability to be a tenth as good at acting as she is at looking pretty.
I have actually seen people argue that SciFi "had" to cast the way they did, because audiences wouldn't be interested and advertisers wouldn't invest in a science fiction series with a handful of white characters outnumbered by black, brown and tan characters. Yeah. Suuure. Because the Matrix series was such a box office bust and never had more than a fringe following.
I'll just be over in the corner, growling.
Last night and tonight, I've been watching Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. It's fantastic, as good as the four seasons of the series ever got (not going to be spoilery now, may write up a review later) and visibly benefitting from a considerably larger special-effects budget than they've previously had to play with.
But. The so-called "miniseries" is only four hours long. At least 40 minutes shorter than that, actually, what with the commercials. Actual run time, we're talking more like three, three-and-a-half hours.
In other words, it's a longish film.
On the bright side, I didn't have to figure out whether to use a 6- or 8-hour tape, or some combination thereof.
On the other hand, three or four hours is no replacement for the full fifth season of episodes that SciFi was under contract to buy from Farscape's production company, and screwed them (and us) out of.
Don't even get me started on the dren SciFi paid for with the money they stole from Farscape.
And then there's Earthsea.
Adapting a novel, or a series of novels, to screens large or small is always a challenge. It's impossible to keep everything in, and, particularly in the fantasy and science fiction genres, there can be numerous story elements which are either impossible or prohibitively expensive to depict. Some elements of a story will inevitably need to be truncated, or portrayed/narrated/explained in a way different from the original text.
None of these factors have any bearing on why I'm so ripshit over the way Sci-Fi is adapting Ursula K. le Guin's Earthsea books. (Yes, apparently they're condensing at least two of the books into the one four-hour microseries, but I'm not going to declare that's a mistake without seeing the thing first.)
Here's the problem.
Ursula le Guin made a point of populating her world of Earthsea with mostly non-white peoples: a wide variety of brown skin shades, a wide variety of cultures. There were a few characters we'd call white, but only a few. This wasn't just an affirmative-action gesture; it underlies, and is crucial to, many elements of the story.
SciFi cast everybody white. Everybody, with the two exceptions of Danny Glover as the Token Mystical Other (a blatant perversion of his character's status in the source material) and Kristin Kreuk as... a white girl played by a half-white, half-Asian girl who has demonstrated over and over again her inability to be a tenth as good at acting as she is at looking pretty.
I have actually seen people argue that SciFi "had" to cast the way they did, because audiences wouldn't be interested and advertisers wouldn't invest in a science fiction series with a handful of white characters outnumbered by black, brown and tan characters. Yeah. Suuure. Because the Matrix series was such a box office bust and never had more than a fringe following.
I'll just be over in the corner, growling.
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part 2: the books
Date: 2004-12-20 07:53 am (UTC)For science fiction that meets the same criteria, I can produce a longer list just as readily: Jerusalem Fire by Rebecca ("R.M.") Meluch posits a future where racial mixing has led to an almost universally brown- or tan-skinned world population and a "white" man is a curiosity; Moving Mars by Greg Bear pulls off the double feat of a believable female protagonist written by a male author and a believable non-white protagonist written by a white author in addition to just being well-written; Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge features a multicultural cast whose ethnicities are more than simply masks over cardboard cut-out characters, and while Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep features few human characters in comparison to its cast of various and varied aliens one of the humans -- singled out specifically as a representative of the species -- is a mixed-race man with an Asian name; Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) took on the issue of the African tradition of so-called female circumcision four years before The Color Purple was published; Spider Robinson's early novel Telempath features an African-American protagonist and explores the fallout of a spectacularly bad solution to societal ills; Four Ways To Forgiveness by (of course I had to come back to her) Ursula le Guin looks at the intersection and interactions of skin colour, culture, religion/spirituality, slavery, and imperialist social policies, but delves into yet more themes without bogging down in its own postulations; and The Telling, also by le Guin, is stellar even among the author's other masterpieces, looking at cultural identity through the double lens of an Indian- (subcontinent) descended Earth woman whose lesbian relationship with an ethnic Chinese woman led in part to her feeling disconnected from her own heritage, and a planet on which, not unlike Chinese-occupied Tibet, rulers of a modernising, urban-based empire have outlawed and tried to eradicate traditional spriritual beliefs and language which people in highlands far from the cities continue to preserve as much as they can. Again, I could go on, but that actually is an off-the-top-of-my-head listing.
And I know that, should you want to discuss most (some of them are obscure even within their genre) of these books with like-minded people, such people do exist within speculative fiction fandom, and easily outnumber cretins like redhawk.
Re: part 2: the books
Date: 2004-12-20 09:35 am (UTC)Don't see it much.
Thanks so much for the rcs. I may check them out later but I've got a stack of books I need to attack and digest.
I've read Four Ways To Forgiveness as well as all of Tiptree's ouevre but I've given Spider Robinson wide berth after an unfortunate encounter with a novel that I've since shoved forcibly out of my mind. I've not read Vernor Vinge's stuff either. Of course I've dealt with Delaney who is brilliant and relentless but gently so.
:)
Currently, I've been dealing with Nalo Hopkinson, Jewelle Gomez, Sandra Jackson Opoku. I loathe Tanarive Due's stuff, though. :)
And I know that, should you want to discuss most (some of them are obscure even within their genre) of these books with like-minded people, such people do exist within speculative fiction fandom, and easily outnumber cretins like redhawk.
Well, I'm willing to listen to thoughtful, polite people who are in the habit of deconstructing privilege in the context of speculative fiction. Though, it's interesting that you assumed that I hadn't known of many of the books you've mentioned. :)
Where do you go for conversation in this vein?