Thread 211476768

Is it truly unfilmable? Would audiences even understand anything?

It's all about the folly of consciousness, which film struggles to express except in montage. The most straight-forward way to adapt it would be to make it about Siri's autism in space: have characters speak a certain way that predicts their behavior, then have the behavior drift from the predictions until you have chaos, and reveal the fullness of AI and hivemind control at the end to show Siri never had a clue what was going on. Pepper it with flashbacks to his Black gf to illustrate that he is distracted and solipsistic.

What's that sci fi novel where at the end spaceships travel towards something that is sort of Heaven, or sort of not

>>211477175
Ultimately, this was a similar way to how Dr. Strange and Mr. Norrell was adapted. The actual conflict between the two men was the least important part of the book, but the rest was metatextual so it was the easiest way. I thought the show was good, but I get why people feel it wasn't the book.

>>211477449
Eon?

>>211477596
No

>>211477175
One thing to keep in mind is that Siri eventually confesses to the reader that he translating everything said as the freaks only speak in weird techo freak bits that are incomprehensible to people without half a Nintendo 64 in their head.

>>211477596
>>211477449
I don't remember them going to heaven in Eon, just down like a long infinity shaft they built in a hollowed-out asteroid because they got bored.
I dunno, dropped the sequel.

>>211477449
Come on negroes, I NEED TO KNOW, chatgpt is fucking worthless. You have talked about this here

>>211477899
You could ask /sffg/ but they only discuss christian fantasy and chinese webnovels.
I've gotten good sci-fi recs everywhere BUT /lit/.

It's not even readable

>>211478445
kek, leafs destroyed!

I like how the Firefall series has a consistent theme of autistic White boys reconnecting to humanity through a sassy Black gf. It's funnier because Peter Watts is married to a White woman.

>>211478615
I somehow never realized his girl in Blindsight was black, and I only read Echopraxia once. I don't even remember his love interest.

>>211478657
The Blindsight gf is a future turbo-mix that mostly looks like a modern lightskinned Black woman. The Echopraxia gf is a more mundane Black woman, but she calls the protagonist a White boy when he gets too caught up in his historical narrative.

>>211477820
>translation
Honestly, I get that. I'm autistic and it definitely runs in my family. My mom and grandpa are so codependently intertwined that they can have entire conversation in 40% sentence fragments they complete for each other. I could never work with the two of them because they get in that mode and I can't understand anything they're saying.

>>211478811
I forgot to say, the Echopraxia gf was his liason to the cult. I can see how you forgot her because the plot flow is messier in Echopraxia. The first act is largely about their relationship, the second act is balancing their relationship with research of the algae AI. Then she immediately dies in the vampire revolt and the plot veers into that thread.

>>211478811
>The Blindsight gf is a future turbo-mix
I can see that much but I never thought of her as black. Must be described somewhere. I just remember her dancing tattoos. Anyway, she sounded like a bitch.

>but she calls the protagonist a White boy when he gets too caught up in his historical narrative
Is that the soldier chick whose gf Bruks may have accidentally helped fuck over?
I remember something about him accidentally helping terrorists give everyone boneitis.
I don't remember them hooking up.

Oh shit, I guess it was Bruks who fucked Siri's girl over as well.

>>211479291
>the plot flow is messier in Echopraxia
I remember Echopraxia having less payoff but being more engaging.

>>211479363
Bruks fucked Siri over twice, because now Siri is hoping that he can send Earth a warning and take a nap while all this blows over. Meanwhile, Bruks has been an accessory to vampires taking over the world, with Sarasti probably being the closest thing to a "good" vampire, and Siri will probably be zombified if he ever makes it back to Earth.

>>211476768 (OP)
Neil Blomkamp is making a show right now.

>>211477449
something by peter f hamilton? give us something more to work with

>>211479587
Fair enough. Blindsight benefits from basically being a remake of Starfish, a previous novel, with biopunk and mental health replaced with cyberpunk and consciousness. It allowed him to refine the structure of the story. Echopraxia is less committed to the bottle structure, which makes it feel bigger. It also has bigger consequences, while Blindsight is more about its implications. Blindsight is merely about a failure of a second contact.

>>211479726
>Neil Blomkamp is making
So its dead, huh? Too bad.

>>211479781
I know, but apparently, as recently as a couple months ago, Peter Watts was talking about it to some magazine. Forbes, maybe. But yeah, it SEEMS to actually be happening. We will see. I just want this vampire to attack me and call me useless to inspire me.

>>211477449
>>211477899
Titan (1979)?

>>211476768 (OP)
Well there is that short movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM&

>>211479618
Vampire takeover is a good thing.

>>211479726
Oh word, a whole show? And it's Neil Blomkamp?

That could really work.

>>211476768 (OP)
How is this of all things unfilmable? It's a relatively straight forward mystery story. It's definitely a product of it's time though and feels a little dated.

>>211476768 (OP)
You watched a video analysis of it, so what's the biggie?

>>211479837
Wow that is way less fucked up and inhuman than how I imagined vampires in this. They were more like a junji ito type thing for me.

>>211479837
Should the vampires look like Tolkien elves or freaky greys? They're supposed to have extremely sharp, elongated, but gracile features, right? Also, I don't think they covered it, were the vampires given names by the megacorps or were they given birth names? Was Jukka Sarasti actually a Finnish man with autism that went through extreme gene therapy?

Couldn't make it through 10 pages of this boring shit

>>211479888
>>211479781
https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2025/04/09/peter-watts-on-blindsight-armored-core-and-working-with-neill-blomkamp/

It sounds like he is optimistic about an adaptation for the first time, and is actually writing it now.

>>211479897
Still unrivaled novel.

>>211479931
It's just some artist's drawing. He looks a lot more jovial than he would, I think. He was supposed to be human looking, but with predator eyes that made you freeze.

>>211479887
For the planet, not for Siri and his human morality. Vampires will probably breed humans for cyborg meat and to occasionally select autistic humans to genemod so they can provide diversity to the vampire gene pool.

>>211479931
I don't think they're supposed to look THAT freaky. After all they're just an extinct strain of humanity.

>>211476768 (OP)
I thought the book was interesting but I hate the way gen x writes. They all write like they sitting at a bar with you shooting the shit, thinking they were the first to invent swearing and sex. Their prose is dogshit and they are all midwits who add nihilist ideology to their story. Whether it be climate change, le orange tyrant, or some other mans hubris disaster. I read oryx and crake the other day and was rolling my eyes at the too cool for you way it's written. Granted that's a female writer so it was more than likely to be annoying, but blind sight has a similar smug attitude, like they are soooo much smarter than you.

>>211479935
They discovered the latent vampire gene in autistic savants and psychopaths, but Jukka was born a vampire. They brought them back from extinction because humanity had hit a plateau, and vampires were smarter than us and could do a lot more. So they fixed the crucifix glitch, but they had to take medicine like every few hours or they would die. The whole book is about a humanity that can't move forward without mutants and transhumans with half computer brains doing everything for them, and the main character's job is to explain what is happening to the idiot humans "in control."

>>211480122
I also really hate that specific tone of writing. I also kind of hated Blindsight, but I think a movie could be way better.

>>211480037
Humans are doomed anyway because aliens like Rorschach exist. They need vampires, hive-superminds, AI superintelligence to compete.

>>211480122
>I hate the way gen x writes
>oryx and crake
Atwood is not Gen X.

>>211479953
Ehh, I prefer Philip K. Dick and Gene Wolfe for my science fiction. Speaking of unfilmable films someone should adapt this as it's one of his easier straight forward books.

>>211480122
They will write things like,

>Humans have been thinking for millennia. All that thinking, and what good did it do them? The human species never progressed much beyond fucking and fighting. They just got exceedingly good at both.

>>211480365
BotNS is overrated garbage.

>>211480039
valerie, my beloved

>>211480293
sorry meant *women and gen x as a collective in their retarded smug writing style
>>211480447
now wolfe I love. That's my nigga

It's more like Jurassic Park, where the dinosaurs have a mess of non-avian DNA. They found the junk DNA of vampires in autistics and psychopaths, but that doesn't mean they are actually the vampire subspecies of history. They're an impression of them. That kind of superficial stuff is easy to breed in, out, and back again. Where did they say vampires had become true-breeding?
Considering the vampires, as a creative idea, are just humans that act like cats I think their reproductive strategies would be pretty similar. When one vampire is driven to reproduce, they create social structures that put them in proximity of others to basically rape them. Then the vampire goes off, either to do their thing or raise the children.
Aside, one thing that would need to be fixed in any Watts adaptation is his terrible understanding of psychology from practical or theoretical realms. He even acknowledged back when Echopraxia released that consciousness was pretty much solved after Blindsight came out.

>>211480563
>>211480151
Forgot to quote

>>211480563
The hard problem of consciousness is not solved.

>>211480563
>He even acknowledged back when Echopraxia released that consciousness was pretty much solved after Blindsight came out.
What does this mean?

>>211480122
"They hate us for our freedom." was a smug line that really stuck out and tired the book out for me a lot. It's a cool setting and pageturner, but it suffers from that mid 2000s post 9/11 New Atheism grime which sneaks in there here and there and brings it down. There's also a kind of delusional competency worship, kinda like a willing serf living under a technocracy. The way his characters have quadruple digit IQ (what?) but apparently can't speak in full sentences because it's not efficient enough reminds me of today's short attention span socialmedia addicted youth more than the great scientists and philosophers.

>>211480122
Oh dear, /sffg/ has arrived.

>>211480643
>>211480649
The neurological structure of it pretty much is. Nerves of the central nervous system fire off to corresponding nerves of the peripheral nervous system as thoughts occur. It seems that thoughts are the brain priming the body for potential responses, and thought is an experience of that mind-body correspondence. It was the best answer at the time of Echopraxia, and it still is a decade later. This is what is taught in university. It still might be wrong, but it doesn't seem so.

>>211480643
Sure it is. Its in the meat. Just because light hitting my eye at a certain wavelength does not correspond to "le what its like" to see red doesn't mean you need to invoke some dualistic drivel.
The awareness of thought and self has its hardware up there, and maybe even to Watt's dismay a purpose, albeit probably archaic as we seem to be selecting against.

>>211479618
Wait, but I thought Bruks was now working for the alien cum growing inside of the solar array. How does that help the vampires? Didn't he whack, well not he, didn't "it" whack Valarie?

>>211481000
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, or forgetting, but I remember Valerie not being hostile to the cum. Did he murder her at some point between when she started watching him in the wilderness and when he attempted to kill himself?

>>211481086
iirc, the last bit in Echopraxia is Valerie talking directly to the nigger cum that is now Bruks, then it quickly bludgeoning her and walking off to the vampired city.

>>211481147
Sorry, *alien cum, old habit.
My apologies to hard sci-fi niggers ITT.

shit
I really need to reread both books

>>211480808
>>211480902
I'm not getting anything from these answers that hasn't been obvious for maybe hundreds of years. Are you saying the brain is responsible for thinking?

>>211481262
It's not about what is "obvious", which is relative, it's providing an explanation and systematizing it.

>>211481262
>Are you saying the brain is responsible for thinking?
I mean, the brain is responsible for compiling Me, among other things. The whole experience needs the brain, the body, light, the wall in front of me, the food in my stomach, the temperature, etc.

There is a distinction between perception and awareness, I'm not denying that because you literally can't, I'm just saying the answer is up there. Something runs a program that uses a self to sort bits out, even if it ultimately can get in the way.

Hard problem proponents like to run with this distinction until you get to silly things like Goffian papsychism.

>>211481147
I guess the epilogue moved so fast I forgot there was a murder before the attempted suicide in which he jumps off a cliff hoping he'll be too pulped to become a cyborg zombie for the mold, but he wasn't pulped enough.

>>211481402
I'm just now realizing that the way the Rorschachian aliens take over is very similar to the 90's movie Virus, in that they send themselves downstream to a satellite and assemble agents using the shit around them, including people. I bet Watts like that movie.

>>211476768 (OP)
It's literaly just Rendezvous with Rama but Rama is Cleverbot. Also vampires with autism. Modern sci-fi nerds will claim any slop is revolutionary.

>>211481638
If it's Rendezvous with Rama, why doesn't it have a video game?

>>211480037
I think the rub at the end of Echo was that vampires are still a little too human to compete with Rorschach.

>>211479779
>Blindsight benefits from basically being a remake of Starfish
I never really got that vibe but now that you mention, it is about a freak among freaks documenting shit that is way beyond their pay grade. There's a lot of day-to-day in both stories.

The difference being the rifters are more adept in their situation.

>>211481680
Cleverbot vs autists is to dumb of a plot even for vidya.

>>211481875
The RwR game is just horny normies vs a cybersphere

>>211481977
General public would laugh at the vampire bullshit. Only sci-fi nerds are buckbroken enough by decades of swallowing garbage to go along with it.

>trying to explain classic vampire lore in an interesting way
>ayys that can fuck with your mind and make themselves invisible to you
>vampire captain suddenly lashes out at the autist
>vampire captain fucking dies
>the ship ai somehow takes over the dead body??
>autist is sent back to earth where vampire war is waiting
>crew blows up the ship to take out the ayys
neat sci-fi novel that made me think
but i'm still waiting for the ringworld tv show and how the modern writers will ruin the whole thing

>>211482082
People love vampires, and these vampires are basically what techbros aspire to be (the black synthesis of APD and ASD)

>>211482260
>trying to explain classic vampire lore in an interesting way
Are you fucking shitting me?

Honestly, I think Blindsight would work really well as a stream-of-consciousness Anime.

now i want a sci-fi novel with werewolves

>>211482403
vampires being 200 IQ but not being able to handle right angles was pretty fun

>>211482461
>Grug the Caveman finds bismuth
>becomes Grug Belmont

>>211482461
It's fun in the same way 40k bullshit is fun. But in what pretends to be a super cereal book it's just fucking silly. Fact that it was written by someone with background in biology while using comic book logic is baffling.

>>211481638
It's less like Rama and more like Solaris. Anyhow sci-fi was just repackaging old ideas and stories for decades now. Every "groundbreaking masterpiece" that gets nebulas and hugosnow is at best a bootleg of some story from the 60s.

>>211480808
>>211480902
That's not a solution to the HARD problem of consciousness.That's a hand wavy, wordy description used by behavioral psychologists and weak-science biologists.
There isn't a mathematical model for consciousness.

>>211481769
There's still the quantum computer powered AI.
Remember in Blindsight the AI had to turn off the quantum computers. We haven't seen Earth at full power versus Rorschach.

>>211482899
nebulas and hugos are worse than worthless now. they don't give them out to mediocre books. no, nowadays, they're awards that signify that you're better off avoiding the book in question.

anyway, in terms of new and interesting concepts, tchaikovsky's children of time is an interesting look at what an artificially accelerated animal intelligence would look like. the three body problem while not breaking any -totally- new ground, still deals with fairly novel and underexplored concepts. the only thing similar to the dark forest theory i've encountered in sci-fi is forge of god/anvil of stars and that still allows for some degree of cooperation between races, not an eternal apocalyptic universal free for all.

>>211483606
>they're awards that signify that you're better off avoiding the book in question.
i should clarify that that's the case only most of the time, as children of time did win some award or other, i think.

>>211483606
There is a form of intergalatic society in 3BP, where fringe societies that do not have the abilities of the galactic superpowers scavenge like rats and trade among each other in homeworld-style fleets.

>>211483713
true, after i posted i remembered that one of the space ship crews' descendants drops some lore about that at the end of the third book.

>>211476768 (OP)
>Theseus is propelled by an antimatter reactor and captained by an artificial intelligence. It carries a crew of five cutting-edge transhuman hyper-specialists, of whom one is a genetically reincarnated vampire who acts as the nominal mission commander
idk what this is but it sounds liike utter garbage

>>211483964
thanks for the contribution to the thread

What about the original unfilmable sci-fi novel? Movie proposals for this book have been around since the 1910's, but none have been produced thus far.

>>211483964
wow, he's just like me!

>>211483872
>I've witnessed true intergalatic warfare
>but I won't describe it except the elder aliens can change mathematical concepts themselves
H A C K A U T H O R

>>211477899
"Why Do Birds" by Damon Knight (1992).

>>211476768 (OP)
Hollywood would turn it into Alien, but with vampires

>>211484093
Don't give Ridley Scott any more ideas.

>>211484055
not even dostoyevsky wrote a scene from the pov of vronsky after anna karenina's suicide
some concepts are just too hard to tackle for any author

>>211484047
it's really not hard to adapt, just make it ultra stylized at the beginning which shows the last redoubt's environs, and you're golden. the rest is just a post-apocalyptic journey and he only meets mutants and other "mundane" threats.
there's a rewritten book floating around "the night land: a story retold" which shows that the writing style isn't impossible to adapt to modern palates.

>>211484161
>some concepts are just too hard
Then they should write airport romance novels instead. The top-tier hard science authors have no problems epousing in technical, mathematical detail their vision of intergalactic warfare.

>>211484312
you got any titles you recommend? i've dabbled in some hard sci-fi, but in terms of "their vision of intergalactic warfare" it wasn't anything as grand as the stuff described in three body problem, it was more like "it takes a long time to get anywhere, and missiles go at relativistic speeds"

What was the point of revealing the vampire was just a puppet of the AI? Making all that vampire behaviour and conflict meaningless.

>>211484472
>Making all that vampire behaviour and conflict meaningless
That is the point. They were always puppets in a contest between superintelligences (AI captain vs alien R).

I get that we cant see the ayys when they move, but wouldn't we still just see them in the new position they have moved to? Not be totally invisible the whole time.

>>211485053
but what if they keep moving.

anyone read watts' other novels? he has something called the rifters trilogy but after the disaster that was echopraxia, i'm skeptical. solid concept but ridiculous amount of padding, multiple pages dedicated to describing wires sticking out of panels along a corridor or antennae sticking out of a space station hull, just pure torture. there's no way echopraxia was supposed to be a full novel originally.

>>211485598
>multiple pages dedicated to describing wires sticking out of panels along a corridor or antennae sticking out of a space station hull
pure sex. picked up.

>>211477449
I know it can't be Event Horizon.