The Hollywood Reporter reports that Lauren Beukes’ new time-travel thriller The Shining Girls has been acquired by MRC and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way for the purposes of a television adaptation.

The Shining Girls releases today, but already it’s been generating buzz on Summertime reading lists. (I included it in my own list of June SF/F picks at Kirkus Reviews Blog). It tells the story of a serial killer who escapes the authorities using time travel, at least until one of his victims survives and begins to figure out the truth.

[via Giant Freakin Robot]

Science fiction fans see so much poor original SciFi emerging from Hollywood that the standard rallying cry has become “Hey! Look to the pages of written science fiction!”

Sometimes Hollywood listens.

The screen rights for Ramez Naam’s science fiction nanotech thriller, Nexus, have been acquired by Paramount Pictures.

Nexus is a near-future thriller about an experimental nano-drug than can link human minds together. Such a powerful technology can be used for good and evil, as the young scientists protagonist learns when he becomes embroiled in international espionage.

For more insight into the ideas behind Nexus, check out Ramez’s guest post on The Science of Nexus and
Brenda Cooper’s interview with the author.

[via Deadline via io9]

Greg Cox is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous novels and short stories. He wrote the official movie novelizations of Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Death Defying Acts, and all three Underworld films, as well the novelizations of four popular DC Comics miniseries, Infinite Crisis, 52, Countdown and Final Crisis. In addition, he has written books and short stories based on such popular series as Alias, Batman, Buffy, C.S.I., Farscape, Fantastic Four, The 4400, The Green Hornet, Iron Man, Leverage, The Phantom, Roswell, Star Trek, Terminator, Underworld, Xena, X-Men and Zorro. A sample chapter of his latest, the novelization of The Dark Knight Rises, can be read at IGN. Visit Greg Cox at http://www.gregcox-author.com/ for more about his projects.

ADAPTATION: THE NOVELIZATION FROM SCREENPLAY TO FINISHED BOOK
An Interview with Bestselling Author Greg Cox by Gilbert Colon

“Well, I’ve gotta write the book first, John. Then, you know, they get somebody to write the screenplay.” – Susan Orlean in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation.

“Well, they get somebody to write the screenplay. Then, you know, I’ve gotta write the book.” – The Novelizer.

When enthusiastic fans write stories involving iconic characters like Captain Kirk, Spock, Iron Man, or Sydney Bristow, the result is called “fanfic.” When a professional like New York Times bestselling author Greg Cox does it, it is what could be called “franchise fiction” and is published by houses such as Simon & Schuster, Berkley Books, and Titan Publishing Group. One particular form of franchise fiction, the novelization, involves the complicated process of adapting a screenplay into a novel without the benefit of a finished film for reference. It can be a bit like working in the dark, and involves more imagination than it is often given credit for. With The Dark Knight Rises, Cox’s latest novelization, the author takes us behind the scenes to give us a soup to nuts look at the nuts and bolts of this until-now secretive process.

Gilbert Colon: Have movie tie-in novelizations changed since the days they debuted? Since you began novelizing films 10years ago?

Greg Cox: I’ve been doing this for about a decade now, starting with the novelization of Daredevil,and the main difference is that the level of secrecy surrounding the scripts has increased significantly, for which I blame the internet. Nowadays there’s practically a cottage industry devoted to publishing spoilers on-line, so I understand why the studios have to work even harder to keep things under wraps.

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Today’s Gold Box Daily Deal on Amazon is a group of eBooks from Rosetta Books for just 99 cents each: 20 Books Made into Films. Included in that batch are these 7 SF/F titles:

• Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
• Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell
• The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
• The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
• Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind

NOTE: This deal is for today only. Grab ‘em while you can. The books can be used not only on Kindle devices, but also any computer and smartphone that has the free Kindle app on it.

My wife and I went to see Avatar the week that it came out, and we both enjoyed it tremendously. It was big and beautiful and exciting and fun. And if the plot was a little predictable, and if the characters were a little flat, there are worse things. I was excited just to see some big space opera happening on a movie screen again. Full of color and aliens and emotions besides scowls.

But as we were walking out of the theater, there was one thing which had caught and held my attention, and it was something specific which was missing from the ending credits.

Avatar, of course, wasn’t adapted from anything. It came out of James Cameron’s head.

(We can argue, of course, that it was adapted from Pocahontas, perhaps, and fair enough, but you get my point).

The reason this interested me is, nearly everything that hits the theaters is adapted from something.

“Based on the comic book series by Alan Moore”, “based on the television series created by Gene Roddenberry”, “based on the series of words-put-in-rows by Stephanie Meyer”… And we can go further afield than that: “based on the newspaper strip by Jim Davis”, “based on the action figure G.I. Joe”, for haven’s sakes.

The only thing we haven’t yet seen adapted are breakfast cereal mascots. Get Michael Bay to produce a Cap’n Crunch movie. Give it a techno soundtrack and you’ve got a summer blockbuster.

We know that the vast majority of things Hollywood produces are adaptations, because people comment on it fairly regularly, both on the street and in interviews. “Hollywood just rehashes everything, they’ve run out of original ideas,” is neck-in-neck with the other common grumble, “MTV doesn’t play any damn music videos now.”

Adaptations are such a fact of life, something like Avatar – or, another sterling example, any of the perfect pieces of cinematic artwork created by Pixar – catches our attention for sheer fact that it isn’t based off anything at all.

So with that in mind, let’s examine adaptations a little further.

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