Auxiliary Memory

Tips for Managing Email

Back in May I wrote “Does An Organized Desk Mean An Organized Mind?” It summarizes the advice Jordana Jaffer gives about organized people that can be quickly summed up as:

Plan the day the night before
Maintain a to-do list
Master email
Keep desks clean
Have a morning and evening routine
Spend 10 minutes cleaning up at end of day
Keep clean and dirty clothes organized
Never leave the dishes
Always eat lunch
Process your mail daily

At the time I had #9 down pat. Since then I’ve mastered #7 and #8, and mostly mastered #10. My current goal is to become completely disciplined at #3 now that I’ve got all four of my email accounts cleaned out. I already feel the tide is turning. Email, and two messy desks are my Waterloo. Because I’m a blogger and a member of three online book clubs, I process a lot of email each day. Learning to wrestle email to the ground and pin it, has taken some time. I feel a real sense of accomplishment to get all my accounts cleaned out, filed into folders, with an empty Inbox in each account.

Many people keep thinking email is going away, to be replaced by new social media systems. I think they’re wrong. Email is just too basic, too obvious, too useful to ever be abandoned. On the other hand, email can be a pain-in-the-ass-burden to manage. Every time I help a friend I often see thousands of emails in their inbox. Most people just won’t take the time to tame their Inbox. This essay offers some tips I’ve learned while taming mine.

There’s two workflows with controlling email. First, the amount of time you spend reading and writing emailing. Second, the number of emails you process and store. Email is about efficient communication. Email has replaced letter writing, but most folks get more impersonal or work email than personal correspondence. However, a lot of email is now internet friends, people we’ve never met. Email connects us in ways we never imagined.

Most people have work and home email accounts, so they have a lot of email to manage. Some people even have multiple personal email accounts. I’m retired and have four email accounts. However, two are minimal because I want to use Google and Yahoo services and get their email accounts by default. I use an Outlook 365 account for my main email, and an Outlook.com only for my book club activities.

Goals

Get less email
Process fewer emails
Send less time writing and replying to emails
Have an empty Inbox at the end of the day

How Often To Check Your Email?

Time management gurus recommend only checking your email once or twice a day, and then develop techniques to quickly process it. Some jobs require constant attention to email because of workflow. Other people socialize by email, so they check it frequently. If you think you’re spending too much time working on email, then you need to work on streamlining your email work habits. The key is to be your own efficiency expert and observe your habits for ways to save time.

I check my email the first thing in the morning, and the last thing at night. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I check it on the tablet beside my bed. I’m in and out of my email all day long because I work at the computer. I’m pretty compulsive. I’m also a net citizen that likes to live in the hive. If you’re the kind of person that’s ambitious and wants to get things accomplished, learn to have minimal contact with your email. I dream of writing a novel – and my goal of becoming organized is to make routine time for writing.

Most people have no plan, they just look at their new messages, respond to the absolute essential and hope to get back to the rest. They let their inbox grow and grow. At minimum, to manage email effectively, you should keep your inbox cleaned out daily, and learn how to file email you want to save or process later in folders. You can still horde email, and delay processing and responding, but things will be tidy.

Delete As Soon As You Can

Delete the obvious as fast as possible by reading the least possible in the preview. Delete everything you think you’ll read later but really won’t. That’s tricky, but you’ll learn. Before I retired I had three folders (Do Soon, Do Work, Do Home) that I’d quickly shift emails into from the Inbox. Now I only need Do Soon. The goal is always keep the Inbox empty. If you’re a manager defer emails to others.

Use a preview pane so you can see a portion of the email while looking at the Inbox listing. This allows you to work faster.

When deleting make sure the email doesn’t come from a list, and unsubscribe instead of always deleting. Everything you can unsubscribe to is an endless number of deletions you don’t have to do in the future.

Make decisions now if you can, instead of putting things off later. Reply quickly and succinctly, and then delete the message. Or if saving is required, drag the message to an appropriate folder. Manage your email life in subject folders.

If you have a full inbox, sort by sender. That shows the obvious emails to delete first, and reveals the mailing lists.

Learn to use Rules so messages are automatically moved into folders and don’t burden your Inbox. This is especially good for newsletters and mailing lists you actually love to get. I have a folder for News and Sales. I can ignore both if needed.

Junk Mail and Ads

All too often your email box is where solicitors now try to grab your attention. Door-to-door sales, phone solicitation and other salesmanship avenues have dried up. So our email boxes are the goal for junk marketing. Even our email providers squeeze in as many ads as possible on the web page where we have our online email. Yahoo is worse about this, Outlook.com in the middle, Gmail the most subtle, and Office365 the cleanest.

Use an email client if possible. There used to be dozens of email clients. With web clients getting better and better, people prefer their simplicity of web based clients, but local clients like Outlook and Thunderbird offer more features than a web client, and they don’t have ads.

Master you junk mail filter.

Newsletters and Lists

Avoid like the plague signing up for newsletters and lists. Quite often companies and organizations automatically sign you up. Unsubscribe if you don’t want their content. If you join any group, or create any new business account, make sure they don’t send their newsletters by unchecking the appropriate check boxes. Well, unless you really, really, really want them. Because they are going to infest your inbox like crazy.

Learn to use the unsubscribe feature found on most mass emails. Legit places always provide a way to opt-out. You do have to worry about scams, but it’s a human decision you’ll have to make. If you don’t trust the email, add that one to your junk mail filter.

Everyone has legitimate lists they want to belong to, but make absolutely sure they are worth the time they cause you. My two favorite lists are The Kindle Daily Deal and The Audible Daily Deal. I hate missing out on a bargain priced book that I really want. I could unsubscribe and just visit the two websites daily, but that actually takes more time than getting the emails.

Generate Less Email

If you send less email you’ll get less email. Don’t initiate emails unless you need a reply. Don’t reply just to say thanks. Use other forms of communicate like Twitter, Facebook, IM, texting, phone and F2F.

If you need answers consider sending questions as bullets so it’s obvious you are asking several things so people will address each point.

If you receive an email that other people are waiting for acknowledgement and answers, send the reply as soon as possible, and if you can’t reply soon, be polite and send a note saying you got the email and will reply at a set time. File message in the To Do Soon folder, or track it with flag or status system.

Use Email Client with Calendar and Task/To-Do List

If a message is calendar related, convert the email to a calendar entry, and even add it to your Task/To-Do list. Develop a synergy between email, calendar, tasks and contacts.

If you already live by your calendar and/or To-Do list, get the important content moved to those systems fast. That’s why Outlook is so great. Since Outlook works with PC/Mac/Web/iOS/Android it’s all in one location for those who have access to an Exchange server. And Office365 or Outlook.com is very well integrated too. Google has similar features for Gmail.

Cancel Social Media Notifications

For some reason social media sites, which are alternatives to emails, want to constantly notify you that you’ve got messages in their systems, and to come see them. This is actually why email won’t be replaced. It’s extremely easy to miss messages and notifications in social media sites. And that’s why social media sites send you emails, because emails are a more dependable form of notification.

But if you’re pretty faithful about using your social media sites, or you don’t give a damn, just turn off the notifications that are sent as reminders to your email system.

Use A Second Email Service For Junk Email

Get a second email service and when you’re asked for an email address that you know means getting advertising, give out that address. Or for anything you want to subscribe to but don’t feel you have to read. Then when that inbox fills up, do a select all and delete without having to examine each email separately.

Sometimes Use Your Junk Mail Filter on Friends and Family

Have a friend or relative that constantly sends you forwarded messages representing their political view or “hilarious” jokes and videos. Tag them with the junk filter. Of course, you have to assume they will never write you a nice email asking you out to dinner.

Encourage Friends to Use Other Methods of Communication

If you don’t like reading, especially verbose emails, encourage your friends to tweet instead so what they say stays brief, or to befriend you on Facebook. Or tell them texting is best. Whatever you actually prefer.

Use Your Smartphone For Clearing Emails

For many kinds of emails, using your smartphone can be a faster way to preview and delete messages. Or if you stuck somewhere and have some minutes to kill, like being in a line or waiting room, delete messages.

JWH – 9/4/14

Wide Sargasso Sea–Sex and Madness

Jean Rhys explored the depths of the feminine mind living in a masculine dominated society. Rhys wrote many stories and novels before becoming famous late in life with Wide Sargasso Sea, a literary prequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) can be read without any knowledge of Jane Eyre (1847), and is a completely stand-alone novel. Jean Rhys gives a 20th century explanation to a mystery in a 19th century novel, and I can’t help believe that is to a certain degree psychologically, and maybe sexually, autobiographical. Both Rhys and her character started out life in the West Indies and ended up living in England, both dying there.

Although Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea are novels, I wonder if we can read the minds of their authors in their stories. Both books closely follow their characters, with Brontë anticipating stream-of-conscious and Rhys using multiple first person stream-of-conscious. Even though Rhys makes Wide Sargasso Sea completely self-contained as a story, it does cleverly use Bertha Antoinetta Mason from Jane Eyre as a starting point for her story. Both authors use their story to express views on the role of women in society, and to show how they are oppressed on many levels. In a way, Rhys attacks Brontë for copping out, because she uses the tragedy of Bertha Antoinetta Mason/Antoinette Cosway to undermine Brontë’s happy ending.

A good part of Wide Sargasso Sea is it’s setting, and the history of life in the West Indies just after slavery was abolished. First we follow Antoinette as a child so we can see her mother, a woman who has lost her husband, and must care for two children with no income. We see her descend into insanity. Antoinette grows up with black servants whose charity saves these poor whites, who the ex-slaves refer to as white cockroaches. The black people of the story vary greatly in personality, ethnicity and ethicality. The novel explores many themes, the prominent one deals with sex and madness, but it also deals with the confrontation of the races in the 1830s West Indies, and the lush tropical life there. Nature is oppressive in both weather and the emotional moods it inspires in the people. All the characters suffer from a languid disposition because of the atmosphere and biosphere. In this steamy jungle locale there is a lot of sex, repression and sexual oppression going on.

I have not read Rhys other novels and stories, but from the introduction to my edition of Wide Sargasso Sea, she had lot of affairs that ended badly, and often lived at the bottom of society depended on the generosity of men that weren’t always good to her. That’s why I felt her novel is autobiographical to a degree. Rhys wasn’t locked in a room for years, but she did live in isolated exile for years.

I also feel Brontë used Jane Eyre to express her gender repression and desires. In both books, women lives are contrasted with those of slaves and servants. And I can’t wonder if Rhys felt contempt for Brontë when she gave Jane a happy ending with Edward Rochester. Rochester is unnamed in Wide Sargasso Sea, but he’s shown with varying levels of sympathy, but ultimately he’s seen as cruel and self-serving. He’s a tragic hero in Jane Eyre, but a tragic villain in Wide Sargasso Sea.

Another theme in Wide Sargasso Sea is Voodoo. Christophine is an old black woman that cares for Antoinette her whole life before she goes to England. She sides with the whites, and the blacks fear her, because they believe she has special powers. Christophine always tells people they are foolish to think such thoughts, but we are given one powerful scene to believe otherwise. Sex is always at the periphery of this novel, but it comes to the forefront at a hallucinatory peak in the story, where passion, madness, and maybe Voodoo all come together.

The Rochester character often tells the island people, both white and black that they don’t know how to hide their feelings, but he’s often surprised when they apparently can read his mind or predict his future. Even the black children boldly state the fate of the white people with sharp obviousness that the Englishman finds unnerving. At first this man is patronizing to the black people, defending them to his wife, but slowly he realizes they know more than he does, at least about their world, where he is an invader.

I wish I knew how much Rhys remembered of her island upbringing when she wrote this book. Her first sixteen years were lived in the West Indies before she moved to England and Europe. How much research did she do about the island life for the novel? And most important of all, are there any novels written by people living in the islands in the 1830s? How can we know if this 1966 novel represents a true picture of the West Indies in the 1830s?

Wide Sargasso Sea is on many Best Books lists.

#199 – The Greatest Books – Meta list of 66 lists
#125 – A List of Books – Meta list of 13 lists
# 95 – Modern Library Top 100 Novels
# 81 – Radcliffe’s Rival 100 Best Novels
# 79 – 100 Novels Everyone Should Read – The Telegraph
# 53 – 100 Books of the Past Century by Koen Books
# 45 – Top 100 Books by Newsweek
# 13 – 100 Best Novels In English Since 1900
ALL-TIME 100 Novels – Time Magazine

JWH – 8/29/14

If You Are Old, What Would You Tell The Young?

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay

“It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” – rephrased by Jeff Bezos

“Study new inventions to anticipate the future.” – me

Teens aren’t open to advice from people other than their peers, but if I could influence them of anything, it would be to read nonfiction books about emerging trends that aren’t required reading in school, and think up their own advice. We burden the young by making them catch-up on all the knowledge of the past, but I think their education needs to be more present and future oriented. These are books young people could read that might give them an edge. For example, I wished I had read and understood The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell when I was in elementary school – although that wish would require a time machine, but if I had only known about early discipline, practice and mentors I would have had more success in life.

No one can predict the future, but many try. According to Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their book The Second Machine Age we are on the cusp of new age of economic activity, but they are warning that society is going to radically change. Like I said, people can’t predict the future, but we can study trends, both past and present, and generate something akin to a weather forecast. What Brynjolfsson and McAfee are saying is the industrial revolution kick-started the biggest change in human history by machines giving us vastly multiplied muscle power. They feel a second machine age is emerging because humans now have vastly multiplied brain power.

Unfortunately this will put a lot of humans out of work. The industrial age transformed human society, and the second machine age will transform the world again, with even greater impact than the first machine age. What Brynjolfsson and McAfee write about is how to prepare for that change. This is going to be painful. Like global warming and wealth inequality, most of what economists and futurists are saying about the future is bleak. I heard the same bleak forecasts over fifty years ago when I was growing up when I read The Population Bomb, The Limits of Growth and Future Shock. We can look back on those books and see the future became far brighter than what those writers imagined – yet they weren’t wrong either.

People don’t usually like getting advice, especially teenagers, but if you’re going to spend the first third of your life on education, and tens of thousands of dollars on college, it might be wise to consider some future trends. More than ever “what will I be when I grow up” could be taking a very long trip down a dead-end path. Evidently, there is no job that can’t be automated.

Humans can’t compete with machines, but they can coexist with them. We could choose not to deploy machines, but that seldom happens. If there’s money to be made, we never interfere with progress. We will need to rethink capitalism and democracy. People might nitpick Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but overall, Piketty’s data shows obvious trends. The implications of this book go way beyond brilliance. We can no longer support an economic and political system that rewards few winners and expects billions of losers to take care of themselves.

“Plastics” - The Graduate (1967)

At one point in the film The Graduate, an old man advises the young college graduate, Dustin Hoffman, about the future with one word: “Plastics.” If I was to whisper one word to young people today it would be “Statistics.” I was only so-so at math, and that held me back from my ambitions, and the branch of mathematics that I think is the most useful today for understanding the world, science, technology and change is statistics. Science really is a statistical analysis of reality. Understanding the rapidly unfolding events here on Earth requires a second language to comprehend, and that is statistics.

In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable the 2007 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains partially why I whisper “statistics.” Taleb explains how we constantly fool ourselves about reality by being hard-wired to create “the narrative fallacy” which is the system that we bullshit ourselves into believing all kinds of crap about reality, and constantly deceive ourselves about the future. What current science is teaching us is we’re not who we think we are. That our conscious awareness is only a small part of the whole of our mind, which leads me to the next book to read, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman is a professor of psychology who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. That little fact should tell you a lot right there.

These books, The Outliers, The Second Machine Age, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, The Black Swan and Thinking Fast and Slow are just some of the books I’d recommend that savvy young people to read if they really wanted to prepare themselves for the future. I’ve listed them here in the order of how hard they are to read and understand.

JWH – 8/29/14

What To Read Before I Die

Most folks think growing up is the time to learn, and that the rest of life is for coasting on that education. But as you age, you realize that every phase of life has its required coursework. At sixty-two I’ve already forgotten most of what I learned in my K-12 years, and now that I’m retired, I’m quickly forgetting all the things I learned during my work years. The knowledge I acquired in the first third of life prepared me for the second third, and what I learned in the second third, got me ready for the final third, but now that I’m living in the final third of life, I feel like I need to study hard for a next phase. If I was a religious man, that would be a spiritual quest, but I’m not. I’m studying for nonexistence, and that is changing my reading habits.

Most people talk about having a bucket list of activities they want to accomplish before leaving this planet, but I don’t think along those lines. As a lifelong bookworm, all I want to do is read more books before I die. I find reading in the final third of life has affected what books I want to read. Strangely, I want read more nonfiction, as if facts are more comforting to dying, like fantasy was more inspiring to growing. It appears that leaving reality makes you want to take more notice of what you’re leaving. Most of us grow up hoping our childhood ambitions will come true as adults, but then settle for something more realistic. Instead of becoming an astronaut I became a database programmer, and even then I continued to read science fiction all during my adult life. Now that it’s pretty obvious that I’m never going to travel in space, Earth has become far more fascinating.

Even when I read novels now, I admire the details I can connect to reality. This morning I started listening to Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote, and his prose dazzles me with details, fictional facts that feel so authenticate, I’m sure Truman was acting as a recorder of reality. Before that, I read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, a literary fantasy based on 19th century life in the Caribbean, long before Rhys was born, yet it felt real. Rhys was born on Dominica, in 1890, and lived there for her first 16 years. My hope is knowledge Rhys gained growing up in the West Indies distilled into her 1966 novel. Before that was Factory Man by Beth Macy, a nonfiction book that was jam-packed with juicy realistic details, but told in a narrative form that was as exciting as any novel.

I crave details about reality, but I can’t just read Wikipedia all day long, even though that is very tempting. And in the coming years, as I get closer to winking out of reality, it might come to that. I still crave fiction, but it has to have a tight connection to reality. Last night I watched The Crusades, an old Cecil B. DeMille epic, that made me hunger to read a nonfiction book on the subject the whole time I was watching. At one time, all that mattered for a novel or movie to enchant me, was a great story and characters. Now, my critical and entertainment reaction needs to know how close the story, setting and characters models reality. This age related transformation is changing my love of science fiction, making me crave more realistic science fiction, and that has philosophical implications too. Driving into this world the future seemed full of fantastic possibilities, and now that I’m on the road leading out of town, the future seems far more restricted than the sense of wonder probabilities of youth.

And that’s another thing about how age is changing my reading habits. In the 20th century I read mostly about the 21st century and beyond, but now that I’m living in the 21st century I mostly read about the 19th century and earlier. I wonder if that’s true of other aging bookworms who grew up reading science fiction?

JWH – 8/27/14

Why Hasn’t Hollywood Made More Films From Popular Science Fiction Novels?

Hollywood obviously loves the science fiction of comic books, but why doesn’t it also love the science fiction of novels? Admittedly, Hollywood doesn’t make films of all popular literary novels either, or mystery books. Hollywood releases about 500-700 films a year. Russia and China is in a similar pall park. India produces about a 1,000 flicks each year. It’s hard to get exact numbers. Figures are also hard to find for the number of novels published each year, but I’d guess between 50,000-75,000 from numbers I’ve seen.

And even though science fiction is very popular at the movies, movie makers aren’t going to make science fiction movies all the time. When movie makers do make science fiction movies they swing for major hits, hoping to make hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions. Evidently the mentality of comic book science fiction fits the bill better than science fiction novels when it comes to making a lot of money and appealing to a vast audience. Science fiction books actually have a very limited appeal on their own. Science fiction is less popular than mysteries and romances as a genre, and much less popular than general best sellers. And most single story science fictional films are usually original screenplays. In other words, science fiction novels don’t get enough attention to be noticed by film makers.

Obviously bestsellers like The Hunger Games do get their attention. But science fiction novels that merely win the Hugo or Nebula awards don’t garnish enough notice by producers with money to spend. All my life I’ve heard stories about Hollywood sniffing around certain famous science fiction novels, even buying the rights, but they seldom get a film through production. Of course, that’s also true of all kinds of books and screenplays. The process is quite an obstacle course.

I’m sure I’m like tens of millions of bookworms out there who wish Hollywood would make movies out of their favorite books. The trouble is, unless ten million bookworms are all wishing for the same book, Hollywood isn’t interested. Dune by Frank Herbert is probably one of the most famous science fiction novels ever, and it’s gotten the film treatment twice and there are rumors filmmakers want to try again. Hollywood isn’t against trying to turn SF books into gold. Just look at what they’ve done with Tolkien and Rowling. Or the success George R. R. Martin has had with HBO, or the new series based on the Outlander series. Hollywood knows bestsellers can make big hits, but they also know they need the right book. Producers know series books work better than single volume stories. Series show fan commitment. Yet, some popular series like The Golden Compass crashed and burned at the movies and none of the sequels were filmed.

Also notice, those stories from Tolkien, Rowling, Martin and Gabaldon weren’t science fiction either. Box office favors fantasy. Hollywood seems to love Philip K. Dick but few other science fiction writers. Ender’s Game didn’t make that much of a splash with worldwide audiences, so I wonder if we’ll ever see Speaker for the Dead on the big screen. David Brin was blessed by Hollywood when they made The Postman, so why haven’t they tried The Uplift series? Heinlein got decent notice with Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters, but other than talk all his other novels are ignored. Heinlein should get some credit for every space marine type film though. Clarke made it huge back in the 1960s with 2001: A Space Odyssey but why didn’t Hollywood try to win again with one of his other novels? Childhood’s End would seem like an obvious choice for the big screen.

I guess the question becomes: What science fiction novels deserve the Hollywood treatment? Which great science fiction stories have the potential to enchant tens of millions of people? Or even a hundred million? As fans of our favorite books, we have to be honest with ourselves, do the books we love have the potential to be loved by a significant percentage of the population? I love a lot of small films that probably don’t get more ticket buyers in the theaters than a modest bestseller. Are there classic science fiction novels that could be filmed within the budgets of independent filmmakers?

My first thought is to recommend the Hyperion Cantos books by Dan Simmons. Can you imagine what those books would look like visualized on the big screen – it would be tremendous! And the $$$s to make would be tremendous too. The Hyperion Cantos films would need the audience of the Marvel comic films to break even. Are there enough people on Earth interested in that story to make it a worthy film investment? Or could a series of films made from the Hyperion Cantos stories attract such an audience? I have no idea.

My favorite science fiction novel is Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein. It was announced in 2010 that Harry Kloor had adapted HSS-WT for the screen, but the last word on the project was it was still in development. I can’t find any recent news, so I assume the project is dead. This Heinlein story could have been filmed relatively cheap, and it does have a great fan base.

Looking at Worlds Without End list of most read books it’s interesting that among the top 24 books, 15 have been filmed. These are both SF and fantasy. Of the ones not filmed, they are:

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Ringworld by Larry Niven
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guinn

I’d like to see films of all nine of those books. The next 24 books, only 12 have been filmed, leaving:

Foundation/Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
Gateway by Frederik Pohl
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Old Man War by John Scalzi

More great science fiction books that need filming. In the next 24, only 11 have been filmed, leaving:

Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov
Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clakre
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

If you’re paying attention you’ll notice that many of these books are part of a series, something Hollywood loves. And these books are among the most popular SF/F books read right now. Because so many have been filmed, it suggests that the others might be film worthy too. If you read the entire list at Worlds Without End you’ll see that many other popular books have been filmed, but more that haven’t. But what about less popular science fiction books, ones that are the real classics of the science fiction genre?

City by Clifford Simak is a book that is probably not well known by young science fiction fans today, but it was much loved when I was growing up. City is a fix-up novel of several short stories, so it would be hard to film, but it’s theme ties them together so wonderful that I wish they could make a film out of it. The gimmick is humans no longer live on Earth and all that’s left are intelligent robots and uplifted dogs, who tell stories about humans they used to know. I can’t believe a creative screen writer couldn’t do something with such a fantastic idea.

Sadly, so many great science fiction novels of the past have become dated not only by science, but by changing attitudes. I think it would be extremely hard to film More Than Human, the great classic by Theodore Sturgeon. It feels like something Carson McCullers would have written after hanging out with a bunch of New Age hippies brought up on reading Stranger in a Strange Land. Many people have dreamed of seeing Stranger in a Strange Land at their favorite movie theater, but I just don’t think it will ever happen. I’d love to see an extremely true-to-the-novel version, but I think seeing Stranger on the big screen would only make it all too obvious how fucking weird it really is. I’m not sure an army of psychiatrists and English professors could make out what Heinlein is unconsciously saying with this novel.

If they had made Stand on Zanzibar as a movie back in 1968, it might creepily look like the news today.

I wish Pixar would make Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, because it’s so damn dazzlingly beautiful to imagine. And I think they should give the film the American book title, The Long Afternoon of Earth. I think people leaving the theater would be saying “WTF!” to each other, but it would haunt them for days to think about the far distant future and what might become of humanity.

Because people are so paranoid about robots and artificial intelligence, I think a hit could be made from The Humanoids by Jack Williamson. Although I’d be afraid Hollywood would turn it into a shoot-em-up like they did I, Robot. It’s very disappointing to me that Hollywood sees science fiction as a source of video game violence to put on the screen, and make every plot about saving the world.

It seems to me that Ready Player One and Little Brother should be obvious movie hits.

If they could pull it off, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny might generate some good word of mouth movie buzz. And what would America think of the dark vision of Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany? Is there the film technology to pull off Uplift series by David Brin, or make The Rediscovery of Man stories by Cordwainer Smith, or Eleanor Arnason’s uber-exotic The Woman of the Iron People? And what would modern people make of the feminist science fiction novels like The Female Man by Joanna Russ, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, or Dawn by Octavia Butler?

And is it too late to film such vast comic weirdness as Mindswap and A Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley?

I could go on and on and on, because science fiction has so many wonderful, far out, sense of wonder inspiring stories that should be filmed. And I’ve only been talking of novels. I’d film “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny even though it’s clearly scientifically wrong and outdated. There are probably hundreds of great SF novelettes and novellas out there would would film perfectly for a two hour movie. The next Heinlein movie should be “A Menace from Earth.”

Fans of great science fiction stories can hope that the technology, talent and costs of movie making will come down so more classic science fiction stories can be filmed. I was given hope for this the other day when I saw an article about a Star Trek movie Ananar being made by movie makers not through regular channels. Maybe it won’t always take hundreds of millions to make an epic science fiction movie. Let’s hope.

JWH – 8/23/14