Now I admit straight away with knowing nothing more about the original novel in this story from Coming Soon, but what hit me was the wonderfully interesting blurb and the final comment in the post, please do comment about the source if you know it, I’d be interested to hear if it does live up to the blurb.
Phobos Entertainment has picked up all media rights to Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness, says Variety.
First published in 1969, the book is set on Winter, a lost planet whose inhabitants defy standard gender roles and even physically change genders. The tory follows a human emissary who must bridge a cultural gulf to fulfill his mission to bring the planet back into the galactic fold.
How interesting does that sound? Mind you, depends on how they interpret the story, but it does sound promising. The final comment was really interesting, and I know this has popped up in another post recently:
Schulberg plans to exploit the property as both a feature and a video game.
Well that seems to be the way of Hollywood at the moment. Taking as many projects as they can from the videogame industry they’re continuing the tradition of transferring movies to videogame. This practice has been done for some time, but with the conversion being to simple stock ideas. Now there’s more and more development time and cost being put into the game version of a movie, and it’s interesting that it’s now becoming a major announcement up front with each movie.
Anyway, back to the story blurb, how about some comments on how good it really is.
Read the book in college for an English class on sci fi literature. To be honest it doesn’t entirely count as sci-fi. Science is used to create the premise alone but the rest of the book is (~98%) is pure sociology. There is almost no action and you’ll be bored unless you expect one of those sci fi stories that asks deep questions about humanity in general. On the other hand, LeGuin’s other books create a fascinating universe (the “Ekumen” are a master race that created humans on Earth and similar yet fascinatingly unique beings on other planets). Bottom line: you’ll get far more sociology than Star Wars style sci fi. Thats a plus for some but a minus for many. Trekkies should like it.
this is one of my favoritiest books everr. should be interesting to see how they treat the story, or if they do. seems like a lot of great books’ rights are sold, and then they sit around for years, with people fighting over how to deal with it and the movies don’t get made (see: Ender’s Game). sad, too, considering some of the crud they keep throwing out there on the multiplex.