Quis custodies custodiet? You should.

Rating: 9/10 (6 March 2009)

Books are not movies. They cannot, for example, set a scene at a glance.
Movies are not books. They cannot, for example, do introspection in an instant.
Neither form has proved adept at pre-digesting expository lumps.
Either form, at its best, can amaze, inspire, thrill, or move us.
It's a challenge to adapt either medium to the other. Steven Gould's marvelous novel Jumper became a wretched film of the same name. Conversely, about the best you can say of any novelization from a script (even one in the hands of a highly competent author) is "It was workmanlike.". Not that a good cross-medium adaptation can't be done at all, just that the odds are stacked against it. So many things have to come together just right that it's like lightning striking twice in the same place.
The shining exception to this rule is, of course, The Lord of the Rings, an acknowledged literary masterpiece that could have been just horribly, horribly botched as a movie. But it had the good fortune to fall into the hands of friends, and the result was a masterpiece in its own right. (Bless you, Peter Jackson. And uncountable thanks to New Line Cinema, which literally bet the studio on you.)
Adding to the normal problems of adaptation are the added challenges associated with science fiction and fantasy. These genres get no respect in either realm.
Consider what it takes to win praise from literary critics. If you crank out a novel about an angst-ridden Jewish writer who lives in New York City, you're almost automatically on the short list for that year's top prizes in fiction. (That may have something to do with literary criticism being dominated by angst-ridden Jewish writers who live in New York City.) Skiffy? Fantasy? Forget it! Not "deep" enuf. About the sole SF&F work to crack this inner circle was Michael Chabon's wondrously written Pulitzer Prizewinning alternative history, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which happened to be about angst-ridden Jewish comic-book writers who lived in New York City. (It probably helped that one of them turned out to be gay.)
Hollywood is just as dismissive of the genre, tho it's more of a love-hate relationship here. After all, 80 of the top 100 box-office movies of all time have been either science fiction or fantasy. Money, sure; keep it rolling in! But respect? A different story altogether. Look at 2008's crop of terrific comic-book films. What would it take for any of them to get an Oscar nomination? Would they have had to kill to get one? No; that's an exaggeration. You do have to die, tho. Clearly, from the movie industry's perspective, SF&F flix are like the good-time gal you hang out with as much as possible, not the one you take home to mom.
And, if these 2 establishments look down their snoots at SF&F generally, they are even more contemptuous of comic books. Even when comics are collated into more substantial form (in an appeal to "weightiness") and recategorized as "graphic novels" (in a desperate attempt to evade "comicness"), they start out with a strike against them due solely to their roots. Maus, Watchmen, Fun House, Persepolis. I'm not out of fingers on my 1st hand yet, and I can't think of any others that ever got taken seriously. It's like the sad old story about women and black people struggling to make it in America: Due to mindless bigotry, you have to be twice as good to get half as far.
I suspect that part of the explanation for this lack of respect lies in the 1-dimensional axis along which standard fiction gets evaluated. At one end of the spectrum lies Plot; at the other, Characterization. English classes, film schools, and lit crit all go on endlessly about the proper balance between these 2 poles. I submit that, like A. Square in Flatland, they are oblivious to an entire additional dimension. A thoro analysis requires us to expand that 1-dimensional axis into a 2-dimensional triangle by adding a 3rd vertex, Setting.
"It had begun misting as she stepped out of the cab in front of the Waldorf-Astoria." 1 sentence into your novel, and your readers already know a wealth of information about your world. Had it been a movie, the establishing shot would have burned Setting into their brains even more quickly. Because the familiar is handled so readily in mimetic fiction, it's taken for granted by the critics and scholars.
SF&F, tho, have a larger burden to shoulder. For them, Setting is on a par with Plot and Characterization as something that must be dealt with. It's necessary to create a whole different world for these genres, and doing so takes pages and frames that can't be devoted to the other 2 vertices of the triangle. Thus, to a standard 1-dimensional critique, these genres seem to skimp on the elements that mainstream critics are predisposed to look for.
SF&F fans, of course, are accustomed to letting their eyes roam across the whole triangle of creative space. That's why they can find delight in, say, the works of Arthur C. Clarke, which revel in new worlds built or discovered by cardboard-cutout characters. Doing right by Setting makes up somewhat for sins of Plot and Characterization. But only in the cloistered ghetto of SF&F, not in the great outer world.
You might think that graphic novels would be an ideal bridge between books and movies. After all, they partake of the time-decoupled, info-dense, and cerebral (both senses) aspects of the novel as well as of the immediacy, activity, and audio-visuality of film.
So much more to say, but I'm up against the 1000-word limit. Ah, well, that's what blogs are for.