What I’ve been reading lately – Flatlander

I’ve been trying to read more, ever since getting back from Kansas. Unfortunately, other things to do keep trying to crowd out reading time.

One book that I’ve managed to make headway is a collection of short stories from Larry Niven: “Flatlander” – not to be confused with the single short story of the same title and author, which is one from the Beowulf Shaeffer sequence.

But the short stories in this collection are set several hundred years earlier, at least – and center around a cop with a past as an asteroid belt miner – Gil Hamilton the Arm. That last bit is a play on words – Gil is part of the ARM, or Amalgamation of Regional Militia – an organization which serves as the worldwide police force on Earth in the future of Larry Niven’s books. But Gil also has a phantom psychic arm, partly because he lost his arm in a mining accident. (He later got a transplanted replacement arm too.) His psychic arm isn’t strong enough to lift anything heavy, but it can do things that a physical arm can’t, like reach through walls – or TV screens.

The stories all have some kind of mystery element, set against a future where the mining Belters have achieved independence from Earth and lunar settlers are caught between the two groups. There are a few references to Lucas Garner, Gil’s aging but sharp boss, and this is presumably the same character who appears in the first half of Niven’s novel ‘Protector’, thus linking the Gil stories into the known space universe, long before humanity met Kzinti or puppeteers or any extant alien species.

I’ve actually read one of these stories years ago. “Arm” was one of the Larry Niven stories that I was able to download from fictionwise.com, and I enjoyed reading it on my palmpilot, though I didn’t really follow the references to the psychic hand, as the backstory wasn’t given in detail.

Ever since I was in Kansas, ‘Flatlander’ has been my go-to for reading when I happened to have my iPhone around, as it’s cued up in the iPhone’s kindle app. I’m still in the middle of a novella-length mystery taking place on the moon’s surface, with an old flame of Gil’s taking the fall for a laser shooting that he knows she couldn’t have committed.

I’d recommend it to any lover of science fiction mysteries.

Nine books that could become great movies.

Okay, so, for the third day of the Novel Films blogfest, I present you with a list of some of my favorite books, all science fiction and fantasy as it just so happens, that I think could make really great films – if adapted well, and the production budget was high enough.

A spell for chameleon, by Piers Anthony.

Ah, the Xanth series before it got swallowed in puns.

I think that this could become a great movie if the original fantasy charm of the story gets captured. It might be hard trying to capture the land of Xanth in a live action movie or a blend of live action and CGI, but it could really do well as any variety of animation film.

The storyline is fairly simple in its core – a young man, Bink, living under a sentence of exile, goes out into the wild lands looking for the answer that might let him keep his home – and though he meets some incredible characters, he doesn’t find that answer, that unique magic, and is sent from the Kingdom of Xanth into cruel Mundania. Once there, he’s immediately captured by the exiled Evil Magician Trent determined to make his way back and take over the Kingdom. When they blunder back into the wilds of Mundania, accompanied by a woman who literally changes with the days of the month, Bink and Trent must settle on the field of honor, to determine the future of the land that they both love, in their own ways.

A Charmed Life, by Diana Wynne Jones

Again, this is a great book, full of magic, and I could really see it being made into a great movie. Chrestomanci Castle is just crying out to be immortalized on film, along with Christopher Chant and his dressing gowns, Cat, Janet, Gwendolyn, and all the remarkable characters of this film. And talk about twists and turns, not knowing who to trust? The only thing I can see going wrong is that the final battle of magic between the Chrestomanci household and the gathering of wicked witches and necromancers could never be as amazing on screen as it is on the page.