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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

Revenger / Shadow Captain / Bone Silence by Alastair Reynolds.

It's (IMHO) very well suited to a series adaptation. (Reasonable set of main actors, accessible, good places to stretch or compress content, few hard-to-visualise internal character mechanics.)

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Ooh, yes that could be very good, and the age-of-sail/steampunk aesthetic would be a nice change from the usual gleaming-Imperial-navy/raggedy-Rebel-cowboy space look (Star Wars, Firefly, etc).

The Revelation Space series would be very interesting, but it would need an excellent director to bring home the brutal malevolence of that universe (and paging HR Geiger for the Melding Plague scenes).

TBH I think Revelation Space is the 180° opposite of Revenger in terms of TV/film adaptability. There are just so fricken many things that develop from character's internal views, it's a huge universe with a shitton of characters that randomly overlap, and high fiction to a degree of limiting the target audience quite a bit.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love nothing more than see a good adaptation of Revelation Space, but sadly I think the possible outcomes range between poor and horrible :-(

For sure, same as the Culture, but with more existential and body horror. RS (and the Culture) also have a bad habit of hopping across the universe in space, time which would badly disjoint a single series. They're more like Star Trek with separate series each.

But just imagine the Chasm we could have! Would look so good.

Chasm city could make a mini series but it could turn bad like Netflix Altered Carbon because what made it amazing is not just the book itself but knowing all the other events that came after.

I love Revelation Space series (including all the side novels like dreyfus emergency and chasm city) but I doubt we'll ever see an adaptation for TV with a budget high enough to do justice to the source material. That is because the story is not so mainstream for general audiences, it has a lot of gore / body horror, its very dark at times, and has no clear heroes. It's hard scifi to the point that it's so detached from our everyday reality so it will alienate viewers who aren't already fans of the genre. You can argue GOT wasn't close to our reality but at least characters had motives we are familiar with.

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