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>> ^dag:

For Rama, I'd stick with the original. I'm not a fan of the sequels, especially after Gentry Lee got involved in Clarke's dotage.
Speaking of SF remakes, I'd love John Varley's Titan series to be done on the big screen. I think CGI would now make it more than possible.

Maybe it's just me, but I honestly can't remember any events of significance happening in the original book. It's like almost all Clarke books, it's got a great idea as a set piece, but the characters are flat as pancakes, and the plot doesn't really go anywhere either.

I tended to like Clarke's collaborative books better, because they usually had better characters and plot, but were still wrapped around an awesome Clarke idea.

I haven't read the Titan series, but again, that's a Hugo-award winning sci fi novel post-1970. It's also annoying because if you go and check, some major movie house already owns the movie rights on all these novels. Clearly someone has the foresight to go and acquire it, but it never percolates up to the bigwigs to green light an actual film.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

For Rama, I'd stick with the original. I'm not a fan of the sequels, especially after Gentry Lee got involved in Clarke's dotage.

Speaking of SF remakes, I'd love John Varley's Titan series to be done on the big screen. I think CGI would now make it more than possible.


>> ^NetRunner:

@dag supposedly Ender's Game is too, but it's been a few years away for about a decade now.
I'm sorta iffy on how they can make a movie based on Rendezvous interesting. I think they almost have to transplant the events & characters of Rama 2 into Rama's first visit to make it a decent film.
Even then, to make it true to the series, they'll have to instill a deep interest in solving the mystery of who the Ramans are, why they sent the ship, why there's so much weird stuff in the ship, and then pointedly provide zero answers, and zero hints.
Then after 4 books give you a completely stupid answer to all those questions that almost makes you sorry you read the books in the first place.

edit: well crap.. I guess a bunch more people already told you this stuff so Still angry.

It is SO awesome to me that this news report comes out a week after I read John Varley's Red Thunder, so I know a few of these figures....

>> ^westy:
surly the faster you go the more you have to decelerate so say u got to mars in 30 days as aposed to 1 year you would have to spend ages going around its gravity feailds before u lost enough speed to safely enter the atmosphere. ethor that or you are going to have to waste a tun of fuel to brake.

So in the novel the idea was that we don't use up all our fuel any more. He suggests that if you accelerate towards mars at 9.8m/s^2 then you will get half way there in only 4 days. If you accelerate at 1g for say four days and you end up travelling at around 3 million meters PER SECOND or 12 million km/h. That's fast enough to have relativistic effects. No wonder it only takes 4 days to get half way to Mars. At that point we will have travelled 58 million kilometres.

Now simply turn around, and fire your rocket in the other direction for the second half of the trip and decelerate at 9.8m/s^2 for four days. In 8 days you can travel 116 million kilometres. Wolfram Alpha says Mars is only 105 million kilometres away. Whut whut!

8 days to Mars! That's MAD! This video says 39 days. ALSO MAD! Very exciting stuff.