RIP Anne McCaffrey

[Ingmar]

She was never one of my favorites, but I get why other people liked her so much.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/arts/anne-mccaffrey-dragonriders-author-dies-at-85.html?_r=1&

EDIT: NEVER MIND.

One of my friends fooled me with a Facebook post. Been dead for 2 years.  Derp, sorry.

[Quinton]

Whoah, I didn't know she had died.  So even if it's old news, it's news to me.

I wasn't an enormous fan but remember reading the dragonrider books in middle school and enjoying them.

[Merusk]

She hit the teenage-years voice pretty well. The logic and world mechanics of Pern also meshed well with a teenaged view, so yeah while they were never favorites they had a place in many folks reading history.

[Reg]

The dragon rider stuff was pretty good but I liked her Brain Ship books better.

[Shannow]

Loved the Pern series and still read Dragonflight every cpl of years or so.
Considering all the crap shit that gets made into movies today it's a crime they haven't made a Dragonflight one.

[Merusk]

The quasi-rape of Dragon mating makes execs uncomfortable, I'm sure.  Assuming McCaffrey ever optioned things.

You could write around it, yeah, but you also have to remember the series dealt with homosexuality, women and sexuality in general in ways that would never have made it past the "hey let's do a movie out of this" phase.

ed: Actually, you could make a decent HBO series out of it nowadays.

[Reg]

IMO, they could easily skip all the sex stuff without damaging the stories or being horribly untrue to the books. Hah, I'd be more offended if HBO took it and inserted spurious shots of Lessa's tits and F'lars ass.

[Shannow]

Yeah I think the mating process could be toned down or, god help me, just about ignored.
Considering some of the YA books that get made into movies nowadays, why not Dragonflight? Dragons and a kickass female lead, better than so many of those simpering idiots we see nowadays (I'm looking at you Bella). My worry was how were they going to make fighting mutant mushrooms exciting.

I sometimes wonder how much Hollywood is really worried about this stuff, I was watching Happy Feet the other day and saw a scene where they openly alluded to the guru penguin character going to have sex with his harem.

[Merusk]

One liners and double entendres have always abounded, you can even find them in Loony Toons.

That's a fair bit removed from a group of 18-50 year old men clustering around and pressing against an 18 year old woman (or man in the case of green/ blues) whose dragon was in heat.  Grinding on the individual until one of the group's dragon wins and then fucks the hell out of the female's rider right there in front of everyone.

It's interesting to note that as she got older (and the US got more conservative compared to the 60s and 70s) that all did fall by the wayside, but it was pretty central to 2 of the first 3 books; Lessa with F'lar: F'nor with Brekke.  It factored less with Jaxom's worry about Ruth being asexual and that could be dropped, yeah.

Wiki says movies have been tried in the past but were
1) Buffized (another reason to hate that show)
2) Fell apart
3) Seem to have fallen apart again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern#Television_and_film_adaptations

Since Eregon was a pretty significant rip-off of DoP and was a flop, it shouldn't surprise me that that last deal appears to have fallen-through.

[Khaldun]

I liked the Menolly books especially when I was younger but the dragon mating thing would either have to be dealt with for what it actually is or changed dramatically. It's actually rather interesting and disturbing all at once--you've got men bonded to female dragons who get horny in a weird kind of way when their sterile but female dragons mate with male ones, but yeah, you've also got scenes where tons of older men gather around young women and wait to semi-rape them while everyone watches. That could be fascinating if she really 'got' the implications of what she was working with (humans whose sense of sexual morality gets subsumed on occasion into the sexual morality of symbiotic aliens) but she really doesn't and I don't think it's just the time that the books were written in. It's sort of like Gor meets a romance novel.

[Venkman]

The quasi-rape of Dragon mating makes execs uncomfortable, I'm sure.  Assuming McCaffrey ever optioned things.

You could write around it, yeah, but you also have to remember the series dealt with homosexuality, women and sexuality in general in ways that would never have made it past the "hey let's do a movie out of this" phase.

ed: Actually, you could make a decent HBO series out of it nowadays.

Eh. Given what happened with I, Robot and World War Z, I have zero expectation that any Hollywood exec would look that deep. The movie version hits every trope from ID4 to Pacific Rim. It writes itself:

• Humans settling a world (woo, hope for the future, including super tech like spaceships, autonomous computers, a warrior caste and the single quirky genius that understands it all)
• Begin getting attacked by mysterious enemy (every summer blockbuster ever)
• Develop some super weapon to fight it (every summer blockbuster ever, bonus points for the first option failing, blame this on who eventually emerge as the recurring bad guys)
• Coming up with the actual solution (every summer blockbuster ever, bonus points for some contemporary topic. Hey look: genetic engineering small dragons into superdragons! Credit goes to the quirky genius)
• Final battle against the threadstorm. Here either decide they're caused by a malevelont force which can be fought by Hope as depicted by strong American accents, or they're just the force of nature that's fan-friendly true to source.

Movie ends with the main movie-only paygrade actors beginning to talk about kids and making a living, with a cameo of quirky genius working on ways to make the dragons bigger. "Maybe someday our descendants could even RIDE them!!' /queue laughter with a pan shot to the bad guy in pensive mode.

Two years later sell your pilot to Fox or CW. Set a few decades later, ensure at least one of the movie-only paygrade actors is in the pilot, but that the rest of the cast is TV-budget friendly young hot demographically-mixed-just-enough talent. Assume you'll get 1/2 a season at least. The books themselves have enough TV/ad-friendly shit in them to keep it going longer than even Game of Thrones. You could gloss over most of the dragon/CGI SFX budget by just focusing on the politics between the recurring Thread storms.

[Merusk]

You just described Dragon's Dawn in the entirety.  The only goofy stuff there can be shoved in to the background; i.e. You're only obligated to stay married for a Decade and the one freaky geneticist who was banging all his daughters, granddaughters, nieces, etc.

Not what most people think of when discussing, but yeah, I always thought that one was primed for movie making.

[Sir T]

Dragon's Dawn was a pretty good book, and oddly the last McCaffrey I readl

[Khaldun]

In some ways her Ship Who Sang is almost a better vehicle for an adaptation. Though the idea has almost become a commonplace trope in SF since then.