I also feel confident that it has enough things Hollywood likes (insanity, gratuitous nudity from the ‘tail wolves’, crime) that it might do a decent adaptation. The effects wouldn’t even be too much of an issues as the dragons are supposed to be toys to the rest of the world and only living from Sarah’s perspective.

Though Gate to Women’s Country could be a fantastic film – it’s too blatantly feminist to not get slaughtered in the adaptation. Just briefly imagining the things a casting director alone could do… (shudder)

Kelly Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series could make a good urban fantasy franchise. Not feminist per se, but the first couple books in the series directly deal with the misogyny/racism/classism inherit in the entire otherwordly look at modern society.

Am also fascinated by the notion of letting the routine Hollywood re-write work to remove now-dated sexism in Bradley and McCaffrey stories. I don’t put it past Hollywood to insert some brand new 21st-century sexism somehow, but they’d get past the flat “girls can’t do that” schtick that faced 60s-70s writers’ female characters. It’s also fairly clear in Darkover’s overall history that tower circles were considered subversively free in sexual matters by everyone else, and that Keepers were held to celibacy only during particularly repressive periods when that was socially acceptable, not as an intrinsic feature of using their talents. How a movie would deal with this would probably depend on which of Bradley’s books provided the movie plot.

My suggestion for movie material is Schmitz’s Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee books, two women who take very little shit from anybody, and who feature in a number of story-length or novella-length pieces. Schmitz’s other work is worth checking — _The Witches of Karres_ has distinct space-opera possibilities, and several others of his are space opera with colorful, aliens and female human protags. James Schmitz wrote female protagonists at least as often as male, and made them active agents with no apology.

Has someone mentioned the Honor Harrington (aka “female Horatio Hornblower in space”) series? The books are not exactly Deep Lit’rary Stuff, but they get in there with female characters (not just the lead, but the rank and file as well) in a space navy saga.

When Roger Ebert reviewed Michelle Trachtenberg’s ice-skating movie, he mentioned that she did her own skating. He got a polite letter from the CGI people saying she didn’t – and they were delighted that they’d done their work so seamlessly that a man who’s watched thousands of movies couldn’t catch it.

The point of my point was that, in fact, you only think that CGI is always unrealistic because you only notice that a film uses CGI when they do it in such a way as to call attention to it.

I’m not quite as stupid as all that. In The Two Towers, for instance, I think of two different CGIs that worked very differently: First, the army scenes — the long shots. That worked pretty damn well, I thought. Second, the wargs. They did a great job on it — but it still wasn’t good enough; it didn’t pass for real to me. (The worst of all, I thought, was the balrog in Fellowship. Or maybe the eye of sauron which I really didn’t think was good.)

I just think that CGI isn’t there yet on some kinds of things. Close-ups with movement, where we humans are quite able to pick up a lot of nuance even without realizing it — that stuff is very very hard to get right. If the pupils aren’t flaring correctly and often enough, if the nostrils aren’t making tiny motions frequently, little twitches in small muscles, pores — all of these things are stuff we perceive without noticing. That, combined with motion, makes CGI look like CGI to me in those kinds of scenes. So prosthetics are used, but they screw up the tiny motions on the face. Prosthetics + CGI can be pretty good, but they can’t really do whole creatures that have to move. Long shots, crowd shots where there is so much unrelated detail that we can’t really distinguish the many details and our brain is already paring down the information — I think CGI is great for that.

The point of my point was that, in fact, you only think that CGI is always unrealistic because you only notice that a film uses CGI when they do it in such a way as to call attention to it. Toy Story isn’t meant to look like a film in which toys really come to life: it’s a cartoon. It’s done in a new way, as is Shrek, but you see it’s animation because you are meant to see it is.

When you’re not, you don’t.

That’s how the makers of Dragonsong could do the dragons and the firelizards…. so well, you would never know they weren’t real except we’d know they must be.

I wasn’t thinking about Jurassic Park, which I haven’t seen since it was released into the dollar theaters. I don’t think I’ll spend my time on watching it again, even tho you’re are trying to entice me with graphics. If it’s on a plane or hotel room some time I won’t turn it off & will then be better equipped to respond to your comment.

I’m mostly thinking about CGI of people and animals, and how the movement always looks not real to me, particularly facial movement. Also (added later: as in, “in addition”) about computer animation a la “Toy Story” and later works: not intended to be realistic, but intended to be new and improved and I think it’s worse.