Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Adapt or Die - JUMPER!
Steven Gould's JUMPER is a great book.
JUMPER plays out like my favorite type of science-fiction, which is completely reality based, with one element of science-fiction added in. I know everyone who likes science-fiction loves Star Trek, Farscape and Battlestar Gallactica, but they seem too far out there for me to really enjoy. On the other hand shows like Firefly, Quantum Leap, Taken and the 4400 are right up my alley, as well as the books of Michael Crichton and movies like Contact.
JUMPER is a great example of this genre. It begins with a simple premise: What if you could teleport anywhere you'd been before? In no time, 17-year old David Rice has done what I'm sure we would all do, robbed a bank and set up a life for himself. It's been years (actually at least a decade) since I read JUMPER, but I used to always say that David Rice spends the rest of the novel in a Holden Caulfieldesque malaize, dealing with loneliness and adolescence, with just the added twist of having lots of money and the ability to teleport.
So, what of the movie? David Goyer has written a screenplay for it. Certainly Batman Begins fits into the same reality-based sci-fi that we're looking for. IMDB says that Jim Uhls worked on the screenplay as well. He's been pretty quiet since writing Fight Club (which everyone credits to Chuck Palahniuk anyway). But now they've got the writer of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (and XXX2!) doing rewrites? Ouch.
And who is directing? Doug Liman! That's probably enough for me to go see it even if it wasn't a novel I love already (even though I didn't go see Mr. And Mrs. Smith in the theatre).
All in all, I'm sure this will be in my list of most anticipated releases of 07.
And what about Steven Gould? He followed up JUMPER with a great book called Wildside, about a group of kids that find a portal to an alternate earth where humans never existed. I didn't like the two novels after that very much, so I lost track of him, but it turns out he wrote a sequel to JUMPER that I'll be picking up ASAP.
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