Fictitious vol. 14: The perfect adaptation

Predestination, '—All You Zombies—', my second sci-fi story

Hello! If it’s your first time receiving this newsletter - welcome! You might want to check out the back catalog that’s growing every week. In this edition, I’ll be talking about what I deem to be the perfect screen adaptation of a short story, as well as introducing a short story I wrote myself.

Predestination shows how adaptations should be done

The world is full of disappointing adaptations. Mishandled novels, poorly treated source material, lore thrown out the window. Most often than not Hollywood adaptations just end up infuriating the fan base and butchering a book that probably never needed to be turned into a movie. I’m not talking about the recent wave of woke/anti-woke rhetoric, as bad adaptations precede today’s culture wars.

Novels, after all, are complex organisms, with too many sub-plots and character arcs to fit in 90 minutes. With streaming on the rise, more and more sagas get multi-part or even multi-season adaptations. A looser format allows more room to translate the book into cinematic language but also leaves plenty of space for error and frivolity. 

But it's not just novels that are turned into movies and series. It's also short stories. Philip K. Dick's legacy counts dozens of movies, some adapted from just 3 pages of text. Total Recall, Bladerunner, even the Adjustment Bureau are all decent adaptations, each of them completely distinct.

While short form doesn't provide depth, it provides a clear structure and mood. Besides, there's probably no such thing as a die-hard short story fan, so you get the bonus of not having to deal with an infantile fan base. 

Movies based on short stories also avoid scrutiny and questions about fidelity. Adaptations need to expand on the source material, as there’s usually not enough plot or world-building. And while some movies deviate by a mile, there’s a few that managed to really do the original piece justice without having to build on top of it too much.

Directed by the Spieger twins and starring Ethan Hawke, Predestination (2014) is probably the best screen adaptation of a short story I've seen so far. The story in question is Robert Heinlein's "'—All You Zombies—'", a 9-page story that's barely a blip in the author's corpus, which includes everything from Starship Troopers to Orphans of the Sky - the novella that served as my gateway drug into sci-fi.

The story revolves around a temporal paradox, a complicated chain of events that features an intersex person having sex with themselves (pre-op) and conceiving… themself. The baby is then transported back in time, creating a perfect loop. It's poetic and weird, beautiful and slightly haunting. "I am my own grandpa" is a trope by now, spoofed by the likes of Douglas Adams and the creators of Futurama. Time travel is messy in most stories dealing with it, but Heinlein managed to show how messy (or orderly, if you look at it the other way) time travel can really get. 

I wonder if Heinlein himself had to draw something similar to ensure coherence. Credit: By Johnstoo - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Predestination stays remarkably faithful to the original. Same character(s), same setting, same plot essentially. Much of the dialogue is also lifted word by word from the story. I really admire that part, as the characters speak the exact way Heinlein wrote them. It feels that every single line is there for a reason. To add dynamism to the film, the creators added an extra layer of complexity to the time loop, which was executed to perfection. There’s not a lot of action in the movie, nor is there a lot of CGI or futuristic elements. It only shows that good sci-fi doesn’t need all that. A plot and a paradox do the trick.

Time travel movies often look like fairy tales or costume dramas. Characters get transported to a different period, change clothes, brandish an accent and blend in. The Spanish production El Ministerio del Tiempo, which I fairly enjoyed, is like that. A trio of temporal agents go places, meet famous people and try to make sure that history stays intact. Plus shenanigans and cell phones that work in the Middle Ages. While it has certain poignant moments (like one of the characters visiting her own grave), ultimately it doesn’t make the viewer ponder “what if time travel was actually real?” 

Heinlein and the Spierig brothers, on the other hand, make you really question what causes what, whether anything can be changed, and what makes fate predestined.

You'll find Heinlein's short story here: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Robert-A.-Heinlein-All-You-Zombies.pdf.

Predestination (2014) is streaming on Netflix and can also be rented via Google Play.

I published another short story!

Those of you who enjoyed No Duplicates might also enjoy Pulling no Punch Cards, a short story/sketch I wrote in 2020. Slightly more dystopian than the first story, this one already received very positive feedback from the amazing community at the Soaring Twenties Social Club and several first readers. Follow the link below to read it:

Pulling no punch cards

The language corner

Word of the week. JIFFY. Since we have time travel in the main segment, it's only natural to have a time measurement unit as the word of the week. I’m sorry, what? Jiffy is a measurement unit? Why yes! In physics, it’s the time it takes for light to travel one fermi, which is approximately the size of a nucleon. One fermi is 10−15 m, so a jiffy is about 3 × 10−24 seconds. Jiffies are also used in computing, where they denote the time between two ticks of the system timer interrupt. The origins of the word are older. According to Wikipedia:

First attested in 1780,[1] the word's origin is unclear, though one suggestion is that it was thieves' cant for lightning.[2] It was common in a number of Scots English dialects and in John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808) it is suggested that it is a corruption of 'gliff' (glimpse) or 'gliffin' (glance) [3] (compare: 'in the blink of an eye') and may ultimately derive from Gothic or Teutonic words for 'shine'. ('Gliff' or 'gliss' for 'a transient view' was also found in older English poetry as early as 1738 [4].)

Unsolicited language learning advice. As a language learner, you should be ready to embrace piracy. People get squeamish when it comes to ILLEGALLY DOWNLOADING something from the internet but have no qualms about buying second-hand books. In neither of the cases does the author or publisher get a dime, but for some reason, some people are opposed to entertaining the first option.

By becoming not just a pirate but also a hoarder, you'll also help preserve certain gems—things like PBS language learning series or hard-to-find Michel Thomas tapes.

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