I stopped watching Syfy around the time they cancelled both Stargate: Universe (which wasn’t that good, but as someone who never watched any Stargate stuff besides the original movie, it was making me interested in its world. And Robert Carlyle is a clencher for me in anything) and Caprica (started off really rocky, but where it ended and what it promised was incredible), so I can’t really judge what their current output is like.
That’s why I have to be a little uneasy when I hear that Syfy is teaming up with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment to adapt Alduous Huxley’s genre-defining novel, Brave New World, into a television show.
Brave New World set the template for a lot of speculative science fiction, and its still getting milked today with the flood of YA sci-fi we’re being inundated with. I’m worried that the television show will feel like its riding on the heels of The Hunger Games instead of an adaptation of one of the most influential novels ever written.
Plus, I don’t trust Syfy. Ever since they stopped being The Sci-Fi Channel, they’ve made me leery. They’ve promised to return to more straight science fiction in the coming years (maybe they already have? Someone who watches Syfy shows let me know in the comments), and putting up a Brave New World television series seems like that attitude in action.
The last time Amblin and Syfy teamed up, we got the miniseries Taken (whose writer Les Bohem will be scripting Brave New World), which I know I watched in its entirety but can’t remember a thing about now. Is this cause for excitement or dread, Chewers?