Follow Friday - 172 Baucis Is an Asteroid Discovered by French Astronomer Alphonse Borrelly

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the Featured Blogger of the week - Blue Books and Butterflies.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What book or series do you think would make a better television show than a movie?

Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion Series

My pick is Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion series, which is actually not one book series, but rather several interlinked series revolving around a single individual. The main character is Elric of Melnibone, who is also Corum, Erekose (also known as John Daker), Hawkmoon, and several dozen other incarnations. Each incarnation is, unknowingly at first, the champion of the Cosmic Balance in the center of the conflict between Law and Chaos, doomed to a life of strife and conflict. When one incarnation dies, the eternal champion is reborn in another universe, destined to take up his role yet again. Sometimes, the eternal champion encounters another version of himself when preserving the Cosmic Balance requires more than the usual amount of effort.

Creating a television series made out of the dozens of books that make up the Eternal Champion cycle would be a substantial effort, and it would require an almost wholesale cast change every few seasons when a new incarnation of the champion became the lead of the series. In many cases, the series would have a change of tone as well - for example, Elric lives in the remnants of a baroque empire of sword-wielding sorcerers, while Hawkmoon lives in a world full of weird science that might be called steampunk if Moorcock had not written the stories before the term "steampunk" was coined, and so on. One might object that this would confuse viewers, but I figure that viewers are able to handle the various regenerations of the Doctor and constantly shifting worlds on Doctor Who, so they should be able to handle the rebirths of the eternal champion as well.

More importantly, given the structure of the Eternal Champion series, there is simply no way to do it justice in a movie, or even a series of movies. Each incarnation of the champion has his own story, his own world, his own set of family, allies, and enemies, and many have their own endlessly reincarnating sidekick, all of which could be presented in a dedicated movie. But the interconnections between the incarnations and the over arching pattern that links all of them together, would be impossible to effectively explain to the viewers, and a great deal of what makes the series interesting would be lost. Each individual champion's story is interesting, but they are even more interesting when one can see their place in the overall mosaic.

I don't think an Eternal Champion television series will ever be made. To do so and to do it well would require a level of effort that would probably be greater than the effort that has been required to bring the Song of Ice and Fire series to HBO. But if someone did, they would have enough material to provide years of action-filled, weird, and thought-provoking episodes.

Previous Follow Friday: 171 Is a Triangular Number

Subsequent Follow Friday: SCP-173 Is a Creature Created by the SCP Foundation

Follow Friday     Home