Follow Friday - Syracuse Used War Machines Designed by Archimedes to Repel the Romans in 213 B.C.

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 - The Darling Bookworm.
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: How would you pitch to the biz to make your favorite book into a movie?

A number of my favorite books have already been made into movies - Dune, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep, Ender's Game, and so on. That doesn't mean they were made into good movies, but there is some version of them on film. So I'm going to talk about a book that I'd like to see made into a film, even though it would probably be almost impossible: Nova by Samuel R. Delany.

Nova is something of a strange novel that spends much of its time discussing cultural stagnation and the distinctions between different kinds of art, but it is also a gripping space opera that pits its protagonist Lorq von Ray in a race across the galaxy against the nefarious Prince Red and his sister Ruby with the financial control of human civilization as the stakes. The plot revolves around the hunt for rare element Illyrion, used to power starships and terraform planets. Lorq has come across the idea of finding Illyrion directly at the source - the heart of an exploding star - and recruits a crew to travel in search of one. He recruits an eclectic crew to purse his quest that includes Mouse, a Romani with a musical instrument that projects light, sound, and scent, and can be used as a weapon.

Prince Red has a mechanical arm that gives him superior strength, but which he is embarrassed by. Lorq and Prince Red have a long-standing rivalry that goes back to when they were children, and which reached a peak when Prince Red disfigured Lorq by slashing him across the face with his artificial arm at a party after they had competed against one another is a space yacht race. Prince Red is the scion of a wealthy family based on Earth, and represents, essentially, "old money", while Lorq hails from the Pleiades Federation, and his ancestors made their money through piracy and murder, and he represents "new money".

This only scratches the surface of Nova, which has at times been described as a near perfect science fiction novel. There is so much going on in the book that it would be hard to include everything, but at its heart it is a sweeping space opera about daring individuals locked in a struggle driven by hatred and revenge and trying to fly into dying stars to make their fortunes, which seems to me like a recipe for a great movie.

Previous Follow Friday: Water Boils At 212 Degrees Fahrenheit

Subsequent Follow Friday: In Terminator 2, Sarah Connor Says There Are 214 Bones in a Normal Human Skeleton

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