Experience has taught me that I shouldn’t expect a whole lot from adaptations across media. In fact, I’ve managed to reach a sort of Zen acceptance of adaptations. I have delved the secret which makes the good cross-genre adaptations a pleasure and the bad ones irrelevant.

Also, let’s not forget that I came of age at the dawn of the cross-platformization of brands. Mine was the mid-1960s generation at the peak of Saturday morning animated spokesbeings, when Bugs Bunny not only starred in his own animated series but was also used to pitch the cereal sponsoring the show and was featured on the cereal packaging as well. My awareness of science fiction comes from old TV shows, most notably The Adventures of Superman, to which I was introduced first through the syndication of the 1940s Fleischer Studios cartoons and the comic book, and The Outer Limits and Twilight Zone. So early on I was more or less aware that a character could exist simultaneously in a variety of iterations. My immersion into comic books solidified that awareness as I saw that not only didn’t every writer treat characters consistently from one title to another, but once they got into the hands of people outside the comic industry, all bets were off. Any resemblance to the character as portrayed in the comic book source material is purely coincidental! The 1960s Batman, for example.

That being said, and with the recognition that it’s necessary to make changes to a property or story for the transition from prose to moving pictures, there have been a few successful attempts. A favorite book that became a favorite movie is Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five, filmed by George Roy Hill in 1972. Vonnegut’s story of a man unstuck in time was adopted by the anti-war movement as an absurdist analogy to the growing resistance by Americans to the war in Viet Nam, and Hill’s deliberately paced adaptation captures the peace of Billy Pilgrim’s befuddled acceptance of his existence. Its success comes not so much from how closely it adheres to the book–I don’t watch a film with a checklist to gauge its fidelity–but how close it adheres to the intent of the book. I mean, no filmmaker could possibly film every page of Moby Dick, but director John Huston and screenwriter Ray Bradbury sure did find a way to boil the essence of Melville’s 600+ page novel down into a faithful two-hour thriller.

A more recent example of a film faithfully capturing the intent of its source novel is John Carter. Yes. John Carter. The 21^st century successor to Heaven’s Gate as biggest Hollywood mega-budget bust. I haven’t read A Princess of Mars in forty years so I’m sure some purist can tell me why I’m wrong, but Andrew Stanton’s 2012 John Carter seemed to strike all the proper chords I remembered from the books (don’t asked me why this great film tanked; I can only blame it on marketing). A lot of the current movies based on Marvel Comics properties have also found the right chord, tapping into the sense of wonder and epic excitement that made the comic books themselves work.

My two favorite science fiction novels, Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clark and The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, have never made it to the big screen. Maybe if someone did attempt to do it, I would be as unforgiving as the old, original Star Trek fan is to the J.J. Abrams remakes, but I hope I fall back on the secret that allows me to shrug off objectionable adaptations

No matter how good, no matter how bad, the original source novel or TV show or movie is still right there, on your self, waiting to be read or watched again.

When I was six years old I met my first alien. He hailed from a planet called Krypton but looked like you and me. Growing up, every fall meant I would come down with bronchitis and wind up in bed for a while. That pivotal year, I was given an issue of Superman and was hooked. A few years later, my fascination with the four-color hero expanded to all manner of super-heroes which was a short leap to television, movies, and finally, prose.

I still recall being at Mid-Island Plaza with my dad, going into the Cherry Hill Bookstore and have him take me to the science fiction section. He scanned the shelves and plucked a copy of Asimov’s Mysteries for reasons lost to time. It was my first adult science fiction book – and I still have it.

So, for the last 50 years or so, I’ve been engrossed with all manner of science fiction. That means I’ve consumed a tremendous amount of fare. Truth be told, nowhere near enough of the classic or modern day prose, but I remain a fan. It also means it takes a lot to enthrall me and a lot less to annoy me.

There were moments of sheet bliss such as the first time I watched Star Wars in a theater, feeling like a kid once more. George Lucas successfully nailed the gosh wow feel of the old movie serials I grew up watching in reruns on weekend television.

I still recall the excitement my college friends and I felt when Battlestar Galactica was going to debut on a Sunday evening. We all gathered at Ricky’s off-campus house and had dinner, settling onto the couch to watch. We were uniformly appalled at how shoddy it felt with a tired script and weak actor (Lorne Greene notwithstanding). Thankfully the suck was interrupted by the news that Carter brokered a deal with Israel and Egypt. A short while later, I was even angrier at the travesty that was NBC’s updating of Buck Rogers, ignoring the source material.

Successful science fiction in the comics was easily done as witnessed by EC’s wonderful works, which I discovered in paperback form in the 1970s. Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach also showed how it was done during that same decade so I kept wondering why television kept getting it wrong (a decade later they began figuring it out).

I have a stack of science fiction books on my TBR shelf, some dating back a decade or more, some from last year. Ask me the last great one I read, the title that immediately pops up is Connie Willis’ The Domesday Book, which I read only a year or two back. There’s still a sense of wonder in a tale well told. Being invited into someone else’s imagination is a nice vacation from my reality and I marvel at where their ideas come from.

May I never lose that interest in what comes next.

After four days, Michael Jan Friedman’s Kickstarter campaign for his new novel, I Am The Salamander, is right on pace to meet its goal of $5,000 by November 16th–and he’s got a team of 27 backers to thank.

“I can’t tell you grateful I am to these wonderful people for meeting the challenge I laid out for them,” Mike said, “and there are many more who have helped to spread the word, for which I’m grateful as well.”

I Am The Salamander is the story of a teen-aged superhero. But it’s not just his strange powers that set him apart from the crowd. It’s the fact that he’s a cancer survivor–a creative risk that Mike has decided to undertake.

“People don’t like to talk about cancer,” he said. “They don’t like it in their fantasy books. It’s too real. But it’s among us. And hope is such a big part of the formula for surviving cancer. If I Am The Salamander can offer even one young person the strength to plug on against the odds…that’s a goal worth the risk, isn’t it?

“One of my backers has a child who survived cancer. That’s about the most beautiful thing I can think of. It inspires me to make I Am The Salamander the best book it’s in my power to write.”

I’ll just come right out and say it.

I rarely read Stephen King. Not because he isn’t good. It’s that I don’t like horror.  So me and his stories … not so much. And therein lays the irony. Here’s why:

As part of our Crazy 8 Press theme this month, we challenged one another to blog about a piece of writing that inspires us as authors ourselves.

In my previous life I received a degree in Secondary English Education from Buffalo State College. My plan — as man much younger than I am today — was to become a full-time high school English teacher. But after graduation I switched gears and went into journalism instead, and now I write novels.

Anyhoo, as part of my teacher’s course load at the time I was required to take a class in teaching writing. Enter said mad author scientist Stephen King. For my final paper — which counted for half of my semester’s grade — I wrote about (and gave a presentation on) the inherent value in teaching The Stand.

In particular I noted the epic novel’s modeling of dialogue, setting, tension, and character development. Granted, I found the book’s ending a bit weak, but the first 850 pages — eight hundred and fifty! — are absolutely mesmerizing. Trashcan Man. Fran. The Walking Dude, a.k.a. Randall Flagg. Whoa. I’ll never forget them.

The opening scene at the military site. The cough in the movie theater. And that heart-thumping trek through the Midtown Tunnel? Yikes. Talk about feeling like you’re in a moment — a moment so vivid and intense I could barely breathe — or wait to see what happened next.

But let’s return to Buffalo State College. I remember the scene vividly. It was the fall of 1993, in the English Department. The corner classroom was large, so there were many windows, and though the day was overcast, a beam of light shone on the floor, at my feet. I took it as a sign.

Because back then, the ‘Stephen King is a literary doofus horror hack loser disgrace to all writers and writing’ campaign among the literati was in full effect, and as an emerging English teacher, not overtly championing classic ‘literature’ was equally popular.

So … yeah… I had a little edge to me that day.

But if you’re going to stand up among your peers and profess the writing of Stephen King as a viable English teaching tool … you gotta just go for it. Can’t hold back.

So as I stood before my classmates, and announced my topic, I endured the expected gaggle of snickers, eye rolls, and thought balloons casting all sorts of clever insults my way: Stephen King? I think Colchamrio will be pumping gas before teaching class! Ha!

But you know what? I didn’t care.

To this day, any time I get hit with writer’s block, I stop what I’m doing, reach up to my bookshelf, open to any random page from my hardbound copy of The Stand, and within moments I’m inspired. I must have done this a dozen times as I wrote Finders Keepers, and another handful as I wrote Crossline.

If I have an author’s inspiration bible … The Stand is it. It has served me well, and continues to do so.

As for my Stephen King presentation? I endured.

And I got an A.

LONG ISLAND, NY (October 17, 2013) — The hero of veteran science fiction writer Michael Jan Friedman’s new young-adult superhero novel, I Am The Salamander,  is a cancer survivor.

“I didn’t set out to make Tim Cruz a kid who had cancer,” Friedman said. “But when you read I Am The Salamander, you’ll see why it makes perfect sense for Tim to have beaten that disease, and why he’s in a position to offer hope to real teens trying to beat cancer themselves. And let’s face it, hope is what superheroes do best.”

I Am The Salamander is being funded by a Kickstarter campaign. ““The publishing landscape has changed,” said Friedman, who has written 70 novels for major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, and Random House. “It’s harder than ever to get publishers to take a chance on a story, especially a quirky one like I Am The Salamander. And when they do, the book’s shelf life is shorter than that of a jar of half-sour pickles.

“I want I Am The Salamander to be around for a good long time,” he said. “That means I have to get it in the hands of readers on my own, and I have to keep it available to them.”

However, Friedman said, he wouldn’t ask anyone to donate to the I Am The Salamander campaign “just because it’s a worthwhile thing to do. I’m asking because it’s also the best thing I’ve ever written, and because I want to get it out to readers the most direct way possible.”

Friedman is asking his readers for $5,000. to cover the cost of book design and printing. The book’s cover was rendered by up-and-coming Brazilian talent Caio Cacau, who previously illustrated the cover to Friedman’s recently rereleased first novel, The Hammer and the Horn.

Those who wish to make donations to the I Am The Salamander campaign can do so at Kickstarter.com.

So the question of the day, “Hey, Glenn, who inspires your writing?”

First off, I’m lucky to say that I’ve never been inspired by the writer of “Pay To The Order Of…”  I’ve never written for need of money, though I’ve certainly written for want of it. I’ve always found myself unable to write anything with any poetry in the words if I need funds, it saps a certain spark out of the language. Oh sure, I can craft words and make serviceable prose, but the magic isn’t there.

That said, who inspires me? Let me tell you a story…

I grew up, as so many of my contemporaries did, in a sort of Golden Age of science fiction– Star Trek was in reruns on channel 11, Star Wars was in the movie theaters, and new sf and near-sf shows were coming up all over the place like Space:1999 and Ark II and Star Blazers, and I could read the Legion of Super Heroes and Green Lantern and Guardians Of The Galaxy. And my father got me reading books early, reading the Foundation Trilogy when I was seven and back when it was still a trilogy.

But I was growing up in 70s suburbia. I couldn’t figure out how I could get from a Long Island bedroom into outer space, how to insert myself in all of these strange and wonderful worlds. Even New York City was a long way away for a kid, and it was a scary place then, filled with all the dangers the newspapers could tell us about. I felt like Luke on Tatooine, as far away from the action as possible.

Then I was introduced to Spider Robinson, and the most famous of his works, the stories centered around Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon– where all those strange and wonderful things were happening in a bar on Route 25A in Suffolk County.

Well, heck– I lived in Suffolk County, I lived on 25A! That place must have been just down the road from me! The advice given to writers is “write what you know”, Spider was writing what I knew.

And so I read the stories about the talking dogs and time travelers, and the aliens and the absurd puns, and the people and the community they built, all the while looking for clues as to where exactly the place was. Because that was accessible. I could make the leap from where I was to the fantastic, to the future. It was, quite literally, the gateway.

Through Spider I was introduced to Robert Heinlein’s works among many others, and through his own writings I was introduced to characters who I might have easily passed in the supermarket and just hadn’t been introduced to yet, real people with flaws and quirks and horrible cases of paronomasia. And many years later, I got to meet Spider and his lovely wife Jeanne, and we told each other stories and sang songs, and he was just about exactly like his writing had shown himself to be. His authorial voice was true to himself, and I was proud to publish an electronic version of Night Of Power back in the 90s.

Spider’s had a bit of a rough patch of late, including a heart attack about six weeks ago. So I’m glad to have a chance to put down in writing what I’ve mentioned to him before, to thank him for showing how to get from Kansas to Oz.

If you’ve never done so, go read some books from Spider Robinson right now.