The Great Gatsby as a SFF

[JoanDrake]

Has this ever been done to anyone's knowledge? I saw a movie of it on television and was surprised at how much some of it appeared to border on Fantasy

I know that a lot of SFF is derived from the Classics. Bester's "The Stars My Destination" coming pretty closely from "The Count of Monte Cristo" being the first example that comes to mind. Was Gatsby ever done in Space, or Middle Earth etc.?

And does anyone know of any others? Was "Sense and Sensibility" ever, "Meteors and Asteroids"

 

[Ray McCarthy]

On TV / Film
Forbidden Planet = The Tempest
Treasure Planet (French and English dubbed) = Treasure Island

Books
Foundation Trilogy = Gibbon's Roman Empire ( but not really)

All fiction is ultimately a form of Fantasy.

 

[Joseph W.]

Stephen Donaldson's "Gap" series was explicitly and strongly inspired by Wagner's Ring Cycle (which makes it the perfect pun on the term "Space Opera"). However, he didn't retell the same story.

Gatsby as SFF is a very interesting idea and I think the central plot has been done that way. Gatsby lives the ultimate "beta male fantasy"....having lost the girl of his dreams, he manages to acquire massive wealth and influence to attract her attention, and comes back for her, and does attract her again for a while. Only he then learns (and can't bear the fact) that she really has feelings for the self-confident jerk who swept her off her feet in the first place...and ends up ruined.

The idea fits very well into a lot of readers' frustrations and fantasies, and it's not hard to exchange Gatsby's "getting rich quick" for magic or tech power. The closest analogues I know are Stephen King's short story "I Know What You Need" in his anthology Night Shift (magic) and the "Mad Hatter" episode from Batman: The Animated Series (technology). But I would not be surprised to learn it's been done many other times.

 

[Randy M.]

The last episode of last season's Dark Matter (a SyFy network show) adapted Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. It was probably the best episode of the season in spite of having a cliffhanger ending.

Also, Greg Benford's Against Infinity retold William Faulkner's novella, "The Bear" in s.f. terms. Benford did this a few times. I believe one of his short stories (novellas?) was a retelling of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

Randy M.