5 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books That Can Never Be Filmed

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
Chances are, no matter how much work went into it, any film version of Danielewski’s skin-crawling novel would come off as nothing more than a haunted house story, and one with a flimsy hook at that—ooooo, a house that’s somehow just slightly larger on the inside…terrifying! And while the haunted house aspect of Danielewski’s book is pretty scary and well done, it’s really about 10 percent of what he’s doing in this novel. The layered identities and points of view, the shifting timeline, the way the very fabric of reality is bent and stretched—these challenges by themselves make the book nearly impossible to adapt. But half the fun of the novel is the typesetting kung-fu Danielewski employs, with words that shift in color and size and march around the pages, backward and upside-down, an effect that would be totally lost on screen. Come to think, this probably disqualifies any of Danielewski’s books from adaptation.

At the Mountains of Madness, by H.P. Lovecraft
There is a reason Lovecraft continues to be referenced in new works and people keep trying to make his stories into films (Guillermo del Toro recently came really close). It’s because Lovecraft, for all his flaws as a person and a writer, tapped into a primordial terror that lives inside all of us. At first blush, At the Mountains of Madness should be perfectly filmable: a man recounts a disastrous antarctic expedition involving surreal, horrifying creatures, warning others not to follow in his path. The problems are twofold: one, the complexity of Lovecraft’s mythos means it won’t lend itself easily to expository scriptwriting, and two, the ending. Chilling and effective on the page, on screen it would likely come off as anything but an ending, and changing the resolution to something more definitive or satisfying would be sacrilege.

Dhalgren, by Samuel Delany
No one properly understands what may be Delany’s greatest work—and if anyone tells you they do, they are dirty liars. That doesn’t mean there isn’t pleasure in reading this opaque, circular science fiction novel about a dying city in a dying world, but trying to translate the unreliable narration of The Kid to a screen of any size is simply impossible. Could someone have a go and create a psychedelic visual phantasm? Of course—and then someone else could repeat the experiment and come up with an entirely different version. And so on—the point being that Dhalgren is one of those novels that is different for just about everyone, and so there is no way to make a “definitive” adaptation, and no reward for you even if you were able to: any “successful” translation would have to jettison Delany’s philosophical and textual tricks and reduce the story to something banal, and likely deeply uninteresting.

The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
There aren’t enough digital orcs in the universe to tackle the sheer scale of this book. Granted, it’s not so much a traditional novel as background material for Tolkien’s larger universe, but there are plenty of great stories in there. Could you separate out some of them into one-off films? Yes (the entire Lord of the Rings saga amounts to one small part of the epic narrative therein). Can you film the whole thing? No way. It’s not a technological barrier, it’s the fact that any attempt to do justice to these collected works would doubtlessly require several days of viewing time, as the complexity of the myths and their connections to later works would require mountains of exposition just to get across to a casual audience a mere trifle of what’s going on.

The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
While more coherent and recognizable as a narrative than Dhalgren, Wolfe’s classic quartet of novels is so incredibly dense, with a wholly original mythology and intricate history, filming them would probably drive the greatest director to the brink of insanity. The book’s language is gorgeous and lyrical, and giving voice to it would probably make it sound stiff and artificial. The story, while it certainly does make sense, isn’t immediately accessible. In other words, technically there’s nothing stopping some mad genius from tackling this dying earth story with a grim, unhappy torturer as its central character—but the result would almost certainly be a confusing disaster.
What other books don’t have a prayer to be made into films?