Would it be possible to make a (good, true-to-the-book) movie based on S.M. Stirling’s “Domination of the Draka” alternate-history series? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draka)
Would the story of a white elite ruling a mostly nonwhite population of slaves be acceptable Hollywood fare (outside the context of an actual historical setting)?
Would the spectacle of rebels being impaled on-screen be too much, even for an industry that regularly shows us cartoonishly gruesome violence in slasher movies?
Who would you cast to play the main characters?
How would they handle the problem of Draka English (described in Drakon as “a German trying to talk like Scarlett O’Hara”)? Actors generally are good at putting on stage dialects not their own, but, AFAIK, Hollywood has never, ever tried to create a nonexistent dialect out of whole cloth. (Unless you count the patois spoken by Jar-Jar Binks. :rolleyes: )
I couldn’t see them doing it. If it was anywhere near true to the books, the amount of violence, and especially sexual violence would guarantee it an NC-17 rating
I wouldn’t mind seeing it done, if it could be done well. I don’t know if Steve Stirling would sign over creative control to a Hollywierd “movie committee” after Starship Troopers.
As far as who could act in it, I’m not sure. I always kind of pictured Donald Sutherland as Karl von Shrakenberg, but I don’t know who could really pull off the rest.
The big question though, would be this: how would you sell it? First, to a studio, then second, to an audience? A fictional, “might-have-been” world?
There’s a lot of great sci-fi/alternate history fiction floating around right now that’d be great for a movie. Turtledove’s Guns of the South, Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time series, or his books Conquistador or The Peshawar Lancers, Weber’s Honor Harrington series (IMO, it’d blow B5, Star Drek, and Star Wars away if done right); Flint’s 1632 series, Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars series, Stirling’s & Drake’s The General series, Weber’s & Ringo’s March Upcountry series, Flint’s & Drake’s Belisarius series, Ringo’s Legacy of the Aldenata series…do you get the impression I buy a bit from Baen?
I don’t know anything about the series except what I read in the link provided in the OP. But it would appear that the last book would be doable, with the information about the previous books compressed into a Star Wars-style crawl and/or some flashbacks. People can handle brutal slavery and oppression if it’s mostly off-screen and in the past.
Or maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. I can handle that. After all, I didn’t actually read the books.
Absolutely not! Think [url=http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0079273/]Paul Bettany
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. Richard Dean Anderson, Joe Flanigan, Ben Browder, Tori Higginson, and Claudia Black might make good Domination-types; they’re tall-ish and on the muscular/lean side. Dina Meyer (and that brings Casper van Dien and Niel Patrick Harris to mind, as well) looks okay for the part.
I think you’ve got a point. The thing about the Draka was, they were so fucking evil that they were on par with the Nazis, if not worse. Stirling made the nastiness of the Draka very, very clear, and the nastiness of slavery very clear as well. Any movie that is going to accurately reflect the books is gonna have to do that, and it’s going to be a downer, big time. Also, not exactly a happy ending for the human race … Hollywood’ll want to change that, big time.
Now a movie based on Drakon, where a single Draka breaks out of the Draka universe and into ours, threatening to lead the whole nasty cabal here with their super-weapons … that’d make a pretty good movie. You could ratchet up the horror and suspense by gradually letting the audience discover just how nasty the Draka are and what they did to Europe and the US in their world, so that by the end, you know just what we’re in for if those Hond weapons platforms makes it through to our universe.
People would see it as a Terminator ripoff, of course, and how wrong they’d be.
As a side issue to the movie question, the synopsis in Wikipedia made me rather doubtful of the whole premise. Take representatives of every repressive society since the eighteenth century, throw them together in their own country, and have them somehow become a scientifically advanced society of uber-warrors? Methinks Stirling simply wanted ultra-bad guys without thinking very hard about just how backward and reactionary they would really be. But to be fair I haven’t read the series so I am only going by what I’ve heard.
Actually, Stirling pretty carefully builds the history of the Draka up in the series. Hey, the Nazis would sound pretty farfetched to someone from a world that never experienced them. Being from a world that had Nazis, I find the Draka kinda … believable.
For movies and T.V. shows to get anywhere, the audience has to either:
A) Identify with one of the major characters;
B) Hate a character or side so much as to root for their downfall; or
C) Laugh too much at a character or situation to care whether they’re likeable or not.
Admittedly, I haven’t read the series at all. All I have is the Wikipedia article. But it seems to me like you’ve got absolutely none of that. You’ve got a horrible, horrible society which does horrible, horrible things, and they go on to sort-of win every major conflict over the next 100 years and spread their tyranny in all directions.
The only way I can see it having any appeal is if the story was completely re-written to focus on the successful efforts of an OSS leader or slave rebellion to bring down the Drakas. And even then, why would Hollywood give a crap about a semi-Nazi alternative history that would need to be explained (and therefore put the audience to sleep), when it can just send the protaganist to deal with Nazis, or villains based on myth and real history that can be fleshed out in a minute rather than fifteen?
Same here. When you read through all of the background stuff Stirling worked up in the appendices, the Domination becomes a lot more believeable. I think a lot of people’s skepticism is rooted in the fact that that kind of society didn’t flourish here, in our timeline, so it couldn’t have been possible for it to have flourished anywhere, under any conditions.
We assume that we, as we are, are the inevitable and only outcome of history, and dismiss any alternatives, especially unpleasant ones.
Stirling actually pulled that off pretty well, by making enough of his characters Draka, and making them really brave and heroic and (in some few cases – e.g., Eric von Shrakenberg) truly noble and compassionate. But he was writing a book, where the reader has to get inside a character’s head whenever the author provides a window. It’s harder to pull off in a movie. I’ve often noticed that screen adaptations of novels (e.g., the recent Vanity Fair, or the Stanley Kubrick version of Barry Lyndon) often make the protagonist a lot more sympathetic than he/she was in the book.
That was the real creative challenge Stirling took on. We always assume slavery is a characteristic of backward, technophobic cultures, and is so economically inefficient that industrialization always drives it out of existence. Stirling tried to answer the question: What would a hi-tech slave society be like? In circumstances where the institution was so deeply rooted in the culture (and in the geopolitical situation) that abolition would be unthinkable?* And he made it pretty believable.
*In the Domination, there is no province, county, city, town or country estate where serfs do not outnumber free citizens by at least 9 to 1. The constant fear of all Draka is that if they ease up on their serfs even a little bit, the serfs will rise up and kill them all. Their entire culture and social-political system are designed to prevent that.
Question: How is “Draka” pronounced? I know from the link that the society’s name comes from Sir Francis Drake, but I still want to say “Draka” to rhyme with “shocker.”
I haven’t read the books, but the scenario seems pretty implausible to me, fo a number of reasons. The Draka society seems economically unsound. What was their economy based on? Slavery, especially on that Sparta like scale, seems unworkable in the modern world.
This site, linked from the wiki article, points out the unrealistic nature of the whole scenario in great detail.
One of the main characters, the “liberal” (by Draka standards, which means he’s not automatically committed to the conquest and enslavement of all humanity but he’s willing to do it anyway if that’s what it takes to keep the Draka Race and State alive) Eric von Shrakenberg, is painfully aware of the problems – at one point he comments that an “outdated anachronism of a social system” like the Domination’s “has to fight against the entropy gradient just as much as genuine democracy.” But Stirling makes it seem plausible. Slavery is “workable” because there is a vast structure of political and cultural mechanisms devoted to keeping the serfs in line, and making sure they work even when no free overseer is watching them. Many slaves, you see, can be induced to cooperate with their masters by being offered privileges that set them above an ordinary serf; and others cooperate because they perceive rebellion would mean death, for them and everybody they know. (Draka believe in collective punishments, “to give everyone a motive for restraining the wilder spirits”; if one serf injures a Citizen, that serf and several others selected at random are likely to be put to death by impalement. The Romans had a similar law – if a slave killed his master, every slave in the household must be crucified.) There is a Janissary Corp of serf-soldiers (which is never allowed to be more than twice the numbers of the Citizen Force), and a vast network of Security Directorate (Draka KGB) informers within the general serf population. And modern electronic surveillance technology helps immensely. IOW, the knowledge and resources of the modern world are employed to maintain the slavery system. The Draka are hesitant to educate their serfs, but eventually decide they have to (within limits, and avoiding study of political topics) if that’s the only way to get administrative help. There is a system of “classed literate” serfs. Eventually this is expanded to train serfs to be computer programmers, etc. The system has obvious inefficiencies but generally works as intended.
The Domination’s economy has one major asset: Labor, even highly skilled labor, is very cheap, to the Citizen caste that is using it. That means they don’t produce things like modest consumer durables – e.g., dishwashers (a Draka dishwasher would be a serf). But they can devote as much of their resources as they want into whatever the Directorates and Combines decide they really need, including scientific and technical R&D – and they do a lot of that, especially for military purposes. Draka agriculture is primitive, using hand tools instead of powered equipment – but they have the manpower to make that work, and at least it is environmentally sustainable. The whole Domination takes that very seriously, and has a Conservancy Directorate to minimize civilization’s burden on nature. The Citizens live lavish, high-consumption lifestyles, but there are relatively so few of them that they put little strain on the ecosystem. It’s not like the modern industrialized world, where everybody has and needs a car.
Thanks, Brain Glutton. Again, I haven’t read the books–they sound incredibly depressing and bleak–so I can’t really comment on them. Obviously I can’t say that such a society is impossible, just that it’s very implausible. I don’t think slave societies would be good at innovation and research, and modern warfare is one by the side with the best tech, not the fiercest soldiers. Ancient Sparta was concerned with nothing but it’s own perpetuation. It was Athens that gave us the philosophy, literature, mathematics, and political thought that we associate with Ancient Greece. This didn’t make much difference militarily back in the day, when wars weren’t decided by scientific/technological progress. It would be damning now. The American south had better soldiers than the north, but the north had the industry.
Again, I haven’t read the books. Now, I’m curious. Maybe I’ll give them a shot.
As far as the OP, I think the problem with filming an alternate history is that it would require too much exposition, especially when the key pivots occur so long before the action of the film.
My main problem with the Draka novels in terms of plausibility isn’t with the Draka’s ability to maintain a slave system in the modern world (a big shout-out to all my cow-orkers!) but I just don’t buy the notion that Draka slave tech and productivity could match an alarmed and free world. I think the Draka would have had their asses handed to them by the West in the Stone Dogs, and in no uncertain manner. I think the Western tech would have been an order of magnitude ahead of the Draka’s, and their factories the same.
There’s a reason America became an industrial giant, and it wasn’t that we had so much cheap manual labor. Stirling kinda misses that point, but I figure it’s the bit of fudging needed to keep the rest of the story going.
And you’re right, the story is grim and depressing, but the Draka are FASCINATING bad guys, they make the Nazis look tame by comparison. I read them mostly in hopes that at some point Stirling would put the Draka through the wringer and it would be really fun to read about that, but I guess it’s already been revealed in this thread that that never happens. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have bothered to read the Draka novels.