Tim Minear

Minear’s Moon Still Rises

Tim Minear, who is adapting Robert A. Heinlein’s classic SF novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for the screen, told SCI FI Wire that he just completed the latest draft of the screenplay. "I just actually turned in my next pass at it this morning [Jan. 17] to [producers] David Heyman and Mike Medavoy," Minear said in an interview whilre promoting his new Fox series The Inside. "The next step is they read it and maybe give me more notes or take it to a director or whatever."

It’s been a pet project for Minear to adapt Heinlein’s difficult Hugo-Award-winning 1966 book, about the rebellion of a former lunar penal colony against the Lunar Authority that controls it from Earth. "[It’s] very difficult to adapt," Minear said. "It’s interesting. I kept a lot more from the book than people may have expected. The light marriages are still there. The free trade with Earth is still there. The catapult is still there. And, you know, it’s not a silly arm on a fulcrum or something. The idea is this sort of ferris wheel thing that takes it up over the gravity well and drops to Earth. The thing that I changed from the book is that Mike, the computer, manifests himself visually, so he’s not just a voice. But what I’ve done is I’ve given the citizens of Luna ocular ’ident stamps,’ which are the equivalent of prisoner tattoos, and Mike finds a way into the personalized signature of people, so he can show himself to you, but no one else can see him. So that’s maybe the thing I added."

Though The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was revelatory at the time of its publication, the years have rushed by enough that it’s a challenge to make it fresh, added Minear, who is best known for writing for the TV series The X-Files, Angel and Firefly. "It’s interesting," he said. "That book is very old. And it feels like it’s been cannibalized by so many other films and books and comics or whatever. So it’s interesting. It is an original piece, but some of those things in the story feel derivative. But they’re really derivative of itself. So, yeah, it was a bit of a challenge to make sure they still seem fresh and not like you were ripping off Hal from 2001 or something."