Some more important info: this movie is based on the AMAZING Vonda N. McIntyre novel The Moon and the Sun, which a) won the Nebula the year it came out (1997), and b) beat George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones for the Nebula.
(Vonda McIntyre named Star Trek’s Hikaru Sulu, and won basically all the awards, and wrote gorgeous feminist and queer & polyamorous science fiction - if you haven’t read Starfarers (and, oh, there’s a story about how/why she wrote that, which is hilarious) - it centers a healthy stable polycule as the main protagonists!)
If you haven’t read The Moon and the Sun, it’s got mermaids, French history, a side plot about the Black slave Odelette/Haleed earning her freedom, historical romance (which, annoyingly, it looks like they’ve changed for the film? Marie-Josephe’s love interest is, in the novel, in Vonda’s own words, “very different from the usual tall and hunky romance hero” (he’s a “dwarf,” to use the text’s historical descriptor of him at Court)…oh, and gay characters exist and are…somewhat sympathetic, if not happy, I’d say…the whole novel is a lush and lavish exploration of desire and humanity and monstrosity and storytelling and loyalty and love, and what you’d do for that love, and who you’d be loyal to, if you had to choose.
I wrote a short paper on the novel in grad school, for a women of science fiction seminar, a few years back, and somehow Vonda heard about that and got in contact and asked if she could read it, and she was wonderfully excited that someone would write a paper on her novel, and also very pessimistic about the film ever coming out (I’d discussed that in a footnote). I have the copy with her comments somewhere - I gave it as a conference paper at a science fiction conference, but it was a little short for an actual article, so I never did anything else with it, but maybe I should dig it out again and see what I can do…
I’m so glad the movie’s finally coming out - I think Vonda would be pleased. I hope it’s beautiful.
(The Starfarers story as I heard it goes like this: Vonda was on a panel with several other authors, at an event; a fellow panelist, a Big Name Author, went on a rant about how there was no good science fiction television and everything was awful and Bad; but Vonda liked a lot of SF television and wrote, for instance, Star Trek tie-in novels! So she interrupted him and said, “oh, but you haven’t seen this one show, Starfarers, it’s great but no one’s seen it, the network keeps messing up the schedule or canceling the air date, but it’s got space explorations and genuinely alien first contact and explorations of gender and sex and…”, on and on, describing this great show - and the show did not exist, because she’d made it up.
But then she really wanted to tell the story she’d made up, and she had all the characters, the ideas, everything she’d been spinning on the spot. So she wrote it as a novel. And then she wrote three sequels. And always called it her “best sci-fi TV series.”)
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