![]() ![]() In this way, The Magicians universe can subsume other universes.Quentin Coldwater has lost everything. In the reality of The Magicians, there are ways to move between worlds and into other dimensions. TV as a medium is by its nature so much more information-rich than books, that it makes sense that you’d add plot and detail to fill out all that extra bandwidth.”įor Lev Grossman, the story of Quentin Coldwater and his adventures in Fillory and further are over, and yet those stories are brand new at the same time. ![]() There’s only so much you can say, only what you can squish into words. “Reading and watching are such totally different activities,” he said, “because they operate through the narrow channel of text, books have to stay very lean. There is an overlap of course there are places where a reader of the books could be “compensated for the spoiled-ness with a certain amount of smugness for having read the book.” But the author knows there is an inherent, basic core difference between the two. Grossman knows that fans of the show might not be the same as fans of the books. Why not? The reasons are hinted at in the books, but in the TV show they dig into that and get explicit about it.” Just to give one example: Julia doesn’t get into Brakebills. I wanted to see them expanded into dozens of hours. “When I sent them off to Hollywood, I didn’t want to see the books smooshed into two hours. “I wanted to see The Magicians as a TV show rather than a movie because there were so many things I wanted to get to in the books but couldn’t,” Grossman said. The true opportunity for these fantasy novels wasn’t in what they would lose in an adaptation, but instead, a thirst for what the stories could gain. It makes her more of a chaos agent.”ĭespite the many changes to canon, Lev Grossman feels that television has been the ideal format for The Magicians, and he’s happy to let others expand his world. She operates without the kind of institutional constraints that the others do - no Brakebills, no Fillorian monarchy. “I think Julia still surprises John and Sera ,” Grossman said. And now, five years later, Julia is still so fascinating that she’s being fleshed out in all sorts of new and unexpected ways. Back when The Magician King was released in paperback in 2012, Grossman said that the “Julia’s story took me by surprise a little bit.” Meaning, he wasn’t aware the character would play such a large role until he found himself basing a good deal of her backstory on his own experiences. “They throw everything into email and run it past me for feedback.”īut certain plot elements and characters are easier to control than others. “As John and Sera and the writers hash out the stories, they generate a lot of documents - season outlines, episode treatments, script drafts, and so on,” he said. He described the changes made from his trilogy of three books to be a “pretty transparent,” process between himself and the Syfy Channel. Seemingly, the author is totally cool with ceding a huge amount of creative control to the team at Syfy. Ostensibly, Executive Producers John McNamara and Sera Gamble have creative control over the show, but Grossman revealed that the powers-that-be of the show consult him “more than you’d probably think.” And though the thematic stakes are loosely the same as the Grossman novels, the plots have unfolded differently. In the books, Julia’s journey was told (via several chapters of flashback) in the second book, The Magician King, while the Syfy series had her machinations run concurrently with the other characters. While the show’s plot has diverged from the books, certain elements have also been grafted on top of one another. In the show, Quentin is joined in his adventures and misadventures by fellow students Alice, Penny, Eliot, and Margo, but also his childhood friend Julia, a magically inclined woman who did not get admitted into Brakebills. That’s the case until it turns out that Fillory is real too. ![]() When he grows up, he discovers an elite secret magical school called Brakebills where real magicians think fantasy crap like the Fillory books is a joke. ![]() “Even I get shocked by what happens,” he told Inverse, “and I wrote the damn books.”īoth the show and the books focus on Quentin Coldwater, a young man obsessed with a series of fantasy books collectively called Fillory and Further. But thanks to magic and a shifting medium, that’s not always the case. The characters he originally dreamed up in his Magicians books are about to embark on their second television season, meaning Grossman theoretically has all the answers as to what lies ahead. When author Lev Grossman watches Syfy’s The Magicians, he’s sometimes surprised by what he sees. ![]()
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