Independent Science Fiction and Speculative Culture Newspaper
Alienaward PressBuenos Aires · Independently edited · Weekly columns and dispatches
Adaptation arguments are usually better in writing than in a comment thread, and we read every correction that comes in. If a translation note missed a shift in meaning, or a piece on a short story turned into a film skipped a decision you know something about, tell the editor directly. The contact page holds the only form on the site, and it goes straight to the desk.
Not ready to write? See what the newsroom covers, or go back to the current issue.
Three working examples from the newsroom's adaptation coverage, where a speculative work changes shape as it crosses into another medium.
When a short story becomes a feature, pacing gets rewritten first. What reads as a slow reveal on the page often needs a scene, a face, and a room before the second act. The reporting follows directors and writers through those early cuts.
Game designers borrow a world's pressures, not its plot. A novel's factions, scarcities, and unspoken rules can become a rulebook that leaves the map deliberately unfinished, and the players fill in the rest at the table.
Translation is its own adaptation. Rhythm, idiom, and the amount of context a sentence carries all shift between languages, and the notes that accompany a translated edition often say more about the original than the translation itself.
Adaptation is rarely a clean transfer. A short story becomes a film treatment, a novel becomes a tabletop setting, a Spanish paragraph becomes an English one. On this page we collect the practical outcomes that come from following those moves closely, rather than treating them as trivia.
We trace pacing cuts, structural rearrangements, and image choices back to the moment an editor or director made them. You read the reasoning, not only the finished version.
When a work crosses from Spanish into English, some texture stays and some does not. Our notes name the specific losses and gains instead of pretending the move is neutral.
Cover art often gets redrawn for a new edition. We follow the print runs, zine fair panels, and art direction conversations where those second versions are argued over.
Game books regularly lift structure from novels and short stories. We look at what designers keep, what they discard, and how that changes what a table can actually do.
Interviews pair the person who wrote the original with the person who reworked it, so the disagreements between them stay visible rather than getting smoothed over.
If you want the mechanics behind a single adaptation rather than the pattern across many, the process notes walk through one case from first draft to final print. The full service list shows how adaptation coverage sits alongside criticism, translation notes, and dispatch reporting.
Most writing about adaptation stops at the verdict: better than the book, worse than the film, faithful or not. We are more interested in the decisions underneath. When a short story becomes a small-scale genre film in Buenos Aires, or a novel's geography turns into a tabletop setting, someone had to choose what to keep, what to cut, and what to invent because the new form demanded it. That is the part worth reporting.
Our reporters sit in on zine fair panels where adapted cover art gets argued over, and they talk to the translators who decide how much of the original's texture survives a move into English. The result is reporting that shows the work: pacing choices, structural cuts, the moment a screenwriter realizes a first-person narrator has to become someone the camera can actually watch.
Adaptation talk often defaults to whatever an international platform has just released. We keep the focus on Argentine and Latin American work, including small-press editions and regional filmmakers whose versions rarely get a wide release. That means covering projects before they are famous, and staying with them after the festival run ends.
A long-form essay on how a tabletop rulebook implies a world without describing it sits next to a dispatch from a print run where a cover was redesigned twice. Neither replaces the other. The criticism gives you the argument; the reporting gives you the room where the argument happened.
If you want to see how a piece moves from pitch to publication, the editorial process lays it out step by step, and the coverage list shows which formats we publish each week.