Exploratory Adaptation: The challenge of adapting fiction to screen in the age of multiplatform, transmedia and mobile media

This chapter examines an ongoing project in adaptation, based around the 1979 Welsh science fiction novella Cafflogion (Jones, 1979). It affirms the virtues of a long-term project-based approach to literary-to-media adaptation, and considers how the logic of adaptation might apply both to the task of creating different kinds of fiction and to the conditions under which those tasks are carried out. In doing so, it locates the authorship of the adapted work(s) as distributed across a transmedial taskscape, and explores how adaptation might be used to realize one’s connection with fictional adaptation as a complex entanglement rather than merely as a singular quasi-authorial task.