Christopher Ruocchio's "Howling Dark"

Christopher Ruocchio is a graduate of North Carolina State University, where a penchant for self-destructive decision-making caused him to pursue a bachelor’s in English Rhetoric with a minor in Classics. An avid student of history, philosophy, and religion, Ruocchio has been writing since he was eight years old and sold his first book —Empire of Silence— at twenty-two.

Here the author dreamcasts an adaptation of Howling Dark, the second novel of his galaxy-spanning Sun Eater series:

I’ve not wavered in my determination that Harry Lloyd (Viserys Targaryen from Game of Thrones) is still the perfect actor for Hadrian. Not only does he have the look, but I’m consistently impressed with his depth and range in each role I see him in, and have no trouble seeing him as both the romantic, Byronic figure that Hadrian is and the Bonaparte/Darth Vader-esque terror he must become. I have reconsidered Valka. I rewatched Skyfall recently and very much enjoyed Berenice Marlohe’s too-brief turn as Severine. She was pure class with a sharp-edged cruelty in her mannerisms that were pure Valka to me.

I’ll do a couple new ones. The Undying, the Lord of Vorgossos, is in my mind played by the great Ken Watanabe. The Undying is simultaneously a very old man kept alive by machines that feed his mostly replaced-by-machines body and an almost god-like half-machine entity that rules over and controls the resources of an entire planet, and Watanabe could capture both facets I think very well, with that dark timbre, one can easily imagine his voice booming from speakers the size of houses.

It’s no secret that Hadrian is hunting the alien Cielcin, and no spoiler really to say he finds them in the end. The chieftain he meets, Prince Aranata Otiolo, would be played excellently by someone like Zachary Quinto. I’ve been a Quinto fan since his villainous turn on Heroes back in the day, and I hear he’s great in NOS4A2. But putting him in prosthetics and letting him loose to chew scenery with the best of them would be bloody marvelous.

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My Book, The Movie: Empire of Silence.

--Marshal Zeringue