Adapting Prophecy: The Impossible Task of Honouring the Past While Writing the Future
- Rogues & Scoundrels
- Mar 8
- 2 min read
By Rogues and Scoundrels
There is a particular kind of madness in adaptation.
To translate a story across time—to pull its essence intact from one era into another without tearing it at the seams—is an almost impossible task. And yet, here we are. Staring at the page. Trying to honour the original while whispering new images into its margins.
Lee Harding’s Displaced Person (1979) is not just a novel. It is a prophecy wrapped in fiction, one that saw a world we weren’t ready for. Before we logged in. Before we disappeared into screens and called it connection. Harding gave us a realm—a grey world where people slipped away, vanishing from their own lives. It was unnervingly prescient, coining “the interface” before the world had even begun to conceive of cyberspace. Before the shadows of Dark City, before jacking into The Matrix, before the loneliness of Moon, before we learned that isolation could be measured in blue-light hours and ghosted messages.
And now? Now, we live there.
A Grey World That Became Our Own
Harding’s novel wasn’t just science fiction—it was an echo from a future yet to unfold. A warning, buried beneath the melancholy of its protagonist’s displacement.
Back in 1979, it read like a haunting allegory. Now? It’s a mirror we don’t want to look into.
We have seen this world.
In the silent drift of scrolling through endless feeds at 2 AM.
In the way voices dissolve into static on video calls, present but untouchable.
In the millions lost to the isolated void of the COVID-19 pandemic, where human presence was reduced to pixels and data packets.
It is the loneliness of connection, the paradox of a networked world that only deepens the spaces between us.
How do we adapt that? How do we take something so perfectly eerie in its time and make it resonate with a generation that is already drowning in its vision?
Nostalgia & The Future: A Balancing Act
The adaptation in development, is not a reinvention. It is a reverence—a careful, deliberate attempt to keep the late ’70s nostalgia intact while addressing the nuances of a world that has finally caught up.
We are not rewriting Displaced Person. We are excavating it.
Brushing off the dust.
Holding it up to the flickering neon of the present and asking—
What do we see now that Harding already knew?
Because this is not just a story of a boy slipping between worlds.
It is the story of all of us, watching ourselves dissolve into the grey.
And we want to hear from you.
If you remember reading Displaced Person—if it stayed with you, if it haunted you, if its images still lurk in the recesses of your mind—reach out. Tell us what lingers.
And if you have just encountered the grey world for the first time?
Welcome. You’ve been here longer than you think.
Follow Rogues and Scoundrels for more updates on the adaptation and the art of translating past visions into tomorrow’s stories.
Comments