This sounds like a bit of a hyper-specific question, but it's happened twice this year.

The first one is kinda easily explained. The FX adaptation of Say Nothing was great. One of the things that really stood out to me and some friends was the sense of 'having been here before' - especially some of the specific locations like Divis Flats that reappear. I suppose that's just a question of good production design, but it felt like someone did a brain scan and projected exactly what I was imagining. Which also just means Patrick Radden Keefe is a very, very good author.

The second one is a bit stranger. When I went and saw Alien: Romulus, it was (and I am not kidding) exactly as I had imagined the Corporation Rim from The Murderbot Diaries. And I suppose corporation indentured servitude isn't a scarce topic in science fiction, but again, it was like the production designer did an fMRI of my brain while reading those books. It was eerily similar, to the point where I half-jokingly kept expecting a Murderbot monologue to overlay the stupid humans ignoring good security practice.

It was so jarring that I was going to ping a bunch of Tilders I know have read the series and say 'Did this happen to you too?!'

This doesn't always happen, which is why these two made me go 'oh shit'. As a counterpoint, netiher the 1980 or 2024 adaptation of Shogun were anything like what I was imagining in my head. The earlier one looked very cheap, this year's one was beautiful but... just not what goes through my head when reading that book. To be clear, I don't mean character descriptions or other specific details, I mean the broader... feel? The world, I suppose.

Has this ever happened to you? Either with an adaptation of a book, an unrelated screen work that makes you do Leo Pointing At the TV, or - even weirder - a real world location?

Alternatively, and this is a tangent, am I an outlier in imagining books so that I can 'recognise' them when I see them on screen? I know there's a lot of discussion between whether you hear your own voice when you read. Do other people have an internal cinematographer?