Yet it soon sinks in that you’ve morphed from being the Creator to the guy who happened to write the original novel. How this makes you feel depends, I guess, on how you feel about the adaptation itself. I’ve never experienced much anxiety in this quarter. I met the three directors in 2008, and their plan to foreground the novel’s “transmigrating souls” motif by having actors perform multiple roles (each role being a sort of way station on that soul’s karmic journey) struck me as ingenious. Some changes to plot and character were inevitable, so that the book’s six worlds could be coaxed into a film-shaped container: the love interest between the (now) middle-aged Zachry and Meronym on postapocalyptic Hawaii, for example, or Cavendish’s epilogue, which appears in the film but not the book. Moreover, the novel’s Russian-doll structure has become more of a mosaic — you can’t ask a viewer to begin a film for the sixth time after a hundred minutes.

Image David Mitchell Credit... C Miriam Berkley

Wherever the “Cloud Atlas” screenplay differed from “Cloud Atlas” the novel, it did so for sound reasons that left me more impressed than piqued. (At the read-through, I sat next to Lana Wachowski, and when a line earned a particularly strong response, I’d whisper, “Was that one of yours or one of mine?” The tally was about 50-50, I think.) Anyway, film adaptations of novels are prone to failure not because they are too faithless but too faithful: why spend all that effort producing an audiobook with pictures?

Production! My week on set in Berlin, in December 2011, gave me access to a world I’d heard of but never visited. Look — there’s a clone-recycling unit where there wasn’t one 60 minutes ago; look out, fiberglass mountain outcrop coming through; what, are all high-tech sliding doors in S.F. movies made of painted plywood?