Alternities
David Wrong’s “Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed.”
My list is, instead:
10. Rogue Moon, based on Algis J. Budrys’ hardboiled character study of a trio of very damaged people probing an alien artifact on the far side of Luna. This one begins with the zonked explorer intoning his first words, “An dark, an nowhere starlights” over a black screen. I used to have a cast for my dream adaptation but they’re probably all dead now - I can’t remember who they were though. In the very early 1980s RM was supposed to be adapted for a PBS SF series that, as far as I can remember, was stillborn.
9. The Businessman - from Tom Disch’s comic horror novel about a sleazy bastard who haunts his wife’s ghost. I suppose you’d have to pay extra to be able to call poet John Berryman, who is a major character in the book, “John Berryman.”
8. Starship Troopers, but for real - I want my goddamn powered armor! How about less contempt for the material? And more six-man football scenes, please.
7. Ringworld. The Lord of the Rings trilogy makes it official: you can film anything. Why not Niven’s classic Wizard-of-Oz-in-Space story? One word: sprawling. Somehow Andy Serkis plays the Puppeteer.
6. Mm, I’m kind of stuck for the moment.
Comment by Sifu Tweety —
February 27, 2006 @ 9:37 pm
Wow, I read that Budrys story years and years ago and had completely forgotten about it until reading that line. What a goddamn rad opening line!
Meeeeeemooorrriiiiesss
er, sorry.
My personal list has exactly one entry, highlighted, with stars and puffy stickers surrounding it, lots of stars, and all enclosed in a giant heart, is ”Neuromancer”. I SAW that movie, shot for shot, every time I read that book. Which is like 20 times. My original cast was Michael Biehn as Case and… well, then it gets ugly. I can negotiate.
Comment by Avram —
February 27, 2006 @ 9:41 pm
The Stars My Destination. For two things, mostly: A shot of the big Times Square teleport stage, with people constantly appearing and disappearing. And seeing the tiger appear on Gully Foyle’s face when he gets mad.
Comment by Steve —
February 27, 2006 @ 9:45 pm
Zeitgeist. I still want it. Or possibly even one or two of the Leggy Starlitz stories slammed together into a plot. Do it as straightfaced black comedy about gun-running in Bosnia, if you have to.
And on a similarly not-really-s.f.-by-genre-authors kick, Lewis Shiner’s Slam. (Glimpses would probably be unfilmable.)
And, uhh, Patrick Farley’s ”Spiders”. That’s all I got, since nobody’s ever going to make Last and First Men: The Motion Picture.
Comment by Robby K. —
February 27, 2006 @ 9:49 pm
Dhalgren…although it would be impossible to condense into two hours (or even three), half the audience wouldn’t get it and several idiotic pressure groups would protest it. But can you imagine a shot of the scorpions running through Bellona as the city disintegrates around them?
Comment by Glaivester —
February 27, 2006 @ 10:42 pm
How about Spider-Girl? The adventures of May ”MayDay” Parker, the daughter of the original web-slinger, based on the comic book by Tom DeFalco.
Comment by Avram —
February 27, 2006 @ 11:17 pm
If we’re expanding into comics, I want Quentin Tarantino to handle Those Annoying Post Brothers.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
February 27, 2006 @ 11:21 pm
I want a V for Vendetta, done with the same sort of contempt for the material that Verhoeven had for Starship Troopers, but by someone with actual cinematic sense. I mean, there isn’t a single bit of Vendetta that you haven’t seen fifty times before — its innovations are all structural, rather than in the fictional elements deployed.
I may well get the former, but I have no hope for the latter….
Comment by Mike Kozlowski —
February 28, 2006 @ 12:08 am
Ender’s Game, only they need to use O.C.-age actors as the kids for two important reasons: 1) It would make it about a zillion times more plausible, and 2) it would piss off Orson Scott Card.
Comment by Tim O\'Neil —
February 28, 2006 @ 2:38 am
Would it be hopelessly old-school of me to say Stranger in a Strange Land?
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 28, 2006 @ 7:22 am
Tim, I totally have Rogue Moon on the list, so be my old school guest.
Stranger needs crowd scenes, IMHO, and that’s something SF movies have historically been light on. So there are issues.
Comment by shane —
February 28, 2006 @ 7:34 am
I’ll take Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels, but only if the director can get the upCountry scenes right. Maybe George Lucas. Kidding!
Comment by theophylact —
February 28, 2006 @ 10:02 am
Well, most obviously, Asimov’s I, Robot — with Harlan Ellison’s screenplay.
Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man has been optioned for the movies many times; it’s never been made, probably because of the difficulty of representing the telepathic imagery. But I could see, say, Harvey Keitel as Ben Reich (and maybe Daniel Day-Lewis as Linc Powell).
Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Comment by Kevin J. Maroney —
February 28, 2006 @ 10:10 am
The biggest change between Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and the film Field of Dreams is that they changed J. D. Salinger. I suspect John Berryman is less litigious, though.
When the film Will Smith’s I, Robot came out, there was a discussion on rec.arts.sf.fandom of what one could call a film made of Ellison’s screenplay. My suggestion was Even Worse than Will Smith’s I, Robot.
I would love an epic miniseries of The Book of the New Sun. Even if it’s not well-done, I just want to see Urth in all its faded glory.
Comment by Robert the Red —
February 28, 2006 @ 10:26 am
A number of Heinlein’s books would make good movies; for example: Orphans of the Sky, or Methuselah’s Children (with the magazine ending, not the book ending). They have straightforward action, should be relatively straightforward to adapt to screenplay and shoot, and could be very watchable.
If we are dreaming, then Zelazny’s Lord of Light is one of my favorites.
Comment by Doug T —
February 28, 2006 @ 11:11 am
IT’s been a while (a long, long while) since I read it, but Varley’s Titan would make an excellent SF/adventure movie, I’d think.
And I’m not sure it fits the category, but I think Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns would make a movie 10 times as good as any of the Batman scripts they actually filmed.
Comment by Jaybird —
February 28, 2006 @ 12:33 pm
Door Into Summer would make a nice little film.
Chicks could go for the love story and Petronius, Guys could go for the Time Travel.
Comment by Tom Scudder —
February 28, 2006 @ 2:17 pm
”Home is the Hangman” by Zelazny. Made in, oh, the mid-90s or so, when everyone would be able to understand the bits about what’s-his-name erasing his identity from the global nets, and about the virtual-reality training system they used for the Hangman, and so forth.
Really weird and kind of sad that no one has picked up some Zelazny stories and put them to film. He seems like a much more natural choice than Phil Dick, say.
Comment by Alex F —
February 28, 2006 @ 4:32 pm
To really make a successful movie, it’s best to go with a short, pretty straightforward story - not the vast, sprawling sagas, many making for good reading, we get so many of these days. A lot of Heinlein would work well - Podkayne of Mars jumps out, but there are others. Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, done well, could be incredible. But the two best bets that have never been filmed IMHO are Van Vogt’s Slan and Bujold’s Shards of Honor. (Warrior’s Apprentice might work even better than Shards of Honor, but only if you find the right Miles.)
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
February 28, 2006 @ 6:17 pm
I love A Canticle for Leibowitz, it was the first real SF I ever read, and you never forget your first. It’s just too sweeping (and for me, too personal) to be a good film. Besides, the studio suits would want a single star to carry through all of the eras, and that would just s**k.
It’s not necessarily a classic, or even SF, but I’d like to see Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle done in film. It has it all; period costumes, famous real people, sex, pirates, and lots of gold. Much better than Snow Crash.
Also Harry Turtledove’s Colonization series could work well on film.
Comment by Derek Copold —
February 28, 2006 @ 6:22 pm
Michael Moorcock’s Elric Saga would make for a good film.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
February 28, 2006 @ 8:46 pm
I’d have to argue against Ringworld. The events boil down to, ”They go the Ringworld, get shot down, tool around and see stuff, boink some cheerful women who don’t have orgasms, tool around, find a way home, mow down the locals with lasers to get that way home, leave.”
It doesn’t have quite the sort of dire need to graft on a plot as when one makes a movie based on an H. G. Wells book, but it’s still mostly travelogue.
But to be fair, I’ll throw in a nicely unfilmable book - A Deepness in the Sky. Tons of plot, but half the movie (or more likely, trilogy) would be CGI spiders. Eeeg!
Comment by Steve —
February 28, 2006 @ 9:02 pm
But the two best bets that have never been filmed IMHO are Van Vogt’s Slan…
Get Paul Verhoeven to direct, as he’s already demonstrated that he likes taking books with authoritarian sympathies and turning them into IS THIS A JOKE???-level fascist extravaganzas. Ugh, I have a not entirely rational hatred for that book.
If I were going to get a Heinlein movie, I’d want a juvenile or possibly ”Gulf”. Complicated books generally make for bad movies, unless you can excise half the plot L.A. Confidentially and still get something semi-coherent. (This is why Tim Powers’ Last Call and Declare didn’t make my list, let along anything by Wolfe.)
Of the list suggested, I think The Stars My Destination would probably make the best movie.
Comment by Gary Farber —
March 1, 2006 @ 1:53 pm
”Stranger needs crowd scenes, IMHO, and that’s something SF movies have historically been light on.”
Metropolis.
Comment by Doctor Slack —
March 1, 2006 @ 3:00 pm
I’d shell out money to see a film version of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, though it’d have to be done by some exceptional people to not completely suck. At the very least, it would provide an opportunity for a major SF film other than Kubrick’s 2001 to realistically portray things like different gravity.
And surely it should be possible to bring The Watchmen to film in some way. (Maybe the Wachowskis’ V For Vendetta will help grease the skids for this, which would at least partly redeem them for the disaster of the Matrix sequels.)
The Sheep Look Up would make a great film — it couldn’t help but knock strips off The Day After Tomorrow.
Some kind of adaptation of Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar would make great film material, too — a kind of SF version of Traffic or Syriana — although there’d need to be considerable divergence from the source material to make it less dated.
Le Guin’s Earthsea books deserve a proper, cinematic adaptation. The nice thing about Jackson’s success with LOTR (even despite the leaden source material he was working with) is that it might actually lend credibility to the idea of such a project. (The television miniseries wasn’t quite a cockup of Ralph Bakshi proportions, but it was damned close.)
Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness would rock. (Apparently there’s been a Guillermo del Toro production of this in the works for some time now, hopefully it eventually does get made.)
Comment by sander —
March 4, 2006 @ 8:24 pm
i wish i could find a screen play for the moon is a harsh mistress, i like mkaing movies, and that would be awsome!
Comment by Avram —
March 6, 2006 @ 5:35 pm
How could I have forgotten: Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream/Lord of the Swastika, with music by Queen!