In addition to agreeing with several of the suggestions already made, I’d add Nightwings by Robert Silverberg, The Well of Souls by Jack Chalker (imagine the CGI you’d need), The Harvest by Robert Charles Wilson, The Practice Effect by David Brin (or Glory Season or The Life Eaters or a better remake of The Postman), or the Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove done as a miniseries.
Ah, can’t believe I didn’t mention that one. :smack: I agree completely…it would make a kick ass mini-series.
-XT
Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. With room for battle scenes and explosions, it’s one that Hollywood might actually be able to make while remaining somewhat true to the idea that drives the story.
Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin.
for 2 reasons:
- so it could explain to me what the hell that book was about
- I’d be interested to see how they portray the gender-less society
The Night’s Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. Lots of action, sex, satanism and possession. The good guys win more or less.
“Inconstant Moon” was done as an episode of the new Outer Limits. It wasn’t bad.
Having just read The Forever War (alternating Hugo/Nebula winners between more bulky novels and nonfiction), it brings back a recurrent problem with sci-fi: so much is not plot driven. It is not a problem I, or the sci-fi fans here, have – we read the books usually to be transported into different worlds, not so we can watch plot and character arcs unfold. Unfortunately, transported into a different world just doesn’t work in a movie. Think the dreadful first Harry Potter movie (yes I know not sci-fi) as a perfect example – you end up with a bunch of actors spending have their time gaping at stuff. The movies only got better when they started ignoring the fantastic worlds and actually started living in them. That’s what made Lord of the Rings great – a minimum of the hobbits sitting around exclaiming how incredible everything is.
You need to sell it with a plot, like The Matrix tried to do. The Forever War was great – it was truly visionary, Haldeman has such a great imagination, etc. Same with so many of the hard sci-fi and dystopian guys: Larry Niven, Neal Stephenson, David Brin, come to mind.
IMHO the movies that work are often the ones written by the authors who know less about science and more about fiction. Ray Bradbury, Philip Dick, Stanislaw Lem come to mind. So I look for those kinds of things, and here’s my list:
-Ender’s Game although it will be dicey cause you’ll need an incredible child actor. Just cause you know it is going to happen and you know you’ll be first in line to see it.
-A Canticle for Leibowitz although the story line seems a bit dated now.
-A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge although this is probably best approached in a mini-series or a series of mini-series. That book had so much plot in it that 6 hours probably can’t do it justice. Perhaps it can be given the Battlestar Galactica treatment – start with a miniseries and work it into a network show.
-The one that I would kill to see, though, is my favorite underrated sci-fi/fantasy series, the Pleiocene/Intervention/Galactic Milieu series by Julian May (starting with The Many Colored Land). The series is about humanity after intervention by a collective of alien worlds, bringing Earth into peaceful galactic society kind of run by psychics. It is a total of 9 books spanning over 6 million years, all with a great set of characters that are usually quite compelling.
I’d (selfishly) like to see Banks’ Player of Games made into a movie. Or any Culture/almost Culture novel.
Mieville would be good too - esp. The Scar
Also, I think Brin’s Uplift War would be a good movie too - talking apes, but they’re on our side! Evil chickens! Hot telepathic elves! The rest of the Uplift stuff after that, as a series - really alien aliens rock! It’s a pity a Dragon’s Egg movie would be really hard to do, I think.
I’d (selfishly) like to see Banks’ Player of Games made into a movie. Or any Culture/almost Culture novel.
Mieville would be good too - esp. The Scar
Also, I think Brin’s Uplift War would be a good movie too - talking apes, but they’re on our side! Evil chickens! Hot telepathic elves! The rest of the Uplift stuff after that, as a series - really alien aliens rock! It’s a pity a Dragon’s Egg movie would be really hard to do, I think.
Night’s Dawn would take about five television seasons to tell. It has a dozen or so story lines, each with it’s own characters. The episodes would have to be animated, or they’d cost a couple of million apiece, at least.
Right now I’m reading Asecond chance at Eden, a series of stories sketching the Night’s Dawn’s universe’s history.
Argh. I can’t believe we’ve missed this one:
PERN
McCaffrey’s Pern would have great visuals and a good plot. The dialog from the first couple of books would have to be revamped quite a bit (stilted beyond belief!) but I think it could be done.
Actually I think PoG was the only one of Bank’s novels to even get near to the big screen, I knew I’d read it somewhere but a very quick google search found;
I think that is pretty old news, but I could be wrong of course. I would like to see the Culture books made into movies (although at the moment I’d just like another Culture book!) but I think some of them would have to be watered down so much they’d just become weak copies.
If I remember rightly the rights to Richard Morgan’s “Altered Carbon” have been bought as well, also a while ago and I don’t think there is anything recent on whether they will actually make the film.
I’d like to see some of Niven and Pournelles work make it to the big screen, “Footfall” or “The Mote in God’s Eye” would be favourites.
grey_ideas
Besides some of the ones suggested above, I’d like to see some other classics done. With CGI you could do great things:
The Arena by Fredric Brown. Taking a short story and expanding it to fill your two hour movie time slot is, I think, better than trying to pare down a complex novel, especially in a field like science fiction. Area has been done and stolen often enough, but nobody’s done the real thing – th Star Trek episosde nominally based on it changed too much, especially the ending. “Fu and Games” on Outer Limits used the basic concept, but didn’t really tell the same story. I’ve been filming this one in my head for years. I think you could do it real justice, and even do it without voice-over narration (or haning the hero talk to himself). It’s be a hell of a story.
Another one I’ve been filming in my head is The Stars my Destination (Tigher,Tiger! in the UK) by Alfred Bester – The opening, again done without voiceover, would be a killer – Gully Foyle shooting the flare from his ruined starship, seeing his rescuer coming to his ship, then abruptly leaving without rescuing him. Show Foyle screaming in his helmet, but silently (In Space, no one can hear you Curse), then abruptly switch to his POV, you hear the hissing of his oxygen tank as you look out through his claustrophobic helmet window at your hope of rescue fading away and now you hear Foyle shouting “I Kill You Deadly, Vorga!” as he finds his Reason for Being. It’s be a classic cinema moment – and the story goes on from there, filled with memorable moments practicaly made for cinema – the Escape from the Space Colony, the Jaunting Stages, the Toy Railroad, the Infrared ision, The Burning Man. Damn, this could be good! But in the wrong hands, especially if they toss out the story as Hollywood usually does, this would make a really bad Movie of the Week.
Similarly, Bester’s The Demolished Man would, in the right hands, be Great – in a society of telepaths, how do you commit the perfect murder, and get away with it. The Telepath Scenese would make or break this film. Done correctly, with wit and originality, you’d bowl over the audience/. Do it by showing people with perfectly still heads and echo-chamber recorded voice-overs, and you’vwe got cliche bad SF that’ll kill the movie.
And, as you’d suspect ftrom my name, I’d like to see This Island Earth done, but right this time. They virtually threw out the book last time, and even the part they kept relatively faithful – the building of the Interociter – they bollixed up.
All of that just scratches the surface. I’m sure there are plenty of classic short stories from the 1940s and 1950s that would make great flicks, now that we’ve got the capability. Early Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, or Brown, Sheckley, Tenn, or others would be great stuff. Why, in Og’s name did they do a bad adaptation of a Sound of Thunder rather than a good version of a Gun for Dinosaur?
I would like to see Moon is a Harsh Mistress done by a good director with few stars used. Lots of good character actors.
Jim
Ubik by Philip K Dick. Lots of Dick-ish “what is reality” issues with a fairly linear plot.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Great cyber-scifi story.
Interface by Stephen Bury, a pseudonym for Neal Stephenson. Excellent political thriller.
Good Omens would be great, especially after Constantine’s debut a while back…
Also, Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard? series would be fantastic…
I’d like to see a film adaptation of some story in Bruce Sterling’s “Shaper/Mechanist” series – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaper/Mechanist. The 1982 short story “Swarm,” in particular, could be an FX-rich movie – with a distinctly depressing and un-Hollywood ending which they’d damned well better keep!
True, but the science and technology in most such stories seems rather dated now, unless you want to give them the Brazil or Sky Captain treatment.
Meh . . . I’ve never read Ubik. But I think Hollywood should be very careful, in the future, in considering “what is reality” stories. I mean, there’s only so much you can do with making your characters wonder, “Am I in reality now, or still in a virtual-reality simulation?” or “What’s really going on behind the scenery?” Between The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenz, Dark City and The Matrix,* the concept has pretty much been hammered into the ground.
*(Not to mention the “Better than Life” episode of Red Dwarf. 
)
I’d really, really like to see an adaptation of Wilson & Shea’s Illuminatus trilogy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminatus However, to work, it would have to be a non-updated 1970s period piece. And the story is too long and complicated for even a trilogy of movies. It would have to be a miniseries. And the only outfit that could or would take on such a project would be . . . the Sci-Fi Channel . . . let’s just forget I said anything.