The blazes with the drowned LA.
I wanna see the anti-fire!
I’d like to see a well-done version of he War of the Worlds as an 1890s period piece set in and around London… None of this ‘updating’ stuff, although George Pal did do a good job.
Another good one would be Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos: three closely-related stories set in a Christian magical universe where magic and prayer work; where Heaven, angels, and Hell exist, and where witches ride broomsticks into battle.
Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia would be a fascinating world for a story, although I don’t think the book Ecotopia would make a good movie as is.
Of course, with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe now in theatres, and apparently pretty good, I suspect that another Narnia book will be made into a movie. Which one, though, in an interesting question.
The universe of the Shadowrun game would have some great stories, such as the incident where the Great Dragon, Dunkelzahn, is elected President of the UCAS (the largest successor state to the USA and Canada), and then assassinated as he takes office.
:: ponders bookshelves ::
How about a Drakon (S M Stirling) movie? One near-invulnerable genetically-engineered supergenius warrior, from a post-human society that has conquered the rest of humanity and engineered them into servitude while engineering themselves into a master race, falls through a wormhole into contemporary New York. She starts building a hidden power base, calmly killing anyone who gets in the way, so she can call home and bring in the troops. Woe to the cop who starts piecing together her trail…
The Tar-Aiym Krang by Alan Dean Foster. A chase across the galaxy against nasty reptilian enemies to find a mysterious artifact that might be a musical instrument, might be a weapon, and might be… something else. The hardest part would be explaining the title.
How about something from Rudy Ricker’s Liveware universe?
Bookworm, Run!; The Whirligig of Time; or The Ungoverned… all by by Vernor Vinge. 
Short stories seem in many cases to make better movies than longer works.
I’m going to say Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Mainly because I want to see a film about high-tech ninja pizza deliverers just once in my lifetime. Also, the Raft would be awesome on the big screen.
There is an upcoming animated full-length feature film, that is indeed a period piece.
It might fit you bill nicely.
Theodore Sturgeon’s If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister could be the basis of a nifty SF/ arthouse/ porn movie.
“Bleeding Stones” by Harlan Ellison. <if there were an evil grin smiley it would go here>
OK - many of my favorites have already been mentioned, but I’ve gotta throw in a few of these:
(Aside to CalMeacham. I just finished watching This Island Earth this afternoon for the first time in probably a couple of decades. I had forgotten just what a great voice Rex Reason had. Do you follow him in that department as well?)
Randall Garrett’s Lord D’Arcy series, a superbly written pastiche of alternate history, Sherlock Holmes analog, and magic. King Richard didn’t die from a crossbow bolt at the seige of Chaluz, the Plantagenet dysnasty still rules the Anglo-French empire, which includes the colonies. Though written in the 1960s and set in an alternate-history 1960s, the science of the times is circa Victorian-era, locomotives and horse-drawn carriages. But the real mcguffin is that magic works. Not accessible to everyone; genetics and training play a part. Learned theorists have codified its laws (the Low of Contagian, the Law of Similarity, etc.) Lord D’Arcy works for His Majesty as Chief Investigator for Normandy, and is the Holmes analog. Instead of a doctor as an assistant, he has a forensic sorcerer. Great characters, lots of little niceties throughout.
Poul Anderson’s Nicholas van Rijn stories. Now there is a scenery-chewing character. Peter Ustinov, by shedding some gravitas, could have been superb.
Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters. I still have an issue of “If” from 1963, the first SF mag I ever bought, with fabulous illustrations of the variously bred dragons… and their own variously bred humans. It’s a CGI fest waiting to happen.
Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp, about a Terran who undergoes surgery and skin-color changes to work as a saboteur on an enemy alien planet.
There are lots more that have been playing in the theater of my mind for decades…
Greg Bear’s Blood Music
I had hoped to see a good adaptation of the Neuromancer trilogy by William Gibson. But Johnny Pneumonia killed that franchise.
Would definitely like to see A Mote In God’s Eye and the Foundation series also.
AP
I’ve just come from Philcon where David Weber was the guest of honor. During his speech (or more accurately the Q&A session) he said a Harrington movie is is “in the early stages of discussion”. He estimated there was about a 30% chance it would actually get made, but if it is made, and does well, there could be a series of films.
For the Star Trek audience, how about Sector General? Or maybe Douglas Hill’s Last Legionary series?
For the grown-ups I think Against A Dark Background would make the best movie of any Ian M Banks book, purely because it’s self-contained and more limited in scale.
Of the classics, I’d love to see A Mission of Gravity - would make a really good educational kiddies movie.
I’d love to see Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones made into a movie. But not a live action one, since I don’t think live action could do the story justice. Animation done by Miyazaki, Kon or Takahata could be very cool.
I’d also love to see movies of Kate Elliot’s Crown Of Stars series. I started reading the series in October, and I adore them, at least the first three so far. Such wonderful characters, even the “evil” hounds and dogs are written about in a way to make you care about them. The first three books, anyway, would each make a facinating movie.
Hard to see Hollywood touching a movie with no humanoid characters.
Were it not for that objection, I’d like to see a film of Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg – which has human-explorer characters, but the story really focuses on the nonhuman, neutronium-based cheela.
I’ll second the idea that a lot of Golden Age science fiction would prove fertile ground for some new movies.
Also, I think the next Star Trek movie needs to be the story of the Deep Space Nine novel Unity. It brings it all together and brings back a very interesting foe (the parasites from TNG’s “Conspiracy”) to do it, tying it in with Trill politics. It’s awesome. I mean, DS9’s mission was to get Bajor ready to join the Federation, and this book does that.
BrainGlutton, look what they were able to do with Gollum. All you need is human-ish facial expressions and a damned good voice actor.
That only works if the character is at least vaguely humanoid. The cheela in Dragon’s Egg are not (they’re a kind of slug with twelve eyes on stalks in a ring around the body); neither are the Mesklinites in Mission of Gravity (they look kind of like centipedes). Such creatures could not, for instance, produce facial expressions that would allow a human audience to form an emotional/empathetic connection with them. Nothing can, unless it has, at the very least, a definite face with two eyes set above a mouth (nose optional).
I hope imagining the films that could be made from these books makes you all happy, because I think there’s zero chance of most of them ever being produced. Most of them are too expensive compared to what they would make. The few that could be made will probably be changed so much from the novel that you will probably be disappointed by the movie.
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”
It has a weird dysfunctional family, scientific/military intrigue, and a wonderful new religion called “Bokonism”. And of course, the Sci-fi ultimate terror: Ice-Nine.
Arguably, it was Vonnegut’s best book. “Slaughterhouse Five” was made into a surprisingly good and faithful movie, it would be great to see the same with CC.
I agree that Hollywood has a hard time making any kind of real thinking-person’s science fiction.
What we need is for HBO or Showtime to get into the act. HBO is famous for creating super high-quality series or miniseries. How about Heinlein’s ‘Future History’ presented in serial format, with one short story a week? Or for that matter, widen it out and make ‘Classic Science Fiction Theater’, highlighting great short stories from SF that haven’t been done before.
That would get me to get HBO again. I normally only get HBO during Soprano seasons.