I too believe Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat and Bill the Galactic Hero series, would be a blessing from Holliwood. Preferably done a la Galaxy Quest, i.e. in an intelligent take on humour as opposed to over-the-top action or tired slapstick.
Also from Harrison, a little gem called The Technicolor Time Machine, about a film crew who travels back in time to produce a saga on the Vikings and encounters various hardships, most of them rather comical as the people from two different times are juxtaposed and made to interact. Harrison seems to have a deep love for cinema and writes in a way that is very screenplay-friendly, especially if you consider adding in a good dose of voice-over narration to deliver some of his wisecracks.
Philip K. Dick’s Galactic Pot Healer ought to be adapted and filmed by Terry Gilliam in a Brazil frame of mind. I suggest this title because it is short, mind-bogging, and original. The goal is to raise an ancient power called the Cathedral of something or the other from the bottom of a sea on some planet (sorry, been almost 15 years since I last read it). A specialist in hand-repairing ceramic pots is recruited for the mission, although not all is at it seems. I have no idea if this book can be successfully filmed, but I certainly would like to see the end result.
Philip Jose Farmer’s The Image of the Beast and Blown would make great hardcore flicks. They wouldn’t necessarily have to be porn but they would have to have strong and explicit pornographic elements to work, with CGI a must (obviously – unless someone can figure out how to show Gilles’s lengthy slimy coils slithering out of Joan, until she literally falls to pieces and gets really pissed off). These books mix horror, seriously hardcore deviant sex, aliens in disguise, and the lonesome detective into a pretty remarkable yarn set in a smog-choked L.A. and various surreal estates and apartments. I don’t know which (live-action) director could take this on, perhaps someone like Cronenberg or Lynch, but he or she would have to be very frank and unapologetic (is it just me or do we not seem to get nudity and sex in Sci-fi films the way we used to?? Goddamned conservatives…)
If there will ever again be a director capable of crafting as visually, technically, and thematically brilliant a movie as 2001 without the need for incessant dialogue or action and explosions, I would like him/her to try out something by the incomparable J.G. Ballard. The Crystal World comes to mind, but I recognize that is probably too ambitious a project. Instead, the brilliant short story The Voices of Time could be adapted into a full length movie; emotional detachment, the desert, drained swimming pools, decaying gantries in the distance, strange mutations of flora and fauna, and the mystery of why people are falling victim to an inexplicable disease that causes them to go into “fugues” of increasing duration, until the point the fugues (complete unawareness and unconsciousness) become a permanent state. To me, that story would make a remarkable film, but so much of Ballard’s material is just waiting for someone with the right vision – take Vermillion Sands for instance.