It seems to me that if we have a thread going about the best sci-fi films, we probably should also talk about the science fiction books that Hollywood has somehow failed to bring to the screen. Seeing how Hollywood's big studios seem rather dreadfully out of new ideas and wedded to the idea of bringing things to the screen that already have existing fan bases, it might be instructive to point out some of the opportunities that they're missing. Many of these would have been very difficult to pull off without modern special effects, but they're certainly doable today.
Just to get the ball rolling:
The Caves of Steel (Asimov)
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (Heinlein)
Ubik (Dick)
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
Neuromancer (Gibson)
Hyperion (Simmons)
Snow Crash (Stephenson)
Redshirts (Scalzi)
I'm sure that you all can come up with plenty of others, especially seeing how I'm a lot less conversant with the last decade and a half of sci-fi than the period before that.
I've been wanting a film adaptation of
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for a very long time. A lot of Heinlein's novels are badly dated (I honestly can't see farms on Ganymede being possible, no matter what technology is applied), or would be socially uncomfortable at best (Heinlein's later Lazarus Long novels advocated "friendly incest"). Speaking of incest, there is one part of TMIAHM that would have to change to make it palatable for modern audiences... Manny's line marriage includes two wives who are close kin; one of them is the granddaughter of the other. I'm not sure how modern audiences would take to Heinlein's ideas about polygamy being a normal part of society.
2001: A Space Odyssey (not actually a joke)
Other than the ending being a bit confusing, what was wrong with it?
You want to make a movie based on a book based on a movie, Mamfred? Pretty recursive.
The original source for "2001" was a short story called "The Sentinel." So it started in literary form.
Weis's Dragonlance books would make an awesome tv series.
Absolutely!
While I suppose it's barely possible to do
Dragons of Autumn Twilight as a movie, there's just too much in it to really do it justice in two hours. A lot of
Dragons of Winter Night could be cut, because it's some weird dream-state stuff that foreshadows enough of the third novel that by the time you get to
Dragons of Spring Dawning, it's not a surprise. So if I were adapting the first three books, I'd omit the dream-state stuff and add in the subplots of the trip to Icewall and of Gilthanas and Silvara's travels that were only briefly alluded to. Oh, and of course the basic plot of
The Soulforge (Raistlin's Test in the Tower of Wayreth) would be necessary. It's glossed over in the Chronicles trilogy, more detail is provided in the Legends trilogy, but there's actually a gamebook that goes through the steps of the Test, from start to finish.
I think it would be necessary to include the Legends Trilogy, or at least a condensed version. Without that, the anthology and final novel wouldn't make a lot of sense. And I've always enjoyed Dalamar...
Of course I'd also include the "Second Generation" anthology material and conclude with
Dragons of Summer Flame. And dammit, I'd restore that short story to canon so that Usha is Raistlin's daughter. Palin can find himself somebody else to marry, or since cousin marriages are usually not
too frowned-on in medieval-type societies, they can marry anyway.
Definitely think that it could work, though the rights situation on that one could be messy.
Yeah, between multiple formats, publishing companies, and authors (some of the Heroes of the Lance were created by other people during playtesting sessions for the game modules that provided the basis for the novels), it would be a spaghetti mess to sort out.
I would love to actually hear some of the music performed by a real orchestra. I bought all the modules on which the novels were based, and some of them include sheet music. So I sat down at my organ and learned "Est Sularus"... and that song is
beautiful!
I'm not sure. The actual story of Ringworld is pretty bland. What makes Ringworld great is the science and thought process behind it and I don't know how well that would transfer into a movie.
I tried to get into Ringworld a long time back, but couldn't. I should really give it another try. It's 20-odd years later, and now I've got people to help explain the stuff I didn't get the first time.
The Niven novel I'd like to see as a movie is
A Gift From Earth. A repressive government with a justice system that sentences criminals (whether really guilty or framed for other reasons) to be executed and stripped down for their component organs and tissues to perpetuate the lives of the elite class, plus the promise of cloning? Organ donation and cloning are current topics right now. It would be a perfect time to adapt this book.
Anyhow, my recommendations are:
The Dominic Flandrey series by Poul Anderson. Basically James Bond in Space during the Fall of the Roman Empire; the books are good pulpy fun brought to a higher level by a surprising amount of self-awareness by Anderson and the fact he never treats the "natives" as mindless savages, they are just as cunning, intelligent, noble, and duplicitous as the Terran Empire.
My own choice for a Poul Anderson film would actually be a TV series based on his Time Patrol series. I enjoy Manse Everard as a character, and the adventures he gets into, trying to fix history that went awry because of some time terrorist or mistake or mischance happening on the part of other members of the Time Patrol.
Any sci-fi book that 'screams' for a film adaptation likely isn't good sci-fi in the first place. The two mediums are at complete odds with each other.
Major disagreement here. Maybe you just haven't had the opportunity to see good SF on film, or you're just not into the stories or books that were adapted.
The fact that most
sci-fi movies today are behind
sci-fi novels from the fifties kinda bears this out.
Sometimes they go a bit further back than the 1950s. There's one called
Quest For Fire, that's based on a Belgian novel published in 1911.
Honestly, I'm looking at my video shelf right now and seeing
Quest For Fire,
Dune,
Logan's Run, the original Planet of the Apes movie series,
Contact,
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the TV series; yes, I know it was originally a radio play, but I've read the novels), and
The Martian Chronicles. With the exception of Hitchhiker's Guide, the original form of these movies/TV series was literary - either as a novel, short story, or series of short stories. While the perfect version of Dune has yet to be made, both the Lynch movie and the later miniseries have their positive traits. Was the Logan's Run movie true to the book? In some details, definitely not. But I guess it takes growing up in the '70s to appreciate the movie.
Real, or hard, sci-fi can't be made into film.
Nonsense. Of course it can be done. The problem is that today's audiences have been conditioned to expect lots of shooting, explosions, and gratuitous sex in movies. Too many producers, writers, and directors forget the science part of science fiction.
The Grand Tour novels by Ben Bova aren't in the extreme end of "hard SF" but they're more plausible than most I've read in recent years. The
Moonrise/
Moonwar duology would make a decent miniseries (setting up a lunar colony, and the risks, rewards, and slippery ethics of nanotechnology). The protagonist is likable, the villains are suitably villainous, and there's plenty of scope for social commentary (and yeah, even a bit of romance... Bova's actually not very good at writing romances in his novels, though). As for the other novels in the series, given sufficient budget, I'd do a miniseries of
Jupiter/
Leviathans of Jupiter, and I'd also make one of
Venus. There are plot holes when you take that novel in context with some others in the series (inconsistent in-universe chronology that made me say, "hey, waitaminute, that doesn't make sense..."), but if you ignore those others, it's a sufficiently self-contained story that's enough to induce a nightmare or two... at least for me. And it would make a decent movie, in my opinion.
I haven't read Rendezvous. (I've read an embarrassingly small amount of classic sci-fi.)
In that case, perhaps it would be better to hold off on pronouncements about whether or not classic SF/hard SF (they're not necessarily the same) can be made into films?
It's been decades since I last read any Arthur C. Clarke, though I've got at least a couple of dozen of his books and anthologies in my collection. At least one of his short stories - "The Star" - was made into a Twilight Zone episode. (I'd venture to say that's one that can be safely recategorized as fantasy, since we know a lot more about supernovae now than we did when Clarke wrote that story)
This is why something like Anathem isn't screaming for an adaptation. Ditto Foundation, at the end of the day. "Permutations and reversals of ideas" (to quote another of Asimov's introductory comments) does not a good film make, to be sure.
I've just been re-reading Isaac Asimov's short story
"The Last Question." Apparently it was adapted into a theatrical presentation for planetariums (with Leonard Nimoy providing the narration).
Clarke and Asimov were both better ideas guys than Heinlein (if you're thinking about disputing this, consider that Clarke gave you HAL 9000 and Asimov gave you Seldon and the Three Laws of Robotics), but they were never the writer that Heinlein was. That's why Heinlein had so much cred in a community of writers. He brought the goods and he could flat out write. This is the book where Clarke came closest to achieving the heights that Heinlein could hit as a pure writer, coupled with an idea that Heinlein could never touch.
Between those two things, that's why the book has the reputation that it has.
People know about HAL 9000 and recognize the music from 2001 even if they've never read the book or seen the movie. The Three Laws of Robotics are partly what influenced the creation of the character of Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and they're a pretty sensible set of precautions to take if you're going to turn anything significant over to a robot.
Some of Heinlein's ideas and sayings and terminology made it into SF fandom... although I've run across people who have no idea what "grok" means, or they've never heard of TANSTAAFL. But Heinlein was more about turning out space opera stories in order to make money, in his post-naval career. He did address a lot of social issues in his books; I remember that
Citizen of the Galaxy involves at least one corporation being involved in interplanetary slavery, or at least knowingly turning a blind eye to it.
A lot of Heinlein's novels are badly dated now. There won't be farms on Ganymede, or space cadets conversing with the natives of Venus. I suppose that in some future lunar colony, however, there could be a cave where people don mechanical wings and enjoy recreational flying in the Moon's lesser gravity.
But if I had a truly sufficient budget, I'd do a TV series of C.J. Cherryh's
Cyteen and its sequel,
Regenesis. This is one of the most complex SF novels I've ever read, and every time I re-read it, I gain new insights. And as far as re-creating the psyche of a dead person via cloning and pushing the cloned person to become the same person as he/she was before, Cherryh does it even better than Frank Herbert did in Dune. With a constant emphasis on genetics, sociology, psychology, and interstellar politics and economics, this novel does qualify as hard science fiction. Done properly, it would be a spectacular series.
Regenesis introduces a plot line of terraforming an ice world, to make it into a site for a future planet-based colony and lab, and I hope that Cherryh continues the story with at least one more novel so she can delve further into that storyline.
