Just The Caffeine Talking: Movies I Want (Part 1)

Science fiction has won the battle. Until the 1980s, big-budget science fiction films were few and far between. Now SF movies make up a significant fraction of the movies released by Hollywood. It's a safe, dependable genre, like romantic comedies or thrillers. Legions of effects creators, makeup artists, and prop builders can earn steady incomes working on science fiction movies.

We won.

Except . . . that we didn't. Because as I'm sure anyone who has ever listened to a science fiction fan ranting about the latest Hollywood blockbuster is aware, movies are doing a great job of doing science fiction badly. For every Blade Runner we get a dozen Spacehunters. For every Wrath of Khan we get . . . well, all the other Star Trek feature films.

And yet, and yet . . . I do not abandon hope. Because there has been an encouraging trend visible in superhero films which could well creep over into their science fiction siblings. That trend is "respect for the source material." It's not widespread; not yet. But the huge success of The Avengers and other Marvel Studios films may finally get the message to studio bosses: you make lots of money if you make movies that respect and make use of the source material.

Eventually, someone's going to apply that lesson to science fiction. They're going to notice that there's a huge backlog of entertaining and innovative science fiction novels out there, and that decent adaptations of them would make extremely effective motion pictures. They'll make good SF movies -- imagine that, for a moment!

So: what books would make the best movies? Some of the classics of the genre might not actually work as well as one might think. Sure, we'd all love to see Stranger in a Strange Land on the big screen . . . except that it would mostly consist of naked people having conversations about the nature of reality. Not boffo box office.

Anyway, here's the first five. Readers are encouraged to add their own.

• One of Poul Anderson's stories of Dominic Flandry. Not sure which one, possibly A Stone In Heaven. The elevator pitch should be an easy sell: "He's James Bond in the Star Wars universe." It's not quite accurate, but close enough. One could do it as a fun romp in the Star Wars vein, or amp up the Spenglerian gloom of Flandry fighting to preserve an Empire that's already well on the way to falling.

• A Life for the Stars, by James Blish. Obscure nowadays, and undeservedly so. The visuals of New York City flying around the Galaxy inside its force-field bubble alone should sell the movie, and as a bonus there's actually a pretty good coming-of-age plotline and some vivid characters. It might be more entertaining to combine the main antagonists (the city of Scranton) with the more baroque "Interstellar Master Traders" of Earthman Come Home.

• Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke. Just film the book; it'll be fine. Do it in 3D IMAX format and nobody will mind that there's none of that character development stuff in it. I understand this one has been "in development" for years, so there's hope. Hell, it only took John Carter a century to go from novel to motion picture. Rama could probably get to the screen by the mid-2020s.

• To Your Scattered Bodies Go, by Philip Jose Farmer. The first book of the Riverworld series, in which every human who ever lived is reborn along the banks of a river which winds across the surface of an alien world. For the movie, I'd kit-bash it together with The Fabulous Riverboat, but that's because I kind of like Mark Twain better than I like Sir Richard Burton. (I've just discovered that the SyFy Channel did this as a TV movie in the hope it would lead to a series. Apparently not.)

• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. Unlike his earlier work, it hasn't gotten dated, unlike his later work it's not too self-referential. The story itself is strong and simple: a revolution on the Moon. I've seen a proposed screenplay for this one floating around on the Web; one version is linked here.

That's the first five; more will follow when I think of them.