How about Little Fuzzy? Just imagine the toy market!
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I’m not sure anyone would take the risk to make a miniseries of The Difference Engine. The liability for causing all those suicides would be too much. Oh, that book was horrid…
Snowcrash, Neuromancer, Mote in God’s Eye, and Ringworld? Oh, yes, please! The rest of the early cyberpunk Gibson novels would be good, too. (Let’s forget Johnny Mnemonic for now) The drug use in Mona Lisa Overdrive might put off the American market. Count Zero might be doable, but, again, peripherial drug culture references might tank it for NA.
This. I’m not sure it’s subtle enough to count as satire, but it’s definitely an excellent jab at the mindset you describe.
And I seem to remember that at the time, it looked bloody amazing.
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Fuzzies were stolen by Lucas long ago.
@willmore, you didn’t like the seminal steampunk work? I’m tired of steampunk art but I’d like to see it filmed. This SHOULD be the golden age of SF on big and small screens as the tech has made the spectacular possible and the merely fantastic cheap. A realistic Piersons Puppeteer could not have been done 40 years ago. Now you could do it on a desktop.
But what do we get instead in endless supply? Comic books. Bah humbug!!!
I should add that it was directed by Paul Verhoeven, of Robocop directorial fame. Vehoeven is known for his dark humor/satire, and his sociopolitical commentary in his movies. Starship Troopers might not adhere closely to the book, i wouldn’t know since i haven’t read anything from the author, but the movie is very much a product of the director. Whose vision and voice is something i’m a definite fan of.
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I can’t find a link, but I’m sure I recently read an interview with him where he expressed his frustration with idiots who think he’s promoting the quasi-fascist society of ST as something to aim for.
I would love to see the Stainless Steel Rat be a thing, but alas, these are all great scifi books and series known only by scifi fans, and not the general populace, so Hollywood won’t put the effort into making them. No low hanging fruit.
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That would make about as much sense as the Vampire Chronicles without any vampires or Battletech without any Battlemechs.
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That doesn’t stop them from making movies and series about obscure comic book characters. My pet theory is it’s easier to pitch with pictures to the “executives”. SSR would be an awesome TV show, it’s basically a freaking crime procedural!! Burn Notice in space.
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No, I didn’t enjoy it at all. I saw that collaboration the end to Gibson’s best work. Pretty much the same for Sterling as well–though he didn’t have as many standout works before. Though, if I did have to pick one, Islands in the Net was a good book. Some clever biohacking in there.
I don’t normally defend the commic book people, but they had been pretty abused for decades and deserved some decent adaptations.
Well, large numbers of people would disagree with you about Gibson, some of his best reviewed work has been since 2000. I think Sterling has always been one of those writers with more ideas than plot, sort of like Cory, but I’ve liked some of his work.
I don’t grudge comics some exposure, but IMO they’re sucking up all the SF oxygen so that there’s little made that isn’t comic based, or ST/SW. I’ll admit I’m a curmudgeon, I hated Arrival too. Almost all the SF movies that aren’t franchises are time travel stories. Bah humbug!! I loved The Martian and Moon. Gravity was ok, but the science errors in a geek movie were unforgivable.
True, many people would disagree with me and that’s fine. I’m not a professional reviewer and I don’t have to pretend to understand what other people like. I have plenty of books to read, so not liking some authors hasn’t caused me any big harm. 
Oh, man, time travel stories. I think those must have been the first cliche SF genera. Probably because they traveled back before the other stories were written.
I’m curious how long the commic book adaptation trend will continue and if it’ll split off from the main trunk of SF–and create some space for SF to advance again.
What was the last non franchise SF movie that you enjoyed? I think, for me, it may have been Upside Down. (revies plot to make sure it wasn’t a time travel movie…) No, it’s clean.
I guess it was The Martian. I found Dr Strange to be unbearable, family dragged me. TV has been better, Westworld and The Expanse are superb, and Braindead was hysterical.
FWIW my rant against time travel is often repeated. The time travel, evil twin and amnesia tropes are the last refuge of the lame writer with no actual ideas, IMO. Of course at BBS that gets clever responses like “we’re all traveling in time, man, everything is time travel”.
I think we lost everyone. taps mic Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?
I want to say that Gravity was a good SF movie, but there’s all that imaginary friend stuff in it that makes me wonder what actually was supposed to have happened. Was she anoxic and dreaming it? Psychotic break? That part ruined it for me. It seemed more like a way to interefere with the viewers perception of the movie and less about her having this internal dialog. The way they did it made me think of The Sixth Sense where we never realized that you-know-who was dead the whole time. I kept wondering if I was supposed to figure out that he was actually real or something.
Edited to add spoiler tags now that I know how.
How about the Old Man’s War series? They have orbital drops. Even cooler because they do with wearing only unitards. Magic nanite space unitards, but basically high school wrestling gear–from space.
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I enjoyed Starship Troopers saw it twice in the theaters back in the day. Also, liked the Postman movie.
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Actually, no. The movie preserved exactly the parts of the novel it needed to preserve to take a swing at them. The movie ignores many things that are important to fans of the novel, but it reproduces the most important of the things that will irk a European-style leftist. It reproduces them with interpretation, so a serious fan of the book who did not perceive it as a mindbogglingly disgusting militarist-fascist manifesto will perhaps not recognize those elements.
Of course, this is relative to ones own political leanings. If you feel strongly about the philosophical statements in the book either way, you will not consider power armor or the sequence of events central to the book. And if you consider the ideas presented in the book to be equivalent (both morally and in their consequences) to fascism, you will not care that Heinlein goes to great lengths to claim that the people in ST’s future care about freedom and that this hypothetical society is not fascist.
Yes, I remember that, too. I can’t complain about satire being too obvious as long as there is a significant number of people who miss it.
“Starship Troopers’ take on moral philosophy”.
Nothing moral about it.
The thing is, American superhero movies do reasonably well in the European market as well, but over here in Austria, American superhero comics are completely unknown. I grew up a complete and total science fiction geek (my father had me read the Lensman series followed by the first few thousand pages of Perry Rhodan when I was 7), but I grew up thinking that Superman was a character from a 70s movie series and Batman a character from a 60s TV series. Nowadays I know plenty of fans of American superhero movies, but literally* no one (in Europe) who has ever read superhero comics.
Time travel can be used to drive interesting stories that are inherently based on the concept (as opposed to space war stories, which are just an excuse to have a war story that completely dehumanizes the enemy and does not stop to consider whether war can be avoided).
Unfortunately, in 90% of time travel stories, the main element that keeps the suspense going is that the time travelers are about to run out of time. Which makes no sense, given that they are supposed to have a time machine.
* While I am perfectly willing to defend the hyperbolic use of “literally”, I am using “literally” literally this time.
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Gravity was ok, coulda been worse. The science error in the “hanging by a thread” was egregious enough to put me off a bit. I mean if you’re going that realistic, get it right! BTW, if you click the gear symbol on the right side of the write window there’s a tool to blank out spoilers. Polite thing to do.
I don’t recall that being the issue with time travel, for me it’s the fact that it’s irreconcilable, it can simply never make sense and is just a tool to make other points, often not worthwhile. In TEFL Lazarus Long goes back in time and fucks his mother! Are we enlightened by that? The best TT movie was the comedy Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, which mocked the tropes.
I disagree with your depiction of space war stories, that’s just the bad ones. The good ones, like any good story, are balanced and thought provoking. Have you read Consider Phlebas? The war is between a post scarcity hedonistic society more or less ruled by AI’s and a self righteous society that resembles certain earth cultures. Banks wrote some of the smartest SF of recent times.
Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiran–Culture_War
The conflict was one of principles; the Culture went to war because the Idirans’ fanatical imperial expansion, justified on religious grounds, threatened the Culture’s “moral right to exist”. As the Culture saw it, the Idirans’ extending sphere of influence would prevent them from improving the lives of those in less-advanced societies, and thus would greatly curtail the Culture’s sense of purpose. As is the case with all major decisions, the decision on the part of the Culture to go to war was through direct vote of the entire population. Academics who have analysed Bank’s universe in comparison with real-world political thought have remarked that the decision of the Culture to go to war was a moral choice, rather than one of necessity, as the Culture could have easily avoided war.
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It has been about 20 years since I read the original, but I could swear that it ends with the main character getting rather disillusioned with the system, implying that the whole thing was supposed to be a dystopia not a philosophical treatise. I’m aware Heinlein’s politics were screwball, but not everything he wrote has to be considered as a manifesto. Particularly since I thought he leaned more right-wing-libertarian than right-wing-fascist.
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Nice. I remember enjoying the book but I didn’t know there was a series of sequels.
