ACE TRUCKING CO FTW :D
Seriously would be best movie ever, better yet series, you could stuff your firefly up your bum lol
The best sci-fi film never made: Also-rans take a bow
We're obliged to all those readers who took the time to throw over their nominations for the best sci-fi film never made, and we're delighted to report that we've whittled the contenders down to a final 50. We simply waded through all your emails and comments and picked those titles which had received the most support. On …
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Tuesday 19th April 2011 11:48 GMT James Hughes 1
Please God
Not the Heinlein 'classic' The Number of the Beast. I read a lot of SF, and that is perhaps the worst pile of tripe I have ever had the misfortune of reading. Even now, many years later, the phrase "Gay Bounce" brings back tears of pain. A truly terrible book. I only read the whole thing because I thought that at some stage it would get better. It didn't.
'Startide Rising' on the other hand, I'd vote for that.
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Tuesday 19th April 2011 14:15 GMT Tom 13
Number of the Beast isn't Heinlein's worst, only his second worst.
His absolute worst is that piece of crap "Fear No Evil" which made me give up trying to read anything else he ever wrote.
Either way, making Heinlein movies into books is a bad move. If they make a good movie out of one of his bug hunt books, his acolytes complain they made it into a bug hunt. If they make anything else he wrote, audiences will ask WTF?
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Tuesday 19th April 2011 15:35 GMT Ian Michael Gumby
Heinlein requires one to develop a certain taste in his works....
If you look at his stories, some are really good, like the 'Moon is a harsh Mistress'.
But others like 'The cat who could walk through walls' also goes in to his 'series' of stories that play around 'The number of the Beast' story line. And then there are other authors who also wrote about alternative universes. Zelanzy ?sp? is another one.
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Wednesday 20th April 2011 13:43 GMT Tom 13
It's been ages since I read "Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
I recall it as being one of his readable books, but also one of the warning signs. IIRC, at the end of the book he didn't know how to handle one of the primary characters from the thick of the plot, so he killed him off. But it really was "Fear No Evil" that put him on my permanent Do Not Read list. Not a thoughtful experiment, just badly written soft porn.
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Tuesday 19th April 2011 23:54 GMT Jolyon Smith
Fear No Evil and Number of the Beast
Number of the Beast was written as a demonstration of bad writing. It backfired because it is actually one of Heinlein's most enjoyable read's imho. Not his best writing, that's for sure, and not his most serious work, but damned good fun.
Fear No Evil was also thoroughly enjoyable purely as a thought experiment... the very embodiment of the "what if" nature of science fiction.
I have to go now... the black hats are coming....
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Tuesday 19th April 2011 13:31 GMT Svantevid
@Peter Gathercole
"I recognise almost all of them, and have read more than half!"
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Right with you, brother... although I'm slightly lesser geek: recognised only two thirds of them, and read slightly less than half of the list.
This means I'll have several weeks of sleepless nights, until I read everything on the list.
You bastards. :-)
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Tuesday 19th April 2011 12:59 GMT Tom 260
Length
I'd say you'd struggle to fit one of those books into a 10 hour epic, the Reality Dysfunction trilogy (which I assume has made it into the final shortlist) weighs in at 1200 pages per tome, and something on the order of 20-30 main characters. Mindstar is a little smaller and more manageable though, so this would be an easier option, and given its post-Warming setting, somewhat apt for the modern audience.
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Tuesday 19th April 2011 18:40 GMT Dr Dan Holdsworth
So go for a novella
The Charlie Stross novella "The Concrete Jungle" would be a decent enough one to go for, since you're not going to be dropping a huge amount of new info onto the viewer. So, the Government has departments so secret not even the politicians know about them. OK, and a sci-fi weapons system that relied upon CCTV? So that's why we've got so much of it, eh?
The key here is to involve the viewer in the action quickly, and drop info onto them fairly slowly without too much in the way of info-dumping. Granted the public are then going to want some more of the same regarding Bob Howard, and really there isn't all that much more of his adventures which you can shove into the brain of the average movie-goer without leaving them reeling from shock (although I would like to see the "James Bond on a budget" customised Smart car).
This is the problem with most sci-fi; the average film viewer just does not understand how physics in a vacuum works, so a trick like accelerating an asteroid at a planetary system from a few billion miles away, then exploding it to create a huge, rapidly moving cloud of debris that is just right for clobbering anything in orbit around the planet just won't work. The average viewer thinks "Right, it blew up, it has gone". To correct this you end up doing "Physics for dummies" which isn't enjoyable.
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Wednesday 20th April 2011 08:14 GMT Rattus Rattus
@Dr Dan Holdsworth
I really wish sci-fi films didn't get made with the public in mind at all. They won't appreciate good sci-fi, so why turn out shitty action flicks with a slight sci-fi flavour for them? I'd rather see sci-fi get made just for a niche audience - ie those who understand enough to appreciate good sci-fi.
It won't make a killing at the box office, though, so it'll never happen. Maybe someone should let execs know just how much geeks are willing to spend on a show if it's really good - first in the cinema, then buying the BluRay, any merchandising, etc. Over time, that'd add up to be way more than box office takings alone ever could.
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Tuesday 19th April 2011 19:04 GMT AdamWill
Hamilton
Hamilton's stuff would work much better as a US-style 26-episode series, though the budget would have to be ridiculous. Something like what they're doing with A Game Of Thrones at the moment. If it were done right for any of his big series it could work really, really well.
Though the length is slightly misleading as the way he writes lends itself extremely well to editing: there are always tons and tons of sub-plots that aren't strictly vital to the central story, and you can cut out as many as you need while the overall flavour and thrust of the story remains the same.
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Tuesday 19th April 2011 11:50 GMT Willington
Ooh
Only 3 Banks novels in this list which leaves at least 4 others (from what I remember in the comments) in contention for the top 50. What will you do after the final vote is cast? Are you going to stump up some cash for the winning movie to be made? No? Oh well... maybe someone with the influence to make it happen will get to see the results, you never know.
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Tuesday 19th April 2011 12:06 GMT lglethal
Read the article again please...
The pole was for the greatest sci-fi films NEVER made. I.e. those books people believe would be awesome when turned into a film. And the rule was that none of the stories could have previously been turned into a film (no matter how badly the first time)...
Fail on your reading comprehension...
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