Barbarella:
In 2007 Dino De Laurentiis was going to produce with Robert Rodriguez as the director. Rodriguez wanted his lady-love Rose McGowan to star as the sexy space cadet Barbarella. But Universal was not enjoying the casting move and didn't want to front the cash. Could McGowan pull off "sexy nubile blonde" as well as Jane Fonda? This April McGowan spilled that the project was still on (with her in the lead) and that a bunch of pre-production work (including set construction) had already been finished. Rodriguez just has to find a studio willing to put up the $82 million he needs.

Planet Terry:
A middle-aged scifi geek discovers he is actually an alien who has been placed on Earth as part of an intergalactic witness protection program. According to production sources it hasn't been canned yet and is still something that is in development, but couldn't say if director Brian Levant (Problem Child 2) was still attached to the project or not. The story was based on an online comic series by Rob Liefeld that has yet to premiere.

Ender's Game:
As we reported, director Wolfgang Peterson moved on to direct another Chartoff Production and Orson Scott Card is still at work crafting the adaptation of his novel into the screenplay (but the first draft is done). Filming has been pushed back to early 2009. Hurry up — I need to see my super-genius army made up of children battle it out in zero gravity. Oh, and death to all bugs.

Neuromancer:
Scripts for this film have been floating in space since 1999 but could never really find a director, Mel Gibson was once rumored to be attached to the project. In 2007 Peter Hoffman announced that he would be producing the adaptation of William Gibson's novel with a $70 million budget under director Joseph Kahn. Gibson was not pleased. In January of this year a rumor made the rounds that Hayden Christensen would be playing main character Case, but as of today no official announcement has been made. Don't you dare ruin our dark hacker Case, Hayden.

Fahrenheit 451:
Yet another scifi movie Mel Gibson tried to get his claws into. Gibson was rumored to direct the adaptation of Ray Bradbury's dystopian future novel, but now it's unclear on his position. A long list of celebrity men have been pursued for the role of Guy Montag, the book burning future fireman, including Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks (screenplay writer Frank Darabont recently stated that Hanks was no longer attached to the project.) Charlize Theron was another celeb attached to the project possibly as the free-thinking rebel Clarisse McClellan. Right now it has a release date of 2010 and no cast.

Rendezvous With Rama:
The idea to adapt the Arthur C. Clark novel has been kicked around since 2001, when Propaganda films were trying to give it wings. David Fincher (Zodiac) was announced as director this year. Morgan Freeman's production company, Revelations, owns the rights to the story and Freeman is slated as a cast member. But it's not clear yet if he will be one of the exploring spacemen checking out the sun-bound spaceship. But we hear that the draft is still getting tweaked by new writers, so it could be awhile before Rama sees the screen.

Diamond Age:
The Scifi channel announced in the beginning of 2007 a pairing with George Clooney's production company to create a scifi mini series based on Neil Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age: Or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. It was pitched as a 6-hour miniseries. Will we ever get to see the future of an overly conservative world, the future is uncertain.

With Reporting From Andrew Hudson

The sprawling saga that loses the thread is a more common problem in fantasy books than in science fiction — think the Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time, or Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books. But science fiction still has its own never-ending stories that really ought to end. Here are the biggest problems:

Changing the rules: When I first read To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer, I was incredibly excited by its story of an artificial planet where everybody who's ever lived comes back to life. Until I got to the end of the book and realized it was actually Book One in a long series, and none of my nagging questions about the resurrection planet, Riverworld, would be answered for another three or four books. I was even more annoyed when a friend of mine told me that Farmer changes the rules of Riverworld after the first book, to make it easier to keep spinning out tales. I think there my have been some book-throwing involved.

The heir apparent. As I mentioned, a reviewer coined the term "Herbert's Syndrome" in 1984, when Frank Herbert was still alive and had yet to publish his sixth Dune novel, Chapterhouse: Dune. The reviewer defined it as when "a large advance induces a good writer to extend a successful series beyond its natural span." You may have your own opinions about whether six Dune books were too many — but since Herbert's death, his son Frank and his collaborator Kevin J. Anderson have already written seven Dune books, with more on the way. Say it with me: "The cash must flow."

The neat trilogy that becomes a messy tetralogy, and more. The first two Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy books by Douglas Adams seemed pretty well-rounded, encompassing more or less the same arc as the original radio series and TV series. So I was a little nervous about the third book, Life, The Universe And Everything, but it was still a fun ride and seemed to move things forward. I was less thrilled by the fourth volume in what Adams called "the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's trilogy." So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, felt sort of anemic, as if Adams really didn't have any more ideas for the series, but he needed the Ningis. And then I think I read the fifth volume, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.

The need to explain the meaning of everything. Feminist science fiction blogger Liz Henry says this is where many series break down:

People write a series, and then they feel the need to finish it off and Explain it and they go all mystical and metaphysical. [They] try to solve every giant Burning Issue of Existence and good and evil, and why does the universe exist at all, and [the meaning of] utopia. So often, you get the underlying Manifesto or attempt to come up with a coherent philsopy of the author, but all too often, you sure wish they hadn't. By the time Herbert hits God Emperor of Dune, he has gone compeltely mad, trying to explain Everything, and there is no plot any more.

The random left turn. Isaac Asimov gave into fans' pressure, after a thirty-year gap, and started writing more Foundation novels again. And few would argue that Foundation's Edge or Foundation And Earth are in the same league as the original trilogy. One major problem: a slew of new characters, including one who's introduced right at the end of Foundation And Earth, who might have played a bigger role in a final Foundation book, had Asimov written one. But in the end, it just feels as though Asimov is floundering a bit, in the unnecessary sequels.

The miraculous save. In Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue series, there's a clan of women and children who become language experts, and learn a ton of alien languages so they can serve as translators. But over time, they create their own secret language that the men don't understand. Which is great, but then in the third book, suddenly the women discover that they can eat sounds. They can survive by ingesting noises — sort of like a plant's photosynthesis, except noisier.

The shrinking protagonist. Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books become less and less fun, as his roguish protagonist, Slippery Jim DiGriz, becomes more and more of a pussycat. But worse yet is when we get a new protagonist whose story cheapens our original hero, like Bean in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow.

To be fair, why shouldn't novels go on and on and on? It's what movies do, with their endless sequels. And TV series — who really thinks Smallville deserves an eighth season? On the other hand, the thing that makes novels superior to other media is the fact that they have a single author, who puts his/her stamp on them. When that one person runs out of ideas, the novels themselves start to deflate.

With TV, movies, comics and other media, as long as the corporate copyright-holder can find another Akiva Goldsman or Roberto Orci to spin out a new idea, you can have endless installments. In theory, no TV series ever needs to go stale, as long as the writers have the grace to leave when they run out of ideas. (Which almost never happens.) It's a bit harder with books though — and I like picking up a novel and discovering a new universe for the first time.

Aiguille Delaz from Gundam 0083. This strategic genius chose to pull out of the battle of A Baou Qu, the last stand of the One Year War. Instead, he massed his forces in a makeshift headquarters in the middle of a debris field, and prepared his masterplan. Operation Stardust involved having a pilot steal an experimental nuclear-armed Gundam warsuit. Delaz shows off the nuclear-armed warsuit, which proves the corruption of the Earth Federation, and then goads the Federation into showing off its strength in a set of space maneuvers that leave it vulnerable to the nuke — which destroys two-thirds of the fleet.

Ender Wiggin, from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series. Starting out as a laser-tag champion, he gets more and more badass until he becomes the greatest space strategist in history. He thinks he's just fighting a series of simulated battles, but he's actually giving orders to real Earth ships dispatched decades earlier — and he comes up with the crazy risk-taking strategy that destroys the "Bugger" homeworld and pretty much wipes out their species.

Kara Thrace aka Starbuck — You can talk about what a great leader Adama is, or how good Admiral Cain was at coming up with the craziest, most bat-shit strategies to confuse her enemies. But the craziest person on Battlestar Galactica is also the craftiest — just look at the plan Starbuck comes up with to distract the cylon basestars away from the resurrection ship using decoys. The basestars get distracted, and then Galactica and Pegasus take them on. And then Lee's stealth ship takes out that all-important get-out-of-death-free card for those cylons. Rawk!

John Christian Falkenberg, a CoDominium naval officer turned mercenary created by Jerry Pournelle for the CoDominium future history series. He's sort of a space tactician, even though most of the battles he fights are on the ground on various planets where the colonists are rising up. He's frequently facing superior numbers of better-armed insurgents, and has to use a mixture of blitzkrieg tactics and fighting dirty to pull out a victory.

Grand Admiral Thrawn from the Star Wars novels. The blue-skinned red-eyed Imperial Thrawn was already a chessmaster of space battle when the Empire fell in Return Of The Jedi. But after the Empire had collapsed in a rain of Ewok claws, Thrawn rebuilt a small fleet around his Imperial Star Destroyer and set about trying to retake the galaxy. He found a supply of clone troopers, recruited a rogue Jedi, and managed to control half the galaxy. He tricked the Jedi scum into thinking Coruscant was blockaded by totally imaginary space mines, and managed to assemble a formidable fleet out of almost nothing. His only downfall came from understimating the bun-clad head of Princess Leia. Also from Star Wars, there's Admiral Ackbar, who can recognize a trap when he sees one.

Captain Benjamin Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Trek is full of great tacticians, including a never-ending parade of admirals who only exist on video screens. But Sisko gets his hands dirty — sometimes literally — in planning all the big battles against the Dominion. His finest moment was probably planning Operation Return, the huge assault by 624 starships to retake Deep Space Nine. He had to convince one of those stuffed-shirt admirals that DS9 was a higher strategic priority than defending Earth, because DS9 controlled the wormhole, the key to the quandrant. Faced with a solid wall of Dominion and Cardassian ships, Sisko had to play a game of wits with Cardassian leader Gul Dukat, trying to trick the Cardassians into opening a hole in their lines. Dukat saw through Sisko's strategy and tried to set a counter-trap, but Sisko managed to use Dukat's trap to push through. Here's the fleet Sisko was commanding:

Donal Graeme from the Childe Cycle of novels by Gordon R. Dickson. He's an "intuitive superman" with a superb grasp of battle tactics. He's also a master of deception (notice a theme here?). In one campaign, he tricks the enemy into landing on a planet to engage a massive ground force — only to find that the ground force is an illusion. They're trapped on the planet, with Donal's forces threatening to bomb them from orbit unless they surrender.

Captain John Sheridan from Babylon 5. One of the most cunning fighters in the Earth-Minbari war, Sheridan took out the Minbari's biggest ship by mining asteroids with nuclear weapons. In "Endgame," he has to outwit General Lefcourt, his former mentor, who can anticipate all of his moves, including a diversionary ground assault on Mars. But Lefcourt fails to anticipate Sheridan's tactic of having telepaths disable all of Lefcourt's ships.

Just remember, you may think all these discussions about space battle tactics are purely academic, but some people out there are already thinking about how to kick ass in space for realz.

Note: this thread on the Bad Universe and Astronomy Today forums was really helpful in thinking about this post. Some really good stuff there, check it out.

Producer Lynn Hendee was mum on possible casting for the movie's lead role. "We all have our favorites, but it is crucial for the new director to weigh in on that." But she did reveal that author Card has finished a draft of the script and is "already working to make it even better." Hendee predicts that much of the film will be shot on a sound stage. "Ender's Game requires an extended pre-production due to the many visual effects." And by visual effects we hope they mean shooting the off-the-wall battle school zero gravity scenes. Who would you pick for child commander/war lord Ender?

We know for sure the first game will be based on one of the games that Ender plays during his training, but the company wants to turn this into a series, and eventually they're going to have to tell some sort of a story. Of course, in the book, the game is literally everything.

In the novel, Ender Wiggin is selected at the age of six to attend the Battle School, which the military uses with the hopes that they'll one day train a great military leader who will lead the fight against the "Buggers," an insect-like race that is at war with the humans. They do this by teaching via video games and simulations, and without spoiling things, those become extremely important. Games range from simulations computers, to what amounts to zero-gravity versions of Laser Tag.

Warners is developing the movie with Wolfgang Peterson at the helm, but they abandoned work on the game that usually accompanies every big scifi film these days. Does that mean they couldn't crack the idea and decided to leave it up to someone else? If you've read the book, you'd probably say yes.

Ender's Game In The Works [Sci Fi Wire]

• It's a formula. Any storytelling formula is going to be lame. Any. Of course, Campbell didn't think he was prescribing a formula. He thought he was describing the pattern that's inherent in all the great stories. But over time, lazy writers like George Lucas have used it as a checklist. It's just as boring as the video game where you have the level bosses and then you have the big boss at the end. Except in the "Journey," it's the guardians of adventure, followed by the "dragon," followed by the final battle.
• It discourages originality. By the same token, if you claim that every great story is really just the same great story with surface changes, you're encouraging people to plagiarize the hell out of old stories. Instead of championing stories that are different, like say, Firefly/Serenity or James Robinson's Starman, you're tempted to call a schlock-fest like the original Star Wars "mythic" because it's about a hero who's singled out.
• Why is one hero so special anyway? The hero doesn't just get the "call to adventure" because everyone's getting it. He gets it because he's the most important person alive, with the most special skillz or the biggest brain. Everybody who's not him sucks and should go away. It plays into people's fantasies that they're secretly amazing, without having to work for it. But for those of us who aren't Ender Wiggin or Luke Skywalker, it's just pointless. What about a hero who's the greatest because she decides not to put up with the shit that everybody else is putting up with? What about a group of people who decide to work together to change the crappy status quo?
• The "hero" is always a d00d. Why does the hero encounter the goddess halfway through? Because she's hawt and he's a guy. If the hero was a chick, would the goddess be a dude? Somehow we doubt it.
• It's cheesy as hell. Here are some choice New Age-y quotes from Campbell. Sample quote: "Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again." Woah, dude. I just felt my crystals vibrate a little. Campbell also appears to be the inventor of the phrase "follow your bliss."
• He shoehorned a lot of myths into his theory. Campbell himself writes, in Thousand Faces, that he's not interested in exploring the differences between myths, just the similarities. In other words, he looked for whatever similarities he could find and overlooked any differences as "variations" in his monomyth. He also ignored countries outside the Indo-European tradition, like East Asia and Africa.
• It confuses personal growth with solving problems. Sometimes in order to defeat a great evil, you have to learn an important personal lesson and grow as a person. But often, you don't. Oftentimes, defeating a great evil just requires fighting like hell and doing what has to be done, and there's no time to meet the goddess or touch your magic wand or any of that stuff. Campbell's monomyth is unrealistic and spreads the idea that war is therapy.

In a fight between a Jedi and yourself, who would win?

Easily, it's always going to be the ninja! It was a bad idea for Lucas to go with the samurai model. Samurais were basically like the fashion models of ancient Japan. The ninjas actually had the skills. Plus Jedis are fictional. Ninjas are real.

Well that trumps our lightsaber question, then.

No, lightsabers are actual real things! We actually wield lightsabers, but we don't just stop there. We got lots of things made out of light, light-shurikens, light-chuks... which are not just lightweight, but they're also just made of light. You do have to be pretty careful when you hold those.

Okay, Ninja vs. Beowulf?

You know, I think Beowulf is kind of like the Chuck Norris of the ancient world, so he's an ally of the ninja. He's old English and old school, give Beowulf his props.

There's a film called I Am Legend coming out where Will Smith is the last man on earth. How would it be if the Ninja was the last man on earth?

You know, I liked it better when it was called Omega Man. Doesn't it seem like it's awfully familiar? You know, the ninja is very kill-sufficient minded, he doesn't just go killing willy-nilly, I don't think the ninja would let it happen. But the Ninja did kill Chilly Willy. He doesn't like penguins. He was a penguinja, actually.

What's more threatening to ninjakind, global warming or oppressive government regimes?

You know, it's more going to be the government regimes, because stupidity is what's behind that. The ninjas are actually stopping global warming by 23% through sheer intimidation alone. We're going and just staring at polar ice caps and daring them to melt.

If you're going to kick back on a Sunday afternoon and watch something science fiction related, what would it be?

Well, a better question is about what I'm doing that's scifi related. I'm actually getting all of the Orson Scott Card books made into movies, secretly, and I'm going to release them all at once as a 72 hour movie. The whole Ender's series, and the Shadow/Bean series.

Will there be ninjas in it at all?

Maybe! I mean who else could pull off all of those stunts?

So can you guarantee that everyone at this live show will have a good time tonight?

Absolutely! If you complain you'll get killed. Anyone that enjoys the show will make it home safely. Maybe.