The Lost World (1925)

There have been many movie adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel, but for our money, the original is still the best, thanks to some pretty amazing stop-motion animation showing dinosaurs trashing London. The groundbreaking special effects, by Willis O'Brien, gave rise to later classics like the original King Kong — and O'Brien trained Ray Harryhausen. This is also the only Lost World adaptation that Conan Doyle seems to have approved of personally. The whole thing is on Youtube, and here's the climax — skip to about 4:58 for the beginning of the dinosaur-rampage awesomeness.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

Sure, it's a Disney movie, and it's got Kirk Douglas singing "A Whale Of A Tale." But it also has James Mason's understated, creeptastic performance as Captain Nemo, full of subtle menace. And the special effects still look pretty breathtaking, even 55 years later. Most of all, it captures the wonder and boundless curiosity of Verne's book.

Fahrenheit 451

The original film version of Ray Bradbury's book-burning classic is a vivid, lurid masterpiece — I saw it as a kid, and it still sticks in my mind. But what did Bradbury think? He wrote, in the introduction to one edition of the novel:

And what do I think of the film?

I have heard those cries in the past of outraged authors whose books have just been gang-raped by a studio.

Such is not the case, luckily, with me.

I think that Truffaut has captured the soul and essence of the book. He has been careful and subtle in his shadings and motions. He has escaped making a technological James Bond film, and made, instead, the love story of, not a man and a woman, but a man and a library, a man and a book. An incredible love story indeed in this day when libraries, once more, are burning across the world.

I am very grateful.

Clockwork Orange

According to Wikipedia (although it's not sourced), original novelist Anthony Burgess felt Stanley Kubrick's film was brilliant — but almost too brilliant for our own safety. Whether Burgess really said that, he'll get no argument from the hordes of people who've loved this uncompromising, brutal look at hooligans and social control in a dystopian future. It's Kubrick at the top of his game, honoring and transforming the source material. (Note: We considered including 2001 as well, but since the book was written after the movie, we decided against.)

Blade Runner

Yes, this film takes some liberties with Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" But it's also one of the best reflections of Dick's constant paranoia and flood-of-weirdness storytelling methods. And of course, Dick himself wrote an ecstatic letter praising this film's vision and his belief that it would re-energize science fiction altogether.

1984 (1984)

It was almost required that this year would see a movie based on the famous George Orwell novel. Thank goodness this one didn't commit the thought crime of bastardizing Orwell's story of a totalitarian society that controls its subjects with constant surveillance and "newspeak." It's worth tracking the director's cut DVD which restores Michael Radford's original bleak color pallette and the original orchestral score (with no Eurythmics.)

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Of all the Dracula films throughout the years, Francis Ford Coppola's version came closest to capturing the original novel's darkness, with Gary Oldman making for a captivating Dracula. The whole affair drips with sensuality, thanks to some incredibly beautiful designs. (Screencaps from DVDBeaver.)

Handmaid's Tale

This was a troubled production, in which the original director dropped out and screenwriter Harold Pinter washed his hands of the thing. That meant that original novelist Margaret Atwood, among others, stepped in to revise the screenplay. Despite the problems, the resulting film preserves the key themes of Atwood's novel, about a fundamentalist culture in which many women are infertile and the few fertile women are given to high-ranking couples to give birth to their heirs. More importantly, it's a harrowing, weird epic.

Lord Of The Rings

Peter Jackson takes some liberties with J.R.R. Tolkien's epic three-volume novel, but nobody would deny that the resulting movie trilogy really is epic, and really does convey just why so many of us fell in love with these books in the first place. The full-length DVD versions of all three movies will take you the better part of a day to watch, but it's an absorbing story and never loses the feeling of great events taking place.

Call Of Cthulhu

This 2005 silent movie comes the closest of all the many H.P. Lovecraft adaptations of doing a straight-up recreation of Lovecraft's world. The campiness and cheekiness are kept to a minimum, and in their place, you see only the pure majesty of Cthulhu. The Old Ones are, the Old Ones were, the Old Ones shall be, indeed.

Children Of Men

We debated whether to include this one, since it makes such a radical alteration to the book's storyline — in the book, it's men, not women, who are infertile. But this, and several other drastic changes from P.D. James' book, don't detract from the fact that director Alfonso Cuarón crafts a pretty gripping film in its own right, which preserves the dystopian feel and obsession with reproduction from the book. And the film's use of long, single-shot sequences in which huge events feel like they're happening all around you, makes it hard to forget afterwards. Here's a video about the making of the film, including those amazing long takes. And apparently, James herself was happy with it.

A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick has probably had more of his books adapted to films than any other SF author — but Richard Linklater's film version of his undercover narc tripfest does the best possible job of giving you an audiovisual tour of Dick's universe. Watching this film, you feel as though you begin to understand what it might have been like to be Philip K. Dick — which is terrifying in itself.

We've collected various book covers from a number of classic science fiction novels to see how different artists have interpreted the same book. The covers are sometimes surprisingly pulpy, others are elegantly minimalist, and still others are variations on the same theme. Some of these are actual covers from various editions of the books, and some are concept designs created by individuals — on spec, for a class project, or just for fun. Bear in mind that a few of the actual book covers may not be work-safe.

1984 by George Orwell:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury:

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham:

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick:

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick:

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood:

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov:

John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Neuromancer by William Gibson:

We by Yevgeny Zamyain:

The Space Merchants by by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth:

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess:

War of the Worlds by HG Wells:

Roth has declared the novel all but doomed, saying that within 25 years, its audience will have dwindled to a "cultic" minority, going the way of Latin poetry and similar archaic art forms. The issue, he says, is that books simply can't compete with television and other screen-based entertainment.

He said it was "the print that's the problem, it's the book, the object itself". "To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it's hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities," he said.

Of course, others don't have such dire predictions for the fate of written literature. Just a few weeks ago, we spoke to writer Cory Doctorow about the future of the novel, and his view was that the web actually increases interest in and access to print novels.

Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult within 25 years [Guardian via Bookninja]

Talking to SciFi Wire, Darabont - also known for writing the screenplays for The Green Mile and The Shawshank RedemptionIndiana Jones screenplay ever - explained that his planned adaptation is currently awaiting judgment:

Fahrenheit is the thing I'm trying to get up next, which is casting-dependent, so it's one of those. [The script is] out to somebody at the moment, fingers crossed, because, boy, do I want to make that movie. I'm not giving up. I'll die in the traces before I don't make that movie... it's not one of those movies that are vastly expensive by any contemporary standard, but money is still money, and it's of a price that requires somebody that will justify that investment.

It all depends on the involvement of one bankable, but currently unnamed, movie star.

(Our bet? George Clooney. Don't ask us why, he just seems like the type of man we could see wanting to star in a Fahrenheit 451 movie, for some reason.)

While Darabont isn't about to give up, he does have a deadline in mind for the movie's birth... and we mean that literally:

I promised myself that it would at least go into production while Ray Bradbury were still with us... It's not like I think he's going to leave tomorrow, but he's not getting any younger.

We hope that the movie has a little more subtlety than that, personally.

Why director Frank Darabont says it's make-or-break time for his Fahrenheit 451 movie [SciFi Wire]

It's happened to all of us. We read a novel that blows us away, and a few years later its title appears on posters underneath the face of Harrison Ford or Natalie Portman. But at some inevitable point in that darkened theater, the movie takes a turn we didn't expect. Our eyebrows go up, our lips turn down, and the disappointment begins. Maybe the wrong director or writer can curse an otherwise excellent project — or maybe some things were just never meant to be filmed. Here are 10 books that we think should never have been committed to celluloid.

DUNE by Frank Herbert

There's no doubt about it: Herbert's Dune is a bona fide classic. It won the first ever Nebula award and the 1966 Hugo award, and most consider it to be the best-selling sci-fi novel in history. Set in a future where a feudal empire controls the planets of the unvierse, the novel tells the story of young nobleman Paul Atreides and his family's rule of the desert planet Arrakis. Arrakis is the only source of "melange," an addictive spice that lengthens lives and makes interstellar travel possible. Herbert's book explores the power struggles that arise around the spice, and the complexity of human society that exists even in the far future.

Big shoes to fill for a film producer. Yet in 1984 David Lynch wrote and directed a movie version of Dune, rescuing it from development hell and plunging it into bad-adaptation hell. Reviews panned the movie — Roger Ebert deemed it "the worst movie of the year," and others expressed similar disgust. Despite the movie's 40-million-dollar budget, its effects were notably cheap, and the screenplay did not hold up to the challenge of translating a four-hundred-page book to screen. You'd think you couldn't go wrong with Patrick Stewart, Sting, and Jürgen Prochnow, but evidently you very much can.

FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury

Who could forget Fahrenheit 451, "the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns …"? Bradbury's classic 1953 novel takes place in a dystopian future where television has entirely replaced the printed word, and firemen burn books instead of saving lives. The author himself has stated that the point of the story was to showcase how owning a TV set can destroy all interest in literature — so making a movie version seems pretty damn ballsy to say the least.

With that in mind, the 1966 film, helmed by French icon François Truffaut, seems doomed from the start. It certainly didn't help that there were many notable omissions, like the disappearance of the novel's nuclear war (which is, let's face it, a pretty big cut). Julie Christie plays the main character's wife and his illicit lover, which adds an extra level of pointless weirdness. The bottom line is, there are plenty of books for which you can tell your friends to "just watch the movie." But in the case of Fahrenheit 451, that probably makes you kind of fascist. Just sayin'.

V FOR VENDETTA by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

The book is probably one of the best graphic novels ever produced. Detailing the adventures of a masked anarchist and his sweet blond protégée, Moore's writing also delves far deeply beyond his two main characters into complex themes of fascism, anarchy, identity, and the meaning of life itself. Nobody is without a story to tell: Even his villains are creepily sympathetic. By the end of the comic, every reader will have at least one Lloyd image burned in their brain, and be wondering — with no small amount of fear — exactly how much control their government does have.

Enter the movie. For the Wachowski brothers, the boys who gave us the two-thirds-sucky Matrix trilogy, setting this story to film was easy. They just had to cut out all of the character depth, change Moore's nuanced portrayal of British fascism to the cookie-cutter Hollywood standby of Suited White Men, and (of course) turn the subtle, understated relationship of the main characters into romantic pining. But hey, at least they got the costume right.

A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeleine L'Engle

Though it's often marketed as a young-adult fantasy novel, make no mistake: This book is without a doubt a sci-fi classic for all generations, an incredible tale that deftly blends science, speculation, and humanity. L'Engle's 1962 story invented the concept of a "tesseract" — the fifth dimension, a phenomenon that folds the fabric of space and time. It introduced a mother who cooks dinner on a Bunsen burner, a father whose research leaves him imprisoned on another planet, and a brother and sister whose loving relationship turns out to be the most important thing in the universe.

Mostly we make an effort to ignore it, but it's true: Many of the great sci-fi writers were (and are) better at dreaming up nifty science ideas than they were at weaving together a compelling story. L'Engle, however, belongs in no such group. Her work was never meant to be a crappy Disney movie, and yet in 2003, a crappy Disney made-for-TV adaptation appeared that one critic described as "lightweight, saccharine, rather slow going most of the way, and somewhat simplistic" as well as "sometimes clunky, and... often uninspiring". Let us speak no more about it.

THE MINORITY REPORT by Philip K. Dick

Dick's 1956 short story introduced the chilling concept of "precrime," a police system whose officers arrest would-be murderers, rapists, and thieves before they get a chance to do their dirty deeds. His futuristic New York City is a world where three future-seeing mutants control who goes to prison and who doesn't, and free will is a gray area — a luxury that not everyone possesses. One veteran cop, after seeing a prediction that he will kill someone he doesn't even know, is having none of it.

So what did Steven Spielberg's 2002 movie add, besides a gross eye transplant? Well, for one, it brought in Tom Cruise — balding, out-of-shape 50-year-olds are never attractive narrators as far as Hollywood's concerned, no matter what they might be able to share with us in real life. The setting's different, too, and names have been changed, but at least it presents the idea with a lot more nifty special effects and a lot less storytelling, right? And that, my friends, is frighteningly endemic of the print-to-film adaptation.

I, ROBOT by Isaac Asimov

This is a revolutionary sci-fi classic, a collection of nine short stories exploring the limitations and dangers of human-created artificial intelligence. Asimov's 1950 publication of I, Robot established the Three Laws of Robotics, supposedly unbreakable rules which govern the actions of these metal beings, and his short stories read like the best sci-fi mind puzzles you will ever find.

2004's movie adaptation was undeniably well done, and it ended up being one of the best of the year — due in no small part to Jeff Vintar's tight script and the total awesomeness of Will Smith and Chi McBride. Asimov certainly meant to get us thinking, so one could imagine he'd be pleased that his work inspired a smart sci-fi thriller like this. As it happens, however, the main plot of the movie is actually lifted from a 1939 short story by Eando Binder that bears the same name; Asimov's publisher gave his collection the same title, against Asimov's wishes. The Three Laws of Robotics were only added to the script after the film's producers secured the rights to Asimov's anthology. This project, then, has been plagued from the beginning by intellectual property snafus: It's a confused collaboration of several minds, and it seems that not all the minds involved were properly credited. And since it's caused most of the problems, can we let go of that title already?

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edwin Balmer

It's a crusty old staple of hard sci-fi, a 1933 novel that first saw print as a magazine serial. Wylie and Balmer's story begins with a South African astronomer, Sven Bronson, who discovers that a pair of rogue planets are headed for Earth's orbit. Only a small group of scientists believe his claim; they work to build two ships that will carry the beginnings of a new human settlement to one of the rogue planets, which is projected to replace Earth in its orbit. This is the kind of pre-NASA speculation that works best in old-fashioned typewriter font on yellowed paper.

But of course, Hollywood felt the need to put it in Technicolor. The film adaptation did win an Oscar for special effects, but it was 1951, so you decide for yourself if that's impressive. The movie's story doesn't so much explore sci-fi ideas as showcase human hysteria when tidal waves sweep the Earth and survivors are chosen by lottery — and it naturally also allows for the most groan-worthy of romance subplots. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the way the film's hero pushes his handicapped financier off the boarding ramp as the ship leaves, despite the fact that he funded the entire project. "Politically incorrect" doesn't begin to cover it. Apparently there's a remake of the film scheduled for a 2010 release — isn't one mistake supposed to teach you a lesson?

STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert Heinlein

War sucks, and Heinlein proved it with his 1960 Hugo-award-winning novel. Told from the point of view of Johnnie Rico, a young soldier, this futuristic tale explores a world where only veterans can vote or hold public office — and where humankind battles endlessly with giant bugs. Rico's flashbacks to his time at school, and his experiences in the military, serve to illustrate the total destruction that war causes.

In the book, the bugs barely ever appear; Rico views them only through a giant battle suit. For the 1997 film adaptation, though, that was not an option — after all, there ain't a moviegoer born of woman who doesn't want to see giant grasshoppers. Special effects left little screen time for Heinlein's philosophy discussions, but director Paul Verhoeven admitted he never got past the first few chapters of the novel anyway. If he hated the story that much, what do you think was keeping him from writing and directing his own friggin' screenplay?

THE POSTMAN by David Brin

Originally published as two novellas (both of which won Hugo awards), this post-apocalyptic story grapples with the concepts of survivalism, civilization, and hope. In a world destroyed not by disasters but by its own people, one man discovers a worn-out United States Postal Service uniform — and discovers that his fellow humans are so desperate they'll even take hope from that. The complete novel, published as the two novellas combined, was named the best science fiction novel of the year in 1986 in the John W. Campbell awards.

And then Kevin Costner decided to direct and star in a film adaptation. The 1997 story, while still broadcasting a message of hope, centered that message more around the Postman as a war hero — and don't forget his tagalong baby mama. The New York Times blasted the movie for its "bogus sentimentality" and "mawkish jingoism," but Roger Ebert warned that we "shouldn't blame them for trying." Well, I think perhaps we should.

THIS ISLAND EARTH by Raymond F. Jones

The year 1952, I'm sure, saw many new creations in sci-fi, but I'm willing to bet that almost none of them were as silly as the interociter — an alien transmission device, which despite its apparent sophistication is about as big as a truck. Jones gave us the interociter in his novel This Island Earth, which told of an alien race that recruited Earth's greatest thinkers for a group called the "Peace Engineers." Not surprisingly, the "Peace Engineers" were actually helping the aliens wage an intergalactic war. On a planet that had already seen the genius of 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, this should not have seemed a good candidate for a film adaptation.

Since the movie version of This Island Earth now gets most of its viewings in the form of Mystery Science Theater 3000's lampoon, the folly of bringing it to film is assured. Plastic skulldomes, toilet thrones, and raspberry bushes are not the stuff of eternal movie classics. Before you adapt a book, my advice is to run it through a quick Mike-Joel-Crow-Tom Servo test. You might be surprised how much money you save on camera equipment and actors.

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

Below is the Eastern State Penitentiary, where our crazed antihero is sent in 12 Monkeys. Built as a reformist prison by Quakers in the nineteenth century, it was supposed to "cure" people of criminality by isolating them in monk-like cells. Unfortunately, it just made people crazier. The peeling paint looks almost like rotting skin.

And here is the forbidding Alton Estate, used in book-burning dystopia Fahrenheit 451. Though these buildings were originally considered stately and regal, you can see why the filmmakers thought they might also look like the barracks-like housing of a fascist country.

Want to see a dozen more intriguing scifi film settings? Check out Oobject's gallery.

Artist Harald Belker created this red racer as a piece of concept art for a Fahrenheit 451 feature film that was canceled after a few weeks of development. It's a shame too, because we would have bought the toy version of this firetruck for sure. We just hope that all those rounded edges don't mean they'll be cutting corners when it comes to safety.

We thought fires in the future would be fought with foam-dispensing hoverpods and wormhole-powered oxygen suppression systems, but if the engines are going to look this great, then by all means keep all four wheels on the ground.

He claims that George Bush and the day and age of the Patriot Act have made this novel more important today than the day it was published, more than 50 years ago, and he's going to set it "50 years from today — whenever today is." Which means it could be 1950, 2000, or 2050. As long as he doesn't turn it into some sort of futuristic utopia in trouble, a la Minority Report or AI, we're all for it.

Of course that means we'll have to forgive leading man Tom Hanks for The DaVinci Code. We're fairly open minded, but that haircut ... ouch.

'Fahrenheit 451' Director Insists Book Is 'More Relevant Today,' Hopes To Shoot Adaptation In 2008 [MTV]