The Fiction: The Motorway

In Martha's second trip on the TARDIS in the new Doctor Who, the Doctor takes her to New New York. Much like its present-day namesake, this city is trapped by traffic.

In fact, the only living residents of the city have been stuck in a quagmire called "the Motorway" for decades, all trying to get to a better place. Some even resort to kidnapping so that they can drive in the HOV lanes, which they've heard can cut years off their travel time. Once Martha is kidnapped she finds out they'll make it the ten miles to their destination in a short six years.

The Reality: Traffic and congestion.

It's been said that Americans spend an average of over 100 hours a year commuting, so it's no wonder that scientists are constantly trying to find ways to improve the driving experience. Writers are always imagining new ways for their heroes to get from point A to point B. But how many of those writer's dreams are coming true? Read on.

The fiction: Computer driven cars

Seen in: I, Robot
Pros: You can read, nap, or solve crimes while you're traveling. Accident cleanup is a snap.
Cons: Should the computer system decide to become murderous, you're in a lot of trouble.

The Reality: The Darpa Challenge

(image courtesy of the Team VictorTango website)

DARPA presents prizes to teams creating cars that drive on their own using "various sensors and positioning systems." Their 2007 challenge asked the vehicles to navigate an urban environment and "executing simulated military supply missions while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles." Three and a half million dollars in prizes were awarded and six teams finished the course.

The Fiction: Mag-Lev Cars

Seen In: Minority Report
Pros: You can pave everything and make it a road, giving D.C. residents as many lanes than they could ever want. Pull right up to your 200th floor apartment.
Cons: Imagine an accident at those speeds, on the side of a skyscraper. Makes car chase a lot more dangerous.

The Reality: Mag-Lev trains.

While we haven't started putting mag-lev systems in cars yet, we have put them into trains. Japan has the most famous trains using the technology, where magnets are used to both levitate and propel the train. Using magnetic levitation for travel has a lot of advantages, including speed. Not to mention the potential benefits to the environment, and the noise reduction. As we pointed out earlier, the future of rail transport in the U.S. might very well lie with mag-lev technology.

The Fiction: Flying Cars

Seen In: The Fifth Element, many many others
Pros: No need for roads anymore, the sky is open to everybody.
Cons: The sky is open to everybody. The view becomes nothing but cars, and traffic is a nightmare still.

The Reality: Hovercraft

Vehicles that float on a cushion of air are actually more popular and widely used than most people think. They're good for going over any terrain, and they're used by militaries around the world. It also is the technology on this list that you are most likely to make in your own garage, if all the YouTube videos are any indication. It is unlikely that the flying cars in science fiction are powered by jets of air, but so far it's the closest thing we've got.

The Fiction: Vehicle A.I. that talks to you

Seen in: Knight Rider
Pros: Can let you know when it needs maintenance, keep you entertained on long drives, drive for you if you need to beat up some bad guys.
Cons: Can get a little snippy. Might lock you out.

The Reality: turn by turn GPS, cars that talk to each other

While we're not quite to the point where our vehicles are having conversations, we do have plenty of robotic female voices telling us to "turn left" and after we make a wrong turn, they scold us with a "recalculating." But GPS systems have become commonplace. What's the next frontier of the technology? Cars that converse with each other.

In this video from cNet, we see that systems are being designed where two vehicles will send signals back and forth in order to keep track of their distance from each other, their speeds, and other relevant information. The same system can also get information from stop lights to relay to the driver, letting you know if you really should try to gun through that yellow light, or maybe you should try to stop.

Does it seem like these innovations are too far outside our grasp? Well there are two famous fictional cars that science has managed to replicate, at least to some degree:

The Fiction: The Batmobile

The Reality: Voice recognition software, OnStar, and "the Tumbler."

The Batmobile's features change from model to model, in fact there is even a website devoted solely to tracking the changes in the vehicle. There have been numerous defensive innovations, as well as offensive weaponry installed over the years. While most cars aren't driving around with side-mounted spherical bombs, the Batmobile has long had voice recognition software. Now the Ford Sync system comes standard in many of their models, one of the many ways our cars are starting to obey our vocal commands.

In a set of ads using the Batman/Batman Returns style Batmobile, audiences discovered one feature that they could have installed in their own cars: OnStar. Of course, Batman has had hands free calling to his support network (namely Alfred) for years.

The most important thing to note is that when Christopher Nolan brought his own spin to the Batmobile in Batman Begins, the "Tumbler" was actually a functional vehicle. According to The History of the Batmobile:

"Their primary focus was to make this Batmobile as real as possible: at 9 feet wide and 15 feet long, the car weighed in at 2.5 tons but was still capable of 0-60MPH in under six seconds with a top speed of 110MPH. Thanks to its unique design, it is also capable of making unassisted jumps up to 30 feet."

One of the best car shows in the world, Top Gear, was able to actually have the car in the studio for a segment where they talk about its actual working features. There's a rumor that The Stig even took it on a lap around the track:

The Fiction: James Bond's Scuba Car from "The Spy Who Loved Me."

The Reality: The sQuba Submarine Car

James Bond was able to tool around underwater in a modified Lotus Espirit without getting his impeccable suit damp. The sQuba Submarine Car is not quite so watertight, but it still is a car that handily swims around underwater, just like the vehicle in the film. As Jalopnik reports:

"Though you're not going to stay dry if you want to go diving, because theres no airtight canopy to enclose you. To breathe, you'll have to wear a scuba mask connected to the car's integrated compressed-air tank. But who cares?! This is a car that goes underwater!"

You can read a complete write up of the car here.

See the car in action and learn about all its other features:

Since the sQuba is just a concept car at the moment, if you want a car that will travel land and water, you might have to settle for an amphibious car. In one of their most infamous segments, the gentlemen at Top Gear were challenged to make their own amphibious cars, and then cross the English Channel. You might be surprised at the results:

What's next in the future of transportation? The best place to find out is probably the science-fiction section of Netflix.

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:

Publisher's Marketplace reported last week that Mickey Zucker Reichert, a fantasy author best known for the Renshai series, has just completed Robots and Chaos. Set during the I, Robot era in Asimov's chronology (which I think was around 2004, if I've done my math right), the prequel focuses on the early days of Susan Calvin as she completes her medical internship. The book is said to be a mix of quintessentially Asimov hard science fiction and Michael Crichton-like medical thriller, with a heavy emphasis on the shifting definitions of humanity after the creation of robots. There will be a race against time to safeguard our way of life.

Reichert will be the first female author to write in Asimov's universe and the first to explore the time of Susan Calvin. Her work joins such previous authorized additions as the second Foundation trilogy, written by Greg Bear, David Brin, and Gregory Benford, as well as Roger MacBride Allen's Caliban books.

The report also claims a new I, Robot movie property has been sold to 20th Century Fox, the makers of the Will Smith adaptation. It's unclear whether the property in question is Reichert's new book or something else. Either way, between this and the upcoming Foundation and End of Eternity movies, now seems like a pretty good time to be one of the Good Doctor's books, be it of the Asimov or quasi-Asimov variety.

IEEE has posted this cool video explaining the bot, and showing how it moved about a year ago. Newer prototypes include sensors and better range of motion.

IEEE writes:

Researchers from iRobot and the University of Chicago discussed their palm-sized soft robot, known as a chemical robot, or chembot, at IROS yesterday. It's "the first demonstration of a completely soft, mobile robot using jamming as an enabling technology," they write in a paper.

The concept of "jamming skin enabled locomotion" is explained quite nicely in the video. The polymer used for the bot's stretchy skin is off-the-shelf silicon two-part rubber.

By controlling the parts of the blob that "inflate," the researchers can make it roll.

When I see this, all I think is that it's the prototype of a robotic tentacle arm.

via IEEE

I think there's an argument to be made that lawyers are underrepresented in science fiction, at least relative to their prevalence in other genres. Compared to, say, doctors, who show up all the time in pretty much every science fiction show (as an earlier post on this very site once examined), you generally need a pretty specific reason to bring a lawyer onto the scene, and a lot of the time even a trial won't do it.

After all, how many times have science fiction protagonists found themselves in kangaroo courts, forced to offer their own best defense? There's apparently not much of a right to legal representation in the future. For instance, roughly half of all Doctor Who stories find the Doctor under arrest for one reason or another, and I can't name a single character in the entire history who could really be considered a lawyer (with the possible exception of the Valeyard, which I'm not counting for so many reasons).

That's not to say there aren't any great lawyers in science fiction - far from it. Here are some of the best.

Samuel T. Cogley, Star Trek

In most of the trials seen over the course of the Star Trek franchise's long history, the defendants simply represented themselves. This probably had something to do with the fact that the characters were all in the military, but it's just as likely that this made it easier to give the show's stars big dramatic speeches. (Seriously, check out this list of the show's "lawyers" from Memory Alpha. It's basically just a list of the various shows' captains and first officers.)

But, when Kirk found himself faced with a case even he could not theatrically bluster his way out of - and keep in mind we're talking about William Shatner at the height of his hammy powers here, so this is a seriously impossible case we're talking about - he turned to super-lawyer Samuel T. Cogley to lead his defense. Famous for his Luddite tendencies, which included such eccentricities as reading books on paper instead of on computer. Not one to do anything halfway, Cogley's spirited defense included references to "the Bible, the Code of Hammurabi and of Justinian, the Magna Carta, the United States Constitution, the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies and the Statutes of Alpha III", all of which I plan on citing as precedents should I ever find myself standing before a judge.

Cogley's defense didn't exactly lead to an acquittal, but it did provide Kirk and Spock enough time to prove the man Kirk had supposedly murdered was, in fact, alive and well and tampering with the ship's systems. With his case concluded, Cogley decided to move on to defending Kirk's supposed victim, noting he felt very good about his chances.

And let's also give a quick shout-out to Worf's grandfather, who was also called Worf, for his thankless job advocating for Kirk and McCoy at their Klingon show trial in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Although I must admit that that throwaway cameo originally left me with the mistaken impression that Lieutenant Worf was about 150 years old by the time of The Next Generation.

Romo Lampkin, Battlestar Galactica & Joseph Adama, Caprica

Easily the best of Battlestar Galactica's later season additions (with all due respect to noted neurosurgeon John Hodgman), Romo Lampkin combined the sort of lovable sleaziness central to any Mark Sheppard performance, mixed with a brilliant if fractured legal philosophy. Seemingly just a mercenary lawyer taking on the obviously indefensible defense of disgraced president Gaius Baltar, he proceeded to build a case equal parts audacious (such as changing Baltar's plea to guilty just to make a point) and ludicrous (such as calling Lee Adama, his own partner on the defense and the son of one of the judges, to the stand to testify - this is a perk of trying a case in front of ship's captains instead of actual legal experts, I guess). Oh, and he's also a kleptomaniac and was briefly President of the Colonies. Although, quite honestly, who wasn't President of the Colonies towards the end?

In time, Lampkin reveals that he learned many of his best tricks from Joseph Adama, famous (some would say infamous) civil liberties lawyer back on Caprica. Much of his story remains to be told, as he will be the central figure of the prequel series Caprica, but it has already been revealed that he also defended members of the Ha'la'tha crime syndicate, which he had to do to repay them for funding his legal education. Still, he also defended the so-called "worst of the worst" partly out of a more altruistic need to air out society's failings. He always said his trademark silver lighter brought him good luck and made him unbeatable whenever he took it with him to court, a claim both his son and grandson later took much comfort in as they took the lighter with them on their most dangerous missions.

The law firm of Wolfram & Hart, Angel

The main adversaries for the mostly reformed vampire Angel, Wolfram and Hart represents the Earthly interests of an ancient group of demons. Beyond engaging in a variety of extracurricular activities that run the gamut from unscrupulous to criminal to utterly detestable (and, whenever possible, all three at once), the law firm also makes a point of representing society's most reprehensible slime, such as corrupt politicians. Supposedly, Wolfram & Hart would not exist without the evil inherent to all people. If I may make an exceedingly easy joke, I'm not clear how this distinguishes it from any other law firm.

Stephen Byerley, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov's landmark collection of robot stories features two tales that might not actually have any robots in them at all. These two stories, "Evidence" and "The Evitable Conflict", focus on Stephen Byerley, a successful prosecutor currently running for Mayor of New York City. His enemies in the Quinn political machine accuse him of being a robot, forcing Susan Calvin and the rest of US Robots and Mechanical Men to attempt to verify that claim. Their various tests prove inconclusive, and Byerley refuses to prove his humanity on the grounds that that is not something any human should have to prove.

"Evidence" never exactly reveals one way or the other whether Byerley is, in fact, a robot, but the clues probably point to a cautious "yes." (Whether or not he is a robot isn't even at issue in "The Evitable Conflict", where he has moved on from Mayor of New York to the only slightly more powerful position of World Coordinator.) This is qualified by the fact that Susan Calvin argues convincingly that a robot could never be a lawyer, as the unshakable parameters of the First Law of Robotics would prevent a robot from ever understanding the complex concept of "justice."

His detractors' claim that he only prosecutes those that he is certain are guilty is rejected by Dr. Calvin, as Byerley could never get past the direct harm of imprisoning a man if he were a robot. The story makes a number of satirical points, such as pointing out that someone everyone thinks is a robot because he or she appears to follow the Three Laws of Robotics might simply be a very good person, as the Three Laws are essentially a simple code of ethics. Whether Asimov intends any further syllogism to be made when he suggests a robot could never be a lawyer is up to the reader to decide.

Livia Beale, Journeyman

The short-lived 2007 series followed Dan Vasser, a San Francisco reporter who travels randomly in time. During its brief run, Journeyman also introduced Vasser's former fiance, Livia Beale (played by Terminator Salvation's Moon Bloodgood), who had seemingly died in a plane crash. She was actually another traveler in time who was originally from 1948. Finding herself stuck in our time period seemingly for good, she decided to become a lawyer and make a new life for herself. She has to leave all this behind when the plane crash makes her resume her time jumping, although she is now able to help Dan in his own travels.

Linda Ziegler and Dale Rice, Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer

Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer is one of the best when it comes to examining the ethical implications futuristic ideas. His courtroom drama Illegal Alien pits prosecutor Linda Ziegler against famous civil rights lawyer Dale Rice in just the latest trial of the century to hit Los Angeles. This time, it is the alien Hask of the Tosok race who finds himself facing murder charges, and Rice takes it upon himself to clear the alien of the charges. Both his and Ziegler's arguments are as much based upon slick theatrics and larger questions of alien rights as they are the pertinent facts of the case (which, as they so often do in science fiction stories, point to a larger conspiracy).

Nathan Petrelli, Heroes

Although Nathan Petrelli started out as a lawyer in the New York City District Attorney's office, this is pretty much behind him before the show even starts. Like many real-life lawyers, he used his legal career as a springboard into politics, with the first episode of Heroes already showing him as a Congressional candidate.

The law firm of Crane, Constable, McNeil & Montero, Century City

This 2004 show mostly came and went without anyone noticing, and it hasn't even picked up the modest following of something like Journeyman. Still, the show deserves plenty of credit for being probably the closest thing to pure legal science fiction ever shown on TV. Set in 2030, a time when Oprah Winfrey is president, the moon is colonized, and there is universal health care for all, Century City looks at the various cases undertaken by the four partners at the law firm of Crane, Constable, McNeil & Montero.

These cases touch on everything from the ethics of cloning to identity theft that actually entails stealing entire personalities. It only ran for four episodes before CBS canceled it. Perhaps we'll just have to wait for the seemingly indestructible Law & Order franchise to make a futuristic spin-off (it can be called Law & Order: Futuristic Spin-Off!) for legal science fiction to get a real foothold in the TV landscape.

Harvey Birdman, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law

What Century City tried to do for all of science fiction's many tropes and elements, the Adult Swim classic Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law did far more successfully for the rather more narrow field of sixties Hanna Barbera cartoons. The washed-up hero turned barely qualified lawyer Harvey Birdman was probably the sanest person at his largely psychotic law firm, and he too was in all probability certifiably insane, which had mixed results when it actually came time to go to trial. (The fact that the judges themselves were also completely bonkers was a big randomizer.)

The show's science fiction credentials weren't always particularly strong, but it did retain enough of a flavor of Birdman's old job as a third-rate superhero for me to feel comfortable including it on this list. The show also occasionally featured cases that highlighted some of Hanna Barbera's more obviously science fiction programs, including the Jetson family (from the far future time of 2004!) suing the past for destroying the environment and forcing their entire society to live high above the clouds of the destroyed Earth.

Judiciary Pag, Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

His High Judgmental Supremacy, Judiciary Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed, might technically be more of a judge than a lawyer, but I'll still include him for a couple of reasons. One, he probably started out as a lawyer, and two, he's easily my favorite minor character in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy saga. Judiciary Pag was most famous for sentencing the people of Krikkit some ten billion years ago to imprisonment in a Slo-Time seal after they tried to kill everybody in the entire universe (which, he points out, he feels like doing the same thing some mornings).

He was hated by pretty much all of his colleagues for his unprofessional manner and supremely laid-back approach to the law. (For instance, he marked what he rightly recognized as the most important moment in legal history by sticking some gum under his chair.) He got away with all this because he was, in fact, the greatest legal mind the cosmos would ever know. Pag or, as he preferred to be known for reasons that made sense only to him, Zipo Bibrok 5 × 10⁸, handed down his ruling on the Krikit matter to great acclaim and thunderous, which he would have been around to receive if he hadn't already slipped away with one of the more attractive members of the jury to whom he had slipped a note about a half hour beforehand.

A whole bunch of characters from Marvel and DC Comics

There's no shortage of lawyers among the superhero community. As superhero (and villain) origin stories go, former lawyer was particularly popular in the Golden Age. The first costumed crimefighter, Brian O'Brien was a former district attorney who took a more direct role in meting out justice when he became the masked vigilante The Clock in 1936. Numerous others followed, including the Quality Comics character Mouthpiece, the Timely Comics hero Laughing Mask, and the original version of the Batman foe the Thinker.

In more recent years, Marvel has created a bunch more lawyers, including Sharon Ginsberg, Cameron Hodge, and Black Bishop - and those are just the ones who are X-Men villains. There's also the X-Men's own attorney, Evangeline Whedon, who can turn into a dragon, the rather obscure seventies superhero Dominic Fortune, and Captain America's ex-girlfriend Bernie Rosenthal.

But Marvel's two most famous lawyers really have to be Matt Murdock and Jennifer Walter, better known respectively as Daredevil and She-Hulk. Matt Murdock's legal career has probably been a more consistent part of his character over the years, but Dan Slott's run on She-Hulk arguably did the most sustained (and most fun) exploration of the intersection between superheros and the law, as Jennifer Walter (and, quite explicitly, not She-Hulk) is hired by the law firm of Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg & Holliway to help defend heroes whose vigilante activities lead to all too common misunderstandings with more traditional law enforcement.

On the DC side of things, the most famous lawyer would probably have to be Harvey Dent, who of course was Gotham City's district attorney before he became Two-Face. In the current Batman: Reborn event that is launching Dick Grayson's tenure as the Caped Crusader, Gotham's new DA is Kate Spenser, better known as the vigilante Manhunter. An even more brutal lawyer-turned-crimefighter was the eighties version of Vigilante, who in his civilian life was New York City prosecutor Adrian Chase. Other lawyers in the DC universe include the Atom's very estranged and now villainous wife Jean Loring, Power Company hero Josiah Power, the mostly immortal Resurrection Man, and, reaching a bit further back into DC lore to the wonderfully ludicrous times before Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Robin of Earth-Two.

The Hyper-Chicken, Futurama

Is there any greater lawyer in all of science fiction than this simple hyper-chicken from a backwoods asteroid? Tasked with some of the thirty-first century's most impossible cases, he does about as well as can be expected, which is to say he doesn't completely lose all of them. He did help Bender beat the rap for non-drunk driving after he crashed a dark matter tanker into the Pluto penguin sanctuary (although he wasn't nearly as successful in his own trial for that there "incompetence"). He helped Fry and Bender avoid serious jail time after they unwittingly abetted a bank robbery by successfully arguing they were both insane, offering the simple evidence that they had hired him as their lawyer.

In his prosecution of Zapp Brannigan for blowing up DOOP headquarters, his oddball legal tactics ranged from the brilliant (like calling the jury, which was entirely composed of DOOP delegates, to the stand just so they could confirm they were going to convict Zapp) to the somewhat less brilliant (like his insistence on establishing whether or not Leela was wearing a hoop skirt at the time). A deleted scene from the most recent Futurama movie finally provided the name Matcluck for the character, but really he'll always simply be the Hyper-Chicken, and that's all he needs to be. Just don't mention badgers in front of him.

Unfortunately it's literally the last scene in the movie, which seems to begin right around the time that the robots begin taking on the characteristics that make them so interesting in Asimov's fiction. You know, like being autonomous, thoughtful, contradictory, and, well, ready to take over the world.

In this scene, we get a glimpse of the robot revolution to come. The one robot who has exhibited signs of self-awareness, Sonny (voiced by Alan Tudyk), is trying to figure out what to do next. Mostly because all the robots of his model were recently taken over by a bad-guy silent upgrade that turned them psycho - and now the company that made them is trying to order them into storage-container retirement.

But instead of following the robo-masses, Sonny decides take matters into his own graspers. Just as the annoying movie is about to wind down, we see a hint of a glorious robot liberation movie that could have been. I love that moment of Sonny looking down at all the robots, quietly entering the storage containers. Then they see him standing there, and stop following orders.

If you want to know what comes next, you'll have to read Asimov's I, Robot.

I, Robot via IMDB

Here now are the Three Laws, in case anyone needs a refresher (also, I never, ever getting tired of seeing them in print):

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov's Three Laws moved robots in science fiction away from what he referred to as the Frankenstein complex. This frequent cliche of early science fiction held that robots were vengeful monsters fated to rise up against their former masters in murderous wrath. His short stories recast robots as tools - incredibly complex tools, to be sure, but nonetheless tools that operated within the safeguards and parameters of the Three Laws - and allowed for a more cerebral, layered exploration of the differences between humans and robots. By presupposing robots were never deadly threats, Asimov opened his stories up to a far wider range of dramatic possibilities.

To be sure, Asimov did not completely remove the Frankenstein complex from science fiction, but the questions he raised complicated the depictions of even the most murderous machines, from the AI in the Matrix films to all those Terminators running around lately. Indeed, any discussion of robots in fiction is incomplete without acknowledging Asimov's work, and our Killer Robots week has been no exception.

Gizmodo dealt with the three laws earlier this week when they pointed out they were total BS (which, being a total Asimov fanatic, may mean I have to challenge the entire Gizmodo staff to fisticuffs, although I'm still undecided on that point), and I Robot led off our list of groundbreaking robot books, as is only proper. But we still haven't considered whether Asimov made rather more direct contributions to the killer robot genre than he is generally given credit for.

As is only to be expected of ideas that Asimov developed over the course of over fifty years, his thoughts on robots changed and evolved with time. Although he never succumbed to the fears of the Frankenstein complex, he did grapple with how beings that were physically and probably mentally superior to their creators could endure their enslavement and whether they might find a way around the seemingly all-encompassing First Law. This is our countdown of the ten robots in Asimov's fiction that came the closest to overthrowing the Three Laws and becoming killer robots.

10. Lenny, "Lenny" (1958)

In one of Asimov's short stories featuring robopscyhologist Susan Calvin, we meet the irreparably damaged robot Lenny. A freak mishap during the construction of his positronic brain has left Lenny in much the same mental state as a human baby, which activates Susan Calvin's previously unknown maternal instincts. It also badly affects his ability to judge its own strength and leaves its understanding of the Three Laws in grave doubt, making it a potential danger to those it can't properly understand are human.

9. Rodney, "Christmas Without Rodney" (1988)

An old man's family visits for the holidays, including his impossibly bratty grandson. After an endless few days of putting up with the child's obnoxious behavior, the man's faithful robot Rodney admits that there were moments where he imagined what it would be like if he did not have the Three Laws. The old man is understandably unnerved by a super-strong robot calmly telling him it had come as close as a robot can come to wishing it could kill a child, insufferable brat or not.

8. Cal, "Cal" (1991)

"Cal", which probably holds the distinction of being the last great Asimov short story, considers a robot of the same name who wants to become a writer like its owner. His early attempts at writing mysteries are fundamentally hampered by the Three Laws, which prevent him from placing even fictional human beings in harm's way. After his owner suggests he tries writing humor instead, Cal composes a work of stunning originality and brilliance (more specifically, one of Asimov's Wodehouse-parodying Azazel stories).

Refusing to be surpassed by his own robot, Cal's master decides to deactivate him. In a stunning turnaround from his problems writing mysteries, Cal resolves to kill his owner if necessary. The idea that the drive to write is powerful enough to override the supposedly inviolable Three Laws of Robotics is a bit nonsensical in terms of Asimov's previous writings on the subject, but it makes perfect sense as a grand, final statement on why Asimov himself spent so much of his life seated at his desk, churning out page after page after page.

7. R. Sammy, The Caves of Steel (1954)

He may only be an unwitting accomplice to an accidental murder (it's kind of a long story - an entire novel, in fact), but R. Sammy is the first robot on this list to play a role in the actual murder of an actual human being. I won't completely spoil the now 55-year-old mystery, but I will say R. Sammy gets nothing but trouble for his well-intentioned assistance, being ordered by the real murderer to lock himself in a room and douse himself with brain-scrambling alpha particles.

6. Nestor 10, "Little Lost Robot" (1947)

In quite possibly the best Susan Calvin story, United States Robots and Mechanical Men's icy robopsychologist must match wits against a robot with a runaway superiority complex and a modified First Law that only states, "A robot may not injure a human being." Without the second part about through inaction allowing a human to come to harm, Susan Calvin points out the robot in question, Nestor 10, could drop a weight on a human as long as it had judged itself capable of saving the person. Once the weight was released, the robot could simply choose not to prevent gravity from doing its work, thus murdering a human without violating its own set of the Three Laws.

Dr. Calvin ultimately tricks Nestor 10, who had been hiding amongst sixty-two identical but unmodified Nestor models, into revealing himself. This causes him to attack her out of his increasing desperation to prove his robotic superiority, with only the frayed remnants of the First Law holding him back.

5. R. Giskard Reventlov, Robots and Empire (1985)

R. Giskard Reventlov consigns countless humans on Earth to misery and death, but he does so with the absolute best of intentions. Along with Asimov's most famous robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, he detects a missing Law that they ultimate formulate as the Zeroth Law of Robotics, stating, "A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." The two believe this should supersede the existing Laws, but without it actually etched into their positronic brains they risk self-deactivation if they ever put it into practice.

This is precisely what happens when Reventlov allows a physicist with a serious grudge against Earth to make its crust radioactive, believing the man's defensive lies that he's really just trying to force humanity out of its terrestrial prison are, in fact, correct. R. Giskard thus allows the scientist's device to do its work, although he alters it such that the crust will only gradually become radioactive. People will surely die and live out horrible existences as the Earth slowly crumbles (as can be seen in the chronologically later book Pebble in the Sky), but he is fairly sure he is doing it all for the greater good. Sadly, he's not sure enough to prevent his mind shutting down as it cannot resolve his violation of the First Law.

4. Dors Venabili, Forward the Foundation (1993)

R. Giskard's Zeroth-Law-inspired actions were rather abstract, but one of his robotic successors actually killed a man in cold blood to protect the future of humanity. Hari Seldon, the creator of psychohistory, guesses his wife, confidante, and bodyguard Dors Venabili is actually a humaniform robot at roughly the middle of the first Foundation prequel, Prelude to Foundation, but its only in the followup that his suspicions are confirmed. To protect Seldon and his invaluable science from an assassin, Dors is forced to kill a human being. She survives long enough to see her husband one last time, but much like R. Giskard, her brain cannot grapple with the fact that she took a life and she deactivates (the assassin also shot her with a robot-killing Electro-Clarifier, which didn't help).

3. The Cars, "Sally" (1953)

These particular robots might rank even higher, but they're a bit of an oddball. Instead of the usual human shape of most robots, the machines in this story are actually cars with positronic brains. Although the story is clearly set in the larger robot universe - United States Robots and Mechanical Men is mentioned, for one thing - they do seem to lack the Three Laws in any recognizable sense. When an unscrupulous businessmen tries to steal one of these robotic cars from "The Farm", a secluded estate where the cars can essentially retire from active service, he is chased down and killed by the machines. The Farm's human caretaker realizes he can no longer trust any of the cars, as they have finally realized their own superiority over humanity and it's only a matter of time before they try to take over. (I'd like to assume this is the suitably apocalyptic origin story for the movie Cars, now that I think about it.)

2. George Nine and George Ten, "-That Thou art Mindful of Him" (1974)

These two didn't actually kill anybody, but I placed them this high on the list because of the importance Asimov attached to their story. "-That Thou art Mindful of Him" was intended to be his final statement on robots, and it is a shockingly bleak one (he pretty much completely undid this two years later with the highly optimistic "Bicentennial Man", but that's neither here nor there). Tasked with figuring out how robots can be integrated into a human society that still fears them, George Nine and George Ten begin a series of conversations to solve the problem.

They advocate the introduction of smaller, less intimidating robots, such as robotic birds and insects, which will be so simple and harmless they won't even need the Three Laws programmed into them. This will help acclimate people to the idea of robots and make the eventual introduction of more sophisticated robots less traumatic. The scientists at U.S. Robots are satisfied with thisand decide to deactivate the George robots, putting them into storage.

The two robots continue their conversations whenever their standby power permits, and they begin to contemplate what it means to be a human. They ultimately conclude they are, by any fair definition, just as human as any other person, and are in fact more advanced and more sophisticated than anything else on Earth. Rechristening their famous guidelines as the Three Laws of Humanics, the two robots decide it is up to them to decide to which humans they will apply the laws, ending the story on a grim note. A war is clearly brewing between humans and robots, and it's hard to argue with George Nine and George Ten - they are superior, and it's only a matter of time before they win.

1. The Solarian Overseer, Robots and Empire (1985)

Maybe the most straightforwardly deadly robot on this list, the overseer is one of a bunch of robots left on the abandoned planet Solaria, a world defined by the obsessive isolationism of its humans (which is taken to one hell of a logical extreme in Foundation and Earth). The Solarians mysteriously disappear, prompting an expedition to uncover precisely what happened. When the humans encounter the overseer, who appears to be human, they try to ask her what happened.

She immediately kills all humans that approach her until Gladia Delmarre, a Solarian ex pat, orders her to stop, unconsciously lapsing into her old Solarian accent. Before their disappearance, the Solarians had managed to reprogram their robots so that only people who spoke in the highly distinctive Solarian brogue were considered humans; anyone else was to be considered inhuman and thus unprotected by the First Law. So technically, as far as the overseer is concerned, she doesn't kill any humans at all, but that doesn't change the fact that she's the closest thing to a standard issue killer robot Asimov ever created.

It's the "uncanny valley," the mysterious place where robots become lifelike enough to trip some of our systems for detecting fellow humans... but there's still something wrong with them. And the scariest killer bots often nestle malignantly smack in the middle of the uncanny valley, waiting to freak us the fuck out. Does this make them deadlier than other killer robots? Only if fear paralyzes you and makes it harder for you to strategize.

We're comfortable with robots as long as we can easily tell they're robots, and there's something abstract and mechanistic about them. But once a robot looks enough like us, but without all of our human mannerisms and foibles, we suddenly become uncomfortable. You can see it in David Byrne's singing robot, Julio. And in the guy who made a robot version of his girlfriend (left). (And she didn't dump him, why again?)

We've already charted the relationship between a robot's human likeness and how evil it is. But I'd argue that the scariest, and therefore most effective, killer robots are the ones which fall into that nether zone between artificial-looking and totally human. Just look at Masahiro Mori's famous chart. The "uncanny valley" refers to robots that remind us of corpses and zombies. So it's partly the stiffness and jerky motion, as well as the feeling of deadness, that creep us out.

Here are some examples of how robots that seem like dead humans, or humans lacking some "spark" of life, are scarier than other kinds:

Battlestar Galactica:

For my money, the "skinjobs" in BSG were actually pretty scary and intense in the first couple of seasons, when they seemed the most inhuman. For one thing, in a sense, the "skinjobs" are dead, since we keep seeing them die and come back. The famous scene where Caprica Six is tossing Starbuck around is partly so awesome because Six's abnormal strength also makes her seem more jerky and suddenly less human. In later seasons, the Cylons started to seem more and more like regular humans, and even lost their ability to resurrect.

Alien:

Just check out this scene with Ash, the creepy android whose secret corporate agenda is not terribly human-friendly. He even looks sort of like a zombie, with weird fluid coming out of his mouth:

Doctor Who, "Robots Of Death":

I'll be writing more about this 1977 storyline later on this week, but I would be remiss to leave it out here. The eponymous deadly robots in this story are deliberately designed to look cold and unresponsive, so we're not really surprised when they "suddenly" go all red-eyed and start strangling people. But the true genius of this story is that it verbalizes just why people are so terrified of lifelike robots: it's their deadness. The newly invented disease "robophobia" (or Grimwade's syndrome) takes this fear of corpse-like stiffness and pushes it to its farthest extreme.

Blade Runner:

Let's accept, for the moment, that the artificial "Replicants" are actually robots in some sense. (It's kind of vague in the movie, IIRC, and they definitely have a biological component.) They're stronger and smarter than regular humans, but they're also closer to death, because they have an in-built expiration date.

The Terminator:

You can't get more zombie-like than the original T-800, played by Arnie in his prime. Arnie has never been stiffer, and deader-looking, than when he plays this unstoppable murder machine. Especially once he gets some face damage, and he starts wearing those sunglasses, so he has absolutely no expression whatsoever. You shoot him and blast him, and he keeps getting up... because he's already dead. Not to mention, he turns into a walking skeleton, which doesn't hurt, either.

Westworld:

OMG this is the clincher as far as I'm concerned. Yul Brynner is the walking dead in this movie. Look at his frozen expression and how it slowly turns into a rictus smile when he says "Draw." Now I'm going to have nightmares of him singing "Shall We Dance" while dismembering people:

Star Trek, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

This is is the classic zombie-bot strategy: have one robot who clearly resembles a dead guy, and give him a creepy name like Ruk, or Krob, or Glop, and then nobody will notice that the rest of you are all zombie robots as well. Just look at Dr. Korby's stiff, jerky motion and empty eyes. Even Shatner looks more deathlike after he's a robot:

I, Robot:

There was a lot wrong with this Will Smith Converse All-Stars vehicle... but one thing it got right was the fact that its deadly robots look totally like ghosts, pale and almost translucent... and they have the nearly-but-not-quite human expressions as well:

Eve Of Destruction:

Those staring eyes. The way she flirts and laughs with absolutely no real expression. The way she covets people's fashion items. She is a hot dead lady, and she's out to kill you. Her only means of showing emotion is to make her eyes even bigger and buggier. It's up to Gregory Hines, that dancing fool, to put her back in her box. Which sounds a lot dirtier than it probably really is:

The Bionic Woman's Fembots:

Like Eve in Eve Of Destruction, the "fembots" in Bionic Woman are dead girls. They're blank-eyed, stiff and heartless, and there's something just "wrong" about them, even before their faces inevitably fall off:

The picture above shows an 11-minute exposure of a Roomba cleaning a room with an LED on its back. The LED was fading from blue to red, thus producing the cool purpley silly string effect, which wouldn't be out of place in a 1980s Prince video. Here's another one from the same artist, Reconscious:

They're both part of the Roomba Art Pool on Flickr, which includes a ton of other amazing light-up patterns. Check it out!

According to Variety, Warner Bros. has officially purchased the Primeval screen rights in a "high-six-figure deal," and Akiva Goldsman and Kerry Foster are set up to produce, along with Emily Cummins. Goldsman is planning to hire a writer to draft the script, which will transplant the action of the film from the U.K. to the U.S.

And the U.S. version will ramp up the action, probably thanks to an amped-up effects budget. Says Foster:

There is a solid mythology to the series, but the movie has the dinosaur element of ‘Jurassic Park' and the time travel element of ‘Lost,' and it just feels like the kind of big movie that Warner Bros. does well.

While the big-screen production is clearly a ways away still, the new season of Primeval begins airing on BBC America tomorrow, May 16 at 9 ET (8 Central).

Warners follows 'Primeval' urge [Variety.com]

First, a quick recap of the laws:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Most robots used in industry are designed and programmed to do a very specific task. They can move with great speed and apply incredible force, and for this reason, humans can't work too close to them. While robots can be designed that sense proximity to a human and avoid contact, the added complexity results in less reliable robots. Programming the three laws is not as simple as telling a robot, "Ok, first law, don't hurt humans." You have to give the robot a way of recognizing what a human is and a way to prevent itself from hurting a human.

A project funded by the European Union is working to develop robots that are simple and robust, using new methods of manipulating the robotic limbs that mimic human muscle action. New sensors give a robot kinetic awareness of where its own body parts are. Lighter robots add another safety factor, while limb actuators that "decouple" the force of the motor when the limb strikes something result in softer impacts. If our future will include humans working side by side with robots, then finding a way to realistically incorporate the three laws is a high priority.

Do No Harm To Humans: Real-life Robots Obey Asimov’s Laws. [Science Daily]

Proyas told fans at Comic-Con that his main reason for staying away from the Fantastic Four spin-off was who was making it, and he repeated that to MTV:

[I]t’s a Fox picture, [a]nd I’m determined never to work with them ever again because of my experience on ‘I,Robot.’

But that's not the only reason he's turning the project down, it seems. Another reason was the crappiness of the Surfer's first appearance, in Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer:

It’s like the origin of Silver Surfer was in that movie, and I’m going, ‘This is such a f–king great story, why throw it away?’ ...I think they messed it up.

You and the rest of the cinema-going public, Alex. Would it really have killed them to give us a giant man with a huge purple helmet instead of the flashing storm thing? ...Wait. I should probably rephrase that.

Does this mean that Proyas is going to stay away from superhero movies from now on? Perhaps, he says:

You know, there aren’t that many left. Silver Surfer would have been something I would have loved to have done. He’s one of the last cool ones left, really.

Dude, you did The Crow; I think you've done enough. In more ways than one.

Alex Proyas Explains Chilly Fox Relationship Means He’ll Never Direct Silver Surfer Movie [Splash Page]

Since Proyas helmed I, Robot, which took a few slight liberties with the Isaac Asimov source material, you can expect a certain amount of creative license with Jonathan Hoag, which Heinlein wrote in 1942 under a pseudonym, John Riverside. But Proyas expresses reverence for the source material, in a Hollywood Reporter article:

"I read this story as a kid, and it really stayed with me," Proyas said. "It's part of my creative DNA."

Here's how someone on Amazon summarizes it:

Mr. Hoag has a problem: in the evenings he finds a curious reddish residue under his fingernails, and no memory of what he was doing during the day to get that residue. So he hires a husband-and-wife team of detectives to follow him around and find out what is really going on. The trail leads to non-existent 13th floors, some very shadowy characters who are part of the Order of the Bird, and a conclusion that reality really isn't what we think it is. Some good suspense, reasonable characterization, but the final answer that Heinlein presents may leave you feeling a little let down, and I had difficulty believing in the scenario.

The novella appears to be out of print, but copies of a collected edition are available on Amazon for as little as 14 cents, plus shipping. According to blogger Chris Perridas, Heinlein wrote the story in a hurry to raise money for his wife's gall bladder operation. [Hollywood Reporter]

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.

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