Futurama, "Parasites Lost"

Fry eats a dodgy egg-salad sandwich at a spaceship rest area, and the eggs hatch into tons of worms, who form a whole worm society inside Fry's bowels. So the Planet Express crew has to copy themselves into tiny little worm-sized robots, which they can control with their brains — so the robots can travel inside Fry's innards while the actual people (and robot, in Bender's case) controlling them remain safe and normal-sized.

Mobile Suit Gundam and Gundam Wing
The Wing Zero and Gundam Epyon suits included the ZERO (Zoning & Emotional Range Omitted) system, connecting to the pilot's brain via neural interface and giving the pilot real-time strategic data, and eliminating all pesky doubts. The system has one major flaw: the pilot tends to "hallucinate" the possible paths the suit can take, causing temporary insanity unless your mind is strong enough. Here's a battle between Gundam Wing Zero and Gundam Epyon.

Ghost In The Shell

Lots of people in this universe jack into android bodies and control them remotely — sending android "dolls" into danger while remaining safe. In this clip, Major Motoko Kusanagi controls two android bodies at once. Especially in "Solid State Society," she's frequently running two parallel processes, and manages to be in two places at once.

Cities In Flight by James Blish

Before humans can actually visit Jupiter in person, we send tele-operated robots with cool tentacles. Here's a relevant passage (thanks to Technovelgy):

For a wild instant he had thought there was a man on Jupiter already; but as he pulled up just above the platform's roof, he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot; a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man. It was working busily with bottles and flasks, of which it seemed to have thousands on benches and shelves all around it The whole enclosure was a litter of what Helmuth took to be chemical apparatus, and off to one side was an object which might have been a microscope...

The robot looked up at him and gesticulated with two or three tentacles...

"This is Doc Barth. How do you like my laboratory?"

Bug Park by James P. Hogan

In this awesome novel, inventors Eric and Vanessa Heber develop a new kind of telepresence — direct neural coupling — which shuts down your usual senses and connects them to neural feedback from robots, known as Mecs. The novel explains:

Ohira, who had been watching phlegmatically, nodded his head at the figures in the chairs. "You see, it's the way I told you. No ordinary VR helmets here. This connects straight into your head."

"DNC: Direct Neural Coupling," Heber said to Michelle. "That's what makes Neurodyne different."

She nodded. "I have read a little about it."

"Would you like to try it?" Heber invited.

Michelle moved her gaze to the empty chairs but looked apprehensive. "I'm not sure. I wouldn't want to get one of your little guys shredded or caught up in a wringer."

So of course the Hebers, and their precocious teen son, come up with the ultimate business model — tiny little bug robots controlled by tourists' minds, which can explore an insect theme park or even take part in insect gladitorial contests. But of course, bad guys want to use the DNC technology to power miniature assassins instead.

Robot in Invincible

The leader of the Teen Team superhero group, Robot gets promoted to join the Guardians Of The Globe, who are like the Justice League in the Invincible universe. Everybody thinks he's just a regular robot, but eventually they discover he's actually remote controlled by Rudy Conners, a disfigured man living in a tank of fluid.

Battle Angel Alita

Soon to be a movie from James "Avatar" Cameron, this series follows a cyborg assassin who's controlled several different bodies, including a Berzerker body, a "motorball body" and a TUNED body. (Thanks to Cash907Censored!)

The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree, Jr.

In a corporate-controlled future, advertising is illegal, so instead celebrities go around promoting products. This story's protgagonist has her personality put into a perfect robot body, while her real body is put "in the sauna room" and she becomes an advertising celebrity. Her new body is a "placental decanter," specially grown to be perfect, with control implants. "Little Delphi is going to live a wonderful, exciting life. She's going to be a girl people watch. And she's going to be using fine products people will be glad to know about and helping the people who make them."

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

The soldiers in this book are jacked into Soldierboys, Flyboys and other constructs, which they control with their brains. These machines allow the U.S. to run a remote-controlled war against various third-world countries. Protgaonist Julian Class controls his robot Soldierboy via a jack connected to his skull. Too bad that long-term connection to the Soldierboys and Flyboys has weird long-term effects, including "humanizing" you and making you averse to killing.

Sleep Dealer

Two different characters jack their nervous systems into robots, far away, in this incredible movie directed by Alex Rivera. Memo goes to work in the city in Mexico, where he's connected remotely to robots doing construction work in the United States — so the U.S. can import people's labor, without bringing in the people themselves. And Rudy controls a military drone with his mind — using it, among other things, to blow up Memo's family's house when Memo accidentally gets suspected of being a hacker.

Runners up: Suspended (InfoCom game), Debatable Space by Philip Palmer, City by Clifford Simak, Starstruck (comics), Neon Genesis Evangelion, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson

Thanks to Arthur Conan Smith, Kiala Kazebee, S.J. Edeards, Katrina James, Andrew Liptak, Greta Christina, Kate Dominic, Jessy Randall Carlos P. Diaz, FLIMGeeks, Espana Sheriff, Tom Marcinko, Barry Lukens, Lun Esex, Ashley Edward Miller, Allan Bostick, Jackie M, Star Killer, Jason Schachat, Bonnie Burton, Morgan Johnson, Paul McEnery, Izzy Oneiric, Jason Shankel and Kate Cowan.

Haldeman has already blogged about one possibility for Forever War's star. He wonders "if Scott would want to use his buddy Russell Crowe. At 44, he's a bit old for the part as written, though that's why they call it 'acting.'" And he already has a pretty good idea about what might constitute a sequel to the new movie:

I suspect that if the movie is made and is successful, they'll use the rest of the book in a sequel, which will be called Forever Peace. (They've optioned the title to that book, but not the story, so the intent is pretty clear.) I won't complain. It's an honor just to be nominated, as the actor said on the way to the bank.

I'm really hoping that someone with clout will pick up the phone and say, "Dolores, see if this guy Haldeman wrote some other book we might pick up cheap." I've got a couple of dozen of them.

He sure does, and he's not going to turn down the color green in these times:

(A couple of years ago I asked my Hollywood agent whether he could put together a package deal: All of Haldeman's books except TFW for $X million, X being a number big enough to support me and Gay for the rest of our lives. He said no.)

We compare Haldeman's blog notes with our own takes on his adaptable oeuvre:

Tool Of The Trade.
Haldeman's Take: "The most conventionally cinematic is Tool of the Trade," he opines, "which even has a kind of a car chase."
We Say: Tough to find and never recognized on the level with his hard-SF work, Tool of the Trade makes the Jason Bourne series look like Rachel Getting Married. If Haldeman submitted the book to publishing houses today it would be a smash thriller. The problem you have in adapting old spy novels is outdated technology, but there's no such problem with near future espionage tales. Haldeman's characters are rarely all-powerful — he carefully considers the most entertaining reasons and situations in which a person would control another's mind, and outdoes your expectations for what can be done with a familiar concept.

The Hemingway Hoax
Haldeman's Take: "I've always thought The Hemingway Hoax would be a good low-budget film, made-for-teevee," says the author.
We Say: Haldeman is hit or miss in the short form, as he openly acknowledging devoting less time to less lucrative projects. If the idea he's preoccupied with is worthy, the story usually works, and boy does it work here. Easily his most famous shorter work at about the size of a novella, The Hemingway Hoax ranks with Jack Finney and H.G. Wells for best use of time travel, and an affinity for similar subject matter would result in 2007's return to form after a few mediocre novels in The Accidental Time Machine. Truly a must-read if you've never gotten to it.

All My Sins Remembered
Haldeman's Take: Joe recognizes the problem inherent in this three part novel's composition: 1977's All My Sins Remembered is cinematic but has the drawback that the male lead keeps dramatically changing his appearance. Maybe Eddie Murphy could do it."
We Say: Before he tries to cast Richard Pryor, it's important to understand just how awesome All My Sins Remembered is. The man character is perfect for Sacha Baron Cohen: Otto McGavin is a Prime Operator who can assume any disguise — kind of like the prototye for Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs character from Altered Carbon. In three novella-length assignments, McGavin variously takes on the disguise of an overweight alien sociologist, a swarthy feudal duellist, and a questionably intentioned Man of God. Each of these concepts could easily be a feature, and feudal society of the middle part would make perfect material for a series.

"Seasons"
Haldeman's Take: His 1985 epistolatory novella set in the same universe as All My Sins Remembered is called "Seasons." He doesn't mention it in the post, but he chose it to lead off his remarkable short story collection/light autobiography Dealing in Futures.
We Say: The concept revolves around a series of diary entries of an anthropological expedition to a sexless group of aliens that completely changes personality during seasonal depression, it's an action-packed merciless narrative with a harrowing last act. And since it's a longshot that this ever gets filmed, my plan is to trick Haldeman into selling me the rights through light gunplay and begging.

Mindbridge
Haldeman's Take: Joe can't let it rest without putting in a good word for the rare novel from his output in the 1970s that didn't age well, Mindbridge. "Mindbridge would be good," he says, but "it's under a kind of option, stalled."
We Say: One of the early books that burnished his reputation, Mindbridge hasn't aged as well as Haldeman's other universes. The plot now reads like one of the filler episodes of Babylon 5, and the approach to telepathy in this 1976 Nebula-winning novel comes across as a little hokier than we'd expect in a similar story today. At the time it made its author $100,000, and a stern word from critic Leonard Michaels not to waste his "talents on this commercial crap."

The Worlds trilogy
Haldeman's Take: In that particular blog post, Joe doesn't mention his Worlds trilogy, but he's previously acknowledged that it is a work dear to his heart.
We Say: A strong heroine and a ravaged Planet Earth are the highlights of the trilogy, and although the third book Worlds Enough and Time released in 1992, kinda goes to sleep on you, it's a worthy ride. If the Ridley Scott Forever War does well, look for TV to give this series a hard look. It's the perfect eight-hour miniseries and it could capture the curiosity of the Twilight crowd by presenting an accessible heroine in an apocalyptic American setting. At the very least put it in the mail to Angelina Jolie.

Forever Peace
Haldeman's Take: He doesn't even pay lip service to the idea of adapting his spiritual but not actual sequel to The Forever War, Forever Peace.
We Say: That reluctance is more a reflection of the steep hill any screenwriter would face into making this story about the violence of humanity and its continuing evolution a film. The story is both extremely internalized and outwardly action-packed, making it one of the best of Haldeman's novels, but the least likely to ever hit Blu-Ray. The Forever War finally got a true sequel in 1999's Forever Free, but the movie version is unlikely to take it on either because it's so different from the original in plot and setting.

Whatever happens with Haldeman's other works, we encourage Ridley Scott not to toss away the details of The Forever War too lightly. Although he pretends to be at peace with minimal involvement in the production, Joe will fume away on his blog if he doesn't like what he hears — the book is naturally close to his heart.
Joe Haldeman's lecture at MIT this year [The Craft of Science Fiction]

The man isn't just stepping back into the scifi genre he's jumping in head first, and we applaud him for it.

Scott told Variety:

"It’s a science-fiction epic, a bit of The Odyssey by way of Blade Runner, built upon a brilliant, disorienting premise."

This is an exciting project, and it might actually be easier to bring to the big screen then Brave New World. According to the trade, Scott has yet to hire a writer to adapt the novel and still has many other movies on the front burner.

The book follows the story of a war between humans and the Tauran species. The main character, Private William Mandella, works out his duty to the government in space, fighting the good fight, only to return to his home world which has moved ahead centuries past him. Due to the effects of faster-than-light travel, Mandella is centuries younger than the world he left. Forever War also deals with wartime inhumanity and injustice.

[Variety]

Hyperion:
Space-war novelist Dan Simmons has been hoping for a Hyperion movie for ages. Speculation has run rampant on the internet with both Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio supposedly attached to the project. Simmons himself has said that, "yes there is a Hyperion movie in the works. It has been optioned by a top-notch studio, is slated to be directed by a top-name director, and already has the involvement of a top-flight movie star. Screenwriters have been attached to the project and a first draft screenplay is expected soon." The top notch production company was announced to be Warner Brothers with Graham King producing and the release date is set for 2010. Hopefully this will be the last we see of Hyperion on Development Purgatory, and we'll be watching tree-impaling Shrike in no time.

Count Zero, or Zen Differential:
The sequel to William Gibson's Neuromancer, Count Zero was optioned during the height of the Matrix craze. The movie Zen Differential was supposed to be based on CZ and made by Michael Mann. Alas this movie's script never even got a draft.

Logan's Run:
This movie's never ending saga has truly earned its place in purgatory. There was talk of remaking it (supposedly closer to the book) as early as 1994. That faded in and out of possibility until 2004, when Bryan Singer was brought on, and everything seemed good to go. Some pre-production work was done and a draft was written, but then Singer decided to "take a vacation" from film making after Superman Returns, and dropped the project cold. Joel Silver and WB stayed hopeful, and a low-budget proposal by rookie director Joseph Korinski caught their eye. Some are hopeful we'll see Logan's Run as early as 2010, written by Children of Men scriptwriter Tim Sexton with Korinski directing, supposedly under the watchful eye of David Fincher. All I can say is: we'll see.

The Forever War
Alas the Chicago public TV miniseries adaptation adaptation of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War never saw the light of day, neither did the Sci-Fi channel movie (truth be told, I'd rather see the PBS version). Get crackin' people — we want to see the epic battle of humanity versus Tauran aliens. So does Haldeman, apparently, Sci Fi bought the rights to his novel and then never called him back.

King Of Elves:
This movie has been promised to the scifi masses for ages. Disney vows to have this Phillip K. Dick adaptation out in 2012 as their 50th computer animated feature. It's at the end of a very long Disney to-do list, so there's no telling how many times the green-leafy elves will be pushed to the back burner. That being said we are hopefully optimistic about this feature — it seems to be moving forward, but very, very slowly. Also apparently Disney decided to move the elves' location from Colorado to the Mississippi Delta.

Vurt:
Author Jeff Noon wrote a draft of a screenplay for his novel around 2002. It got optioned by Pathe films, with K-Pax director Iain Softley attached. Noon wrote a second draft of the screenplay, but by the time he finished in 2004, the option ran out and got dropped by Pathe, though Softley promised to look for a new producer. The last that was heard about the movie was in 2005 when Noon told readers of his website "don't hold your breath." No! We need our hallucinogenic feathers and our alternate reality ASAP!

With additional writing and reporting by Andrew Hudson.

I. The Unexpected (But Basic) Weakness.

War Of The Worlds by H.G. Wells. One of the earliest classic science fiction tales has one of the most ridiculous miracles as well. I remember when I read this book as a kid, I threw it across the room when I got to the "and then they all got the flu and died, kthxbai" ending. Even as a kid, I felt totally cheated. And the 2005 Spielberg film jettisoned almost everything about the book — except the ending. Trust Alan Moore to fix the problem by making the deadly disease into biological warfare in his second League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel.

Signs. Along similar lines, we have the aliens whose one great weakness is water — so they invade a planet that's mostly water. It's just a tad convenient, but we've already ragged on this movie enough.

II. A Human Suddenly Touches The Soul Of The Machine.

Doctor Who, "The Parting Of The Ways." Almost every season of Russell T. Davies' Doctor Who series has ended with some kind of unlikely miracle fix, but the first one was by far the hardest to swallow. The Doctor is facing an army of 100 trillion Daleks, who are also religious fundamentalists (just to make them even scarier) and he's spent the whole episode building a weapon that he won't use because it'll kill everybody, even the nice humans. And then Rose sees some graffiti and figures out that if she looks into the heart of the TARDIS, something totally awesome will happen. Never mind that the last time someone looked into the heart of the TARDIS, she regressed into a baby. But this time, it totally turns Rose into a super-god! But only for about five minutes, just long enough for her to wipe out all the fundy Daleks, and resurrect the hunky Jack — but not the cute Lynda-with-a-Y, because Rose is glad she's dead. Rose is a mean God, sadly. And here's that video:

The Matrix: Revolutions. Is it still a deus ex machina if you call it "The Deus Ex Machina?" Mayyyybe. In the end of the third film, Neo journeys to the "machine city" and makes a deal with the personification of the meachines, which calls itself the Deus Ex Machina. Actually, this bit grows pretty logically out of the rest of the events in the film, so I'm inclined to give it a pass. If you think the Matrix sequels in general make sense, than this bit makes sense, too.

III. The Cavalry Arrives.

The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson. The world is totally shitfucked, and then John Percival Hackworth creates a multimedia AI book as a "primer" for young ladies. Nell gets a copy of the book, and it teaches her how to become a super-genius ninja mastermind. At the end of the book, just when you think everything is completely screwed, it suddenly turns out someone has pirated and mass-produced the book, and squillions of unwanted Chinese girls have all read it and turned into an army of super-ninjas, aka the Mouse Army. Suddenly, everything's going to be fantastic!

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. TK and his friends are psychic — which is an illegal mutation in this nasty post-nuclear Newfoundland, which persecutes mutants. It's basically like the X-Men, with less technology and better liquor. Just when all seems hopeless, one of the telepathic mutants manages to reach all the way to New Zealand, which turns out to be a technologically advanced, enlightened society where it's actually cool to be telepathic. The New Zealanders randomly show up and rescue our heroes just in the nick of time. Yay, New Zealand!

IV. God Actually Shows Up.

Babylon 5. Sheridan is killed at the end of the third season, and war is looming and everything seems lost and horrible... until the nice Lorien, who's the first being to have attained sentience in our galaxy and has a great skin-care routine, saves Sheridan by imbuing him with his own life-force... but only after Sheridan confronts his fear of death and has the specially mandated Near-Death Catharsis (TM).

Forever Free by Joe Haldeman. According to BookSlut, Haldeman's The Forever War used time dilation and "the cold immensity of the universe" as a metaphor for the Vietnam War. But in this quasi-sequel, the disruption of the universe's physical laws turns out to be "just the effects of a god messing about with his creation." Also, we discover that a reckless experiment could destroy the entire universe, and then a few pages later we learn that there's a way to make humans totally non-aggressive. "All the problems that are introduced are solved with a wave of the hand," says Evelyn Leeper.

V. It's All A Test

Space: 1999. I've been searching and searching for this episode I saw when I was a kid, where Moonbase Alpha hurtles into a weird void where everything goes strobeadelic and regular characters start dying randomly, and everybody keeps seeing freaky ghosts, and a bunch of their Eagle scoutships crash onto a mossy planet whose atmosphere is pure LSD. And just when Commander Koenig cant stand this trippy-ass shit any longer, it turns out it was all just a godlike entity yanking on the waistband of his poly-blend pajama bottoms, just to see how he'd handle it. And now that he's shown he's not going to put up with this shit, the Moonbase can go on its merry way. (I can't find this episode in any episode guides. Did it exist? Or did I invent it?) I feel as though there are twenty episodes of the original Star Trek that follow this formula, too. But since O.G. Trek is full of godlike entities anyway, it's not as if the gods on Trek come out of nowhere — they come out of the show's limitless supply of gods. It would be surprising if a godlike entity didn't randomly show up.

Directed by Stuart Gordon (Reanimator) and written by Gordon and Joe Haldeman, Jox takes place in a future postapocalyptic world, after some kind of nuclear cataclysm. The U.S. and Soviet Union, now called the Western Market and the Russian Confederation, no longer fight wars to settle their disputes. Instead, they send huge freaking robots into battle, to smack each other down until a victor is declared.

I love the way the battlesuits are depicted, with Alexander moving his actual hand to make the robot's hand reach down and overturn Achilles' tank. The giant robot effects are entirely done using models and stop-motion animation, but they look way better than a lot of CGI I've seen. In particular, you can actually see the fighting robot transforming into a tank — unlike in Michael Bay's Transformers, where the transformations were always so blurry and disjointed that you couldn't make out what was happening. Thanks to everyone who recommended Robot Jox to me — it really is an instant classic.

It's not a bad list for when you need a literary escape from the looming holiday season, but we'd love to see separate lists for science fiction and fantasy. Don't mix your Pohls and Kays! Although Alcatraz Versus The Evil Librarians sounds like it might be worth looking into. Check out what she's been reading, and let us know what's on your list.