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.

There's something awe-inspiring about Bradbury recounting how he used to crank out a short story a week and mail it out — working so hard, he barely noticed the flood of rejection slips coming back from the magazine publishers. He consoled himself at the time that these editors were idiots who didn't recognize his genius — even though he later realized these stories were mostly garbage.

That work ethic seems to be firmly in place now that Bradbury is 89. He's announced that he's launching a TV miniseries of six episodes called "The Bradbury Chronicles," with each episode based on one of his stories. They'll each be directed by a different director, sort of like the Masters Of Science Fiction anthology series from a couple years ago. He's signed up with White Oaks Films to develop the miniseries, but no network is on board yet.

Meanwhile, Bradbury has a new movie, Chrysalis, which just premiered as On Demand video on Time Warner, Charter and Bright House. The film won the "best Sci-Fi Feature Award" at The International Horror And Science Fiction Film Festival. A press release from the film-makers quotes Bradbury as saying: "Chrysalis started to develop in my life more than forty years ago. I wrote ten different versions of the story and tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it to various magazines. I finally wrote one more version and sold it to "Amazing Stories." To have it come off the page and come alive is a real triumph. [Producer] Roger Lay, Jr. has done a first-class, A-1 job." The film should be out on DVD early next year.

And finally, Bradbury has written a new musical, called Merry Christmas 2116, in which "an aging couple approaching the 40th anniversary of their married lives together each decide to give their spouse a present. As coincidence would have it, Mr. Wycherly and Mrs. Wycherly each separately approach a maker of realistic, lifelike robots, called marionettes although they have no strings. Mr. Wycherly requests that Mr. Marionette manufacture a highly customized younger, more vital version of himself to please Mrs. Wycherly. The Missus, for her part, asks the robot-maker to fashion a young, hot, sassy, saucy version of herself for her Mister. When the new marionettes are each delivered to their designated recipients, the fun really begins." The show is running at the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena on Saturdays throughout December.

[Bradbury Video via Science Fiction Buzz. Thanks to Dijou for the musical heads up!]

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:

The Masks by Ray Bradbury

Masks, myths and metaphors" play an important part in much of Bradbury's work, claim Jonathan Eller and William F. Touponce in their Bradbury study, The Life Of Fiction, and they believe Bradbury gets to the bottom of this obsession in his never-finished novel called The Masks. Filled with images of carnivals, this 1940s novel would have been the purest distillation of Bradbury's obsession with magicians and magic.

The Owl In Daylight by Philip K. Dick

When Dick died in 1982, he was busy with The Owl in Daylight, which is reputed to be concerned with deaf aliens abducting a B-movie composer, artistic genius, new forms of sensory input, an amusement park, or a sci-fi reboot of The Divine Comedy, depending whom you ask. Dick never outlined the plot, so it's hard to say. His wife Tessa published her interpretation of his concept in 2009, but her version is largely her own work, and draws inspiration from Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Irontown Blues by John Varley

We interviewed Varley back in March 2008, and he told us:

One of these days I hope to write a third novel in the Steel Beach, Golden Globe trilogy, entitled Irontown Blues. The reason I haven't written it is that I don't yet know what's going to happen.

People have been waiting for this novel forever, and little is known about Varley's ideas so far. Back in February, he said it's "third in line," after two other novels he's working on. "If I write it, it would be about a cop," he told Xero magazine.

The Pressure of Time by Thomas M. Disch

A sequel to Camp Concentration, about the pursuits of a society of humans become immortal through genetic alterations caused by a plague that swept through the world. A few regular mortals also survive, hiding out in enclaves. Disch explained:

For various reasons, personal and impersonal, I never got back to work on "Pressure", and now I see I won't, alas. Since Camp Concentration (which took 8 months to write) I realise I can't afford to spend such a lot of time on a book that earns only a standards sf advance". The personal reasons included an intense affair with the poet Lee Harwood that lasted about six weeks. After Harwood left him, Disch suffered several months of unrequited love. Disch confessed that much of The Pressure of Time was "inspired by the pangs of despised loved". Disch travelled around, visiting Ireland and Turkey, but suffered writers block. Unable to continue with his own work, he wrote novelisations of The Prisoner and Alfred the Great.

The other books in Octavia Butler's Fledgling series.

Butler died after Fledgling came out, but the book's ending left most people believing she intended to write at least one sequel, if not many. I've heard rumors she'd made notes on a sequel, but can't find any confirmation of that online. Butler also had started a third novel in her Parable series, called Parable Of The Trickster, but was unable to finish it due to a seven-year bout of writers' block. (Octavia Butler's advice on dealing with writers' block? "Fall in love. Why not? You're already miserable.")

Voyages D'Etudes by Jules Verne

Verne wrote 50 pages, and never finished the rest. The book was rewritten by his son Michel as L'etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac, along with several other works inspired to greater or lesser degree by his father's manuscripts. Esperanto enthusiasts are particularly saddened that in so doing, Michel expunged all references to support for the nascent language, of which Jules was a proponent.

Azathoth by H.P. Lovecraft.

Ia! Ia! Lovecraft started this novel in June 1922, but only wrote a small fragment, which was published afterh is death in the journal Leaves. According to Wikipedia, he described it as "a weird Eastern tale in the 18th century manner" and as a "weird Vathek-like novel." (Vathek being an 18th century novel about Arabia.) You can read the fragment that he actually wrote here. It starts quite stirringly, bemoaning our gray, citified, un-magical existence.

A Sense Of Time by Henry James

Yes, that Henry James. The "Turn Of The Screw" guy. He started writing this romance, about a young man who discovers he can walk through portals into the past, in 1900, but all the time-travel mechanics got too convoluted and gave him a headache. He abandoned it, only to return to work on it in 1914, writing another huge section. In the novel, Ralph Pendrel travels back and takes the place of his own ancestor, but then the woman he loves realizes he's a time-traveler and makes a great sacrifice to help him return to the present.

The Plant by Stephen King

This was King's famous experiment, where he serialized a novel online, and you were supposed to pay him $1 every time you downloaded a chapter. If the percentage of downloaders who paid $1 dropped below 75 percent, King threatened to stop posting the chapters. And eventually, that's what happened. The already-posted chapters have been removed from King's site. The novel is about a paperback editor who receives weird letters (and odd photographs) from a magical weirdo. The editor sics the cops on the magician, who sends him a strange plant in revenge.

The Dark Tower by C. S. Lewis

A story of interdimensional travel including the titular tower (which turns out to be a far-future replica of the the bog-ugly Cambridge University Library), this was supposed to be the original sequel to Out of the Silent Planet. It ends abruptly and some people have accused it of being a forgery.

The Splendor And Misery Of Bodies, Of Cities by Samuel R. Delany

This sequel to Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand may never actually see the light of day. We asked Delany about it a while back and he explained:

I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in.

And after that, Delany's view of the gay community changed somewhat drastically.

The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams

Adams was working on this book, a Dirk Gently novel, when he died, but he'd decided his ideas for it didn't work for Gently. So he tried first turning it into a standalone novel, and then reworking it into a sixth Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy installment. The version which appears in the book of the same name does star Gently, and involves a client who wants to hire him to find the back half of her cat. According to Don't Panic, the book about Adams by Neil Gaiman (with revisions and updates by Guy Adams), the fragment which appears in the book is actually from several different versions of Salmon which were on Adams' various hard drives. What we have is pieced together from three files — Chapters 2, 8, 10 and 11 are from one file, Chapter 1 is from an earlier draft, and Chapter 9 is Adams' last known piece of writing. It's basically a mish-mash, and an assembly of working notes and fragmentary stuff.

Like the novels we're discussing, this list is decidedly unfinished — what are the books that were never completed, for whatever reason, which you would dearly love to read?

Additional reporting by Josh Snyder, Mary Ratliff and Cyriaque Lamar.

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]

Given his recent record, reader expectations for "We'll Always Have Paris" might understandably be on the low side — especially given the cover, which features a grinning Bradbury holding a glowing book, Photoshopped in front of the Eiffel Tower.
And therein lies a happy surprise: Throw those expectations out the window and get ready to enjoy a fresh draft of stories the way only Bradbury can write them.

All of a sudden, I'm curious to read some Bradbury again. [L.A. Times]

Bradbury’s script outline for The Day the Earth Stood Still II: The Evening of the Second Day opens on Christmas Eve, thirty years after the events of the original film. Chris Atkins, an employee at the Vehicle Assembly Building for the Apollo Mission, witnesses the landing of an alien spacecraft, a sight he half-remembers from his childhood. It is revealed that someone left the spacecraft, and NASA officials are on the lookout for him, her, or it. But Atkins has a vague feeling about the ship, a feeling he describes with a vague bit of dialogue:

ATKINS

Maybe we don't search. Maybe we wait for it to find us.

DIRECTOR

Why should it do that?

ATKINS

Because — it knows one of us.

DIRECTOR

Who?

ATKINS

Me. I think. I have a hunch.

DIRECTOR

I hope your hunch is scientific.

ATKINS

And how will your search pay off?

DIRECTOR

It won't. Get home. It's Christmas Eve.

So Atkins returns to his boarding house, where he suspects one of his fellow boarders of being the alien visitor. First he suspects the cockney reporter, but while he’s trimming the house’s Christmas tree, a young woman hands him the star for the top. She is radiant and beautiful and Atkins falls instantly in love with her. So naturally she’s the alien.

The alien woman takes off and Atkins pursues her. He eventually catches up with her (after opening her ship with the words “Klaatu barada nikto”) and learns that she is Klaata, Klaatu’s daughter. Klaatu has died, but Klaata has traveled to Earth with his body to continue his work.

At first, Atkins is excited by her arrival, and the prospect of a messianic arrival on Christmas Eve turns him poetic:

ATKINS
Time for a Second Annunciation?

She knows what he is speaking about. The knowledge of the Biblical Annunciation is in her glowing face as she turns back to him.

YOUNG WOMAN [Klaata]

What would you like to have announced?

ATKINS looks from her to the world far across the land, past the silent gantries.

ATKINS

That this Christmas morn, we get the grandest gift that man ever got. That something incredible and wonderful is about to happen, that will change us forever and be only for the good!

The mood turns sour when Atkins realizes Klaata has come to judge humanity, as he is sure that humans have failed to carry out Klaatu’s edict to change their ways. But Klaata assures him it isn’t so dire:

KLAATA

You've behaved better than you think. That's why we delayed. You're strange people. You've actually done some things right!

ATKINS
Like what?

KLAATA

Don’t you know? Must I, from some other world tell you? Thirty years ago people still died from polio, malaria, scarlet fever. You've stopped all that. Your country invented new kinds of wheat and corn. You send food to 90 countries. Immigrants pour into your land, 500 thousand a year. Why are they coming here if you're as bad as you say?

It appears that by judging humanity, Klaata means she’s judging the US. Do the people dying of malaria in Africa not count?

But Klaata tells Atkins that she has come to Earth not as Santa Claus, but as an extraterrestrial Grinch. After demonstrating her awesome ability to unmake matter, she reveals to him her plan:

KLAATA then explains in some detail what their plan, her plan, KLAATU's plan, is. To let the panic grow in little starts and stops, little vanishings, little disappearances, at first unnoticed. Who cares, for instance, if a11 the tiddlewinks in the world vanish on the same day? Or all the collar-stays? Or all the pennies which now burden us and are almost worthless?

Somewhere down the line – OIL.

Where Klaatu warned humanity to abandon its violent ways, Klaata mostly wants us to end our dependence on oil. Before she leaves, she gathers military officials and world leaders to witness a demonstration of solar power, implying that Atkins should help lead them all into an era of alternative energy.

But Klaata isn’t taking any chances. She gives Atkins a list of problems humanity must solve within the next twenty years, or else face certain destruction. She gives him a small cube into which he must feed data from their assignments. Atkins apparently contemplates gaming the cube, but Klaata isn’t having any of it:

KLAATA

No. Don't even think it. You can't fool Gort.

ATKINS
Gort?!

That’s what everyone in the theater would have been thinking had this ever managed to get made. Did they dismantle Gort? Did he have an accident with a trash compactor? Klaata says this is Gort’s heart, but never says whether the rest of his body is lying in wait to enact humanity’s destruction.

Klaata promises her that if Atkins is a good boy and fulfills all of the duties on the list, humanity will be saved and the two of them will be rejoined:

KLAATA

If you have done as you say you will do, grown to fit your promise, given yourselves back to yourselves as a gift, then place this cube, still lit, in your space machine. You wi11 travel faster than Death can follow. This will take you to our world.

ATKINS

Where the angels of the Lord will sing and dance and shout our welcome?

KLAATA
Where I will be waiting.

They share a bittersweet kiss before Klaata departs, leaving Atkins to ponder whether humanity’s salvation or the promise of future alien nookie is a better incentive for solving the energy crisis.

[Scifi Scripts]

There are just so many great scenes in Sound Of Thunder, like all of the moments where Ben Kingsley, sporting an insane fauxhawk with a life of its own, keeps spouting off. (Sample Kingsley line: "Time itself is being turned upside down, and you're running around with a toothbrush worrying about your pension.")

But the greatest may be this scene, after the changes to the timeline have unleashed a whole swarm of half-baboon, half-dinosaur creatures. (Seriously, this movie is like the anti-Primer.) And one of the scientists gets injured and does the whole "Leave me behind, go save yourselves" bit. (And it actually works.) He sits there waiting to be eaten by dino-boons (babosaurs? daboons?) and decides to give a little speech to his kid (who's not there) about astronomy. Classic!

[IMDB]

• 
  
• Gygax spent his formative years reading science fiction authors Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber as well as the fantasy world of Conan the Barbarian via Robert E. Howard's books.
• 
  
• In 1953 Gygax first played Gettysburg by Avalon Hill, and later ended up ordering blank hexagonal mapping paper from the same company.
• 
  
• In 1966 he founded the International Federation of Wargamers with friends, and in 1967 he organized a 20 person gaming get-together in his basement that was later billed as Gen Con 0. Gen Con is now the world's largest hobby-gaming convention.
• 
  
• He founded the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, which was a military miniatures society. This guy sure loved his Associations, Federations, and groups.
• 
  
• In 1971, he and Jeff Perren wrote Chainmail, a medieval miniatures game, which later featured a supplementary set of rules featuring magic spells and other fantasy elements.
• 
  
• After playing Gettysburg, he became obsessed with finding ways to generate random numbers rather than using traditional six-sided dice. He found a set of the five platonic solids in the back of a school supply catalog and ordered several sets, and later introduced them into gaming in D&D. In fact, owning your own dice and keeping them in a little velvet bag was a sign of geek coolness, back then.
• 
  
• In 1974 he formed Tactical Studies Rules with Don Kaye and released the first set of Dungeons and Dragons rules, and their first run of 1,000 hand-printed editions sold out in nine months, and were later passed around college and high school campuses across the nation.
• 
  
• In 1976, TSR introduced the game Metamorphosis Alpha, which later became Gamma World. The game was inspired by Brian Aldiss' novel Starship, and later crossed over into the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons world with the "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" module. Gygax said the module was meant to show what would happen if a ship like one in Metamorphosis Alpha crashed into a D&D world.
• 
  
• In 1982 TSR followed the scifi vein with Star Frontiers, which featured swashbuckling space adventure through the unexplored worlds of the Frontier. This was actually my first introduction to role-playing games, and I have to admit that I loved this game a lot more than D&D. In fact, I'm tempted to dig through trunks to see if I still have the rulebook.
• 
  
• Gygax left TSR in 1984 during changes to management, and began working on the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon show.
• 
  
• In 1987 Gygax developed Cyborg Commando, a science fiction roleplaying game "set in 2035 at a time when the earth is invaded by aliens called Xenoborgs intent on subduing humanity and taking control of the planet. Luckily humanity has developed a new kind of solider: the Cyborg Commando, a mechanical/electronical man-like structure that can be implanted with a willing human's brain." Unfortunately it was later criticized as "the worst role-playing game ever written."
• 
  
• In 1999 he introduced Lejendary Adventure, which was meant to be a return to less-complicated gameplay with an emphasis on fun, although it explored the familiar gaming territory already well-covered by D&D. One of the last projects he had been working on was an expansion module for Lejendary called "Lejendary AsteRogues", as sort of "fantastical science RPG." According to Gygax, "The Lejendary AsteRogues game is actually in the "Fantastical Science" area, not true SF. It is a sort of mix of steampunk and super science with a leavening of Napoleonic Era military material." Sounds pretty scifi to us.
• 
  
• He wrote two science fiction short stories, "Pay Tribute" and "The Battle Off Deadstar," which were published in the scifi anthology The Fleet and Breakthrough (The Fleet, Book 3).
• 
  
• He has a strain of bacteria named after him: "Arthronema gygaxiana sp nov UTCC393." We hope it's not flesh-eating.
• 
  
• In 2000 he appeared as himself on an episode ofFuturama along with Al Gore, Nichelle Nichols, and Stephen Hawking. He rolls the dice to determine which greeting to give to Fry.
  

Bradbury himself has been involved in every step of the movie, which takes place in an Earth left barren after a third world war. Scientists in a research facility are struggling to find ways to revive plant life. One of the scientists apparently dies, but then a plant chrysalis grows around him and saves him. He starts changing into something new and scary. Here's a passage from the original story:

He could not see. But yes, yes, he could, and it was like the inside of a small dark red cavern, as if his eyes were turned inward upon his skull. And Smith tried to twist his tongue, and suddenly, trying to scream, he knew his tongue was gone, that the place where it used to be was vacant, an itching spot that wanted a tongue but couldn't have it just now.

His tongue was an itching spot.

Malcolm McDowell, probably best known for his lead role in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange stopped to share his thoughts about science fiction with us:

Do you think science fiction films have lost their political edge over the years?

You know, science fiction has gone through many changes, hasn't it? I think the benchmark was Stanley Kubrick's 2001, which took science fiction into another sphere completely, from the sort of Flash Gordon type thing with cardboard sets to films about our philosophy and where and what we are. That's the beauty of science fiction and where it should be. Even films like Star Wars have taken where Stanley left off and run with it, and they're beautiful films. And of course, Blade Runner is a very good example. It's rather a dark film, but it does question us as a human race, and that's what's so interesting about it.

The problem is, a lot of these films are really hokey and bad. Although some of the bad ones can be fun to watch. But, Kubrick did us such a service when he set the bar so high.

It's funny you mention "bad" movies, because when Blade Runner came out, it was generally perceived as a flop. However, here we are celebrating it 25 years later as a classic. Will that happen to other films that weren't hits?

You know, I think that's down to the DVD and the internet. It's amazing how DVD has really rescued some great movies, classic cult movies and now it's not only about who can have the biggest opening weekend. I really love a slow burn, and Blade Runner is one of the best examples of that.

When you were young, were you inspired by any science fiction?

Of course I read The Martian Chronicles and I love Ray Bradbury. He really is the Jules Verne of our country, and he's also a great poet as well.

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]