We reviewed Meyer's novel, The Host, when it came out a year or so ago. And we were pleasantly surprised: It's a cheesy beach read, to be sure, but it's also a genuinely thought-provoking, fairly original science fiction story that manages to ask some questions about what it means to be human. So we're cautiously optimistic about Niccol's adaptation, to be produced by the people behind The Road.

There aren't that many stories which start with the Earth already having been vanquished totally by alien invaders — I can think of a few, most notably William Barton's When Heaven Felll — and Meyer has a neat twist on this premise. The Earth has been peacefully overtaken by parasites that control human host bodies. They're more peaceful and mellow than we are, and Earth under their rule has become a placid, rational place — it's not unlike if the pod people from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers had won.

But Meyer adds another twist on top of that — which is really where The Host gets interesting. The alien parasites are "going native," and they're being influenced by their host bodies' desires and habits and ideas. It's not unlike the relationship between the Trills and their host bodies in Star Trek, except that the creatures in The Host are accustomed to taking over bodies that are more docile and easier to control, unlike our belligerent, adrenaline-and-hormone-ruled selves. The central love story in The Host is actually just our way into thinking about what it means for the alien invaders to go native — the invader known as Wanderer falls for the man her host body, Melanie, loves, and finds herself being subsumed into Melanie's identity rather than the other way around. She becomes a passenger in Melanie's body rather than the controller.

So... you have a story about a voyeur who lives inside a woman's body. You have a world where people are all controlled by creatures, but the boundary between controller and controlled is getting increasingly blurry. And you have a paranoid thriller about a seemingly perfect society that has cracks. It's not hard to imagine the man who brought us the panopticon nightmare of The Truman Show, the man-controlling-ideal-woman story of S1m0ne and the flawed-utopia of Gattaca making The Host into a great film. I'm actually eager to see what he does with it.

The only downside to a Niccol-directed The Host would be if it delays The Cross, the dystopian future movie he's already working on, which we ran some concept art from the other day. Here's hoping he finishes The Cross, and then creates a smarter, sharper version of Meyer's admittedly schlocky novel. It could be that rare movie adaptation that outshines the book. [Variety]

In the last few years, psychiatrists began documenting cases of patients who reported a belief that they were being filmed for television entertainment. The patients differed in their experiences, but all believed that their lives had somehow been selected to participate in a show without their consent:

One man showed up at a federal building, asking for release from the reality show he was sure was being made of his life. Another was convinced his every move was secretly being filmed for a TV contest. A third believed everything - the news, his psychiatrists, the drugs they prescribed - was part of a phony, stage-set world with him as the involuntary star, like the 1998 movie "The Truman Show."

Although the syndrome, which some psychiatrists have unofficially named after the film, is related to classic paranoid and grandiose delusions, the pervasiveness of reality television in our culture may reinforce the delusion in many patients. Mental health professionals note that, when patients see shows featuring hidden cameras and invasive footage, it seems plausible that they could be on television themselves:

That's not to say reality shows make healthy people delusional, "but, at the very least, it seems possible to me that people who would become ill are becoming ill quicker or in a different way," Ian Gold [a philosophy and psychology professor at McGill University] said.

While many sufferers are intensely disturbed by their delusions (one physician reported a patient who threatened to kill himself if he couldn’t drop out of his imagined reality show), some find the idea of being on television appealing. The imagined total invasion of their privacy may be distressing, but a few actually take pride their supposed celebrity status.

[via Associated Press]

Actually, there are two lists here: a list of pre-Murdoch stories that predicted the rise of a media omnivore; and a list of more recent works which use a Murdoch figure to make a point, either satirical or serious. For convience's sake, we'll date the Murdoch era as beginning in full force in 1985, the year Murdoch took on American citizenship so he could legally start buying up U.S. TV stations.

Stories which predicted Murdoch:

Diana Christensen in Network. Faye Dunaway's character gets some dynamite footage of terrorists robbing banks, which propels her to the top of her network. But she's not satisfied, and ends up merging the network's news and entertainment divisions into one monster, which she controls. Then she decides to give some Maoist terrorists their own TV show, and their first episode consists of killing the last "mad as hell" newscaster who clings to truth and all that crap.

Palmer Eldritch from The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick. Eldritch is the ultimate media mogul, because he controls your dream afterlife, via his substance Chew-Z. Forget controlling what you watch on TV or at the movies — getting to be in charge of your eternal afterlife is the ultimate media-whore rush. At least this guy is convinced Palmer Eldritch is a Rupert Murdoch archetype.

The Great Zapparoni from The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger (1957). The Great Zapparoni runs a huge entertainment empire that depends on animatronic robots. He's achieved "global domination" in the information and entertainment industries thanks to super-sophisticated artificial intelligences. But he's paranoid about the scientists who work for him selling his secrets, so he tries to hire a war veteran to be his head of security and keep tabs on his employees. Bruce Sterling praised the novel's prescient social commentary and technology.

Stories which poke fun (or a scorching-hot poker) at Murdoch:

Christof from The Truman Show. The creator of the ultimate reality show, Christof crosses over from media megalith to mad god. He wants to keep Truman terrified of water, so he'll stay trapped in the fake reality Christof has created for him. And when the two of them finally speak to each other, Christof sounds both paternalistic and omnipresent, his voice echoing out of the sky.

The Jagrafess from Doctor Who, "The Long Game". At first you think the Editor, in his natty suit, will turn out to be the Murdoch of this far-future dystopia. After all, the Editor is the one making the eloquent speeches about how you can control people completely by feeding them fake news and emphasizing just the right word to create a "climate of fear." But it turns out the frozen head office of Satellite Five, the huge media empire, is really run by a giant slug overhead, the Jagrafess, which spits venom down at the pathetic Editor.

Grossman from Max Headroom. The head of Network 23 has an evil scheme to create "blipverts," which cram 30 seconds worth of advertising into just 3 seconds, so you can't change the channel or walk away. The only problem is, they make people explode after watching too many of them. Reporter Edison Carter starts to uncover the truth, so Grossman orders him dead. But instead, Carter is transformed into the cyber-personality Max Headroom.

Hiram Patterson from The Light Of Other Days by Arthur C.Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Patterson's news company OurWorld develops the WormCam, which uses wormhole technology to spy on anywhere in the universe instantly. And then Patterson also develops the SmartShroud, the only thing which can hide someone from the WormCam. And eventually, he can even use his WormCam to spy on events in the past. But his ultimate aim is even more sinister — to use wormholes to suck power out of the Earth and the stars, all to help his energy company crush the competition. The greedy and psychotic Patterson has "certain elements" of Murdoch, Clarke conceded. (Clarke and Murdoch are very close friends. After a Murdoch paper reported the accusation (later discredited) that Clarke was a pedophile, Murdock assured Clarke those reporters would never work again. And Murdoch's Harper Collins published Clarke's anti-Murdock novel.)

Daniel Siltz from Cold Lazarus by Dennis Potter. It's the 24th century, and everything has gone to shit. Britain is dominated by American media oligarchs, and all real experiences are illegal. The only legal experiences are virtual ones, which you have to pay for. Siltz, who's clearly meant to be Murdoch, wants to resurrect the mind of dead 20th century author Daniel Feeld, so he can make money by selling Feeld's memories on his virtual entertainment network. But Feeld's mind becomes conscious of his predicament and begs for death, arousing the sympathy of anti-VR guerillas, who eventually kill Feeld and Siltz. Potter wrote this TV drama while he was dying of the pancreatic cancer which he named Rupert after the man who represented everything Potter loathed most.

Linderman, from Heroes. He's an evil omnivore who controls everything and manipulates everyone from behind the scenes. And actor Malcolm McDowell says he's lost count] of how many times people have asked him if Linderman is based on Murdoch. (I can't quite see it, myself. But then again, McDowell himself says the alleged Murdoch resemblance holds true for many of the characters he's played in recent years.)

Fred in Planet Fred, a movie which Dreamworks optioned back in 1999, and which probably will never come out at this point. Supposedly it's about a microscopic alien who settles on the head of a Murdochian media boss. It sounds sort of How To Get Ahead In Advertising-esque, so it's too bad that we're getting Eddie Murphy's new Starship Dave (about tiny aliens living inside Eddie's head) instead.

You could always borrow "mundane science fiction," a term that's sweeping the literary SF world. But the word "mundane" doesn't conjure up images of a taut thriller, does it? There's also "near future," but that could encompass films set in 2027. The Village Voice has used the five-minutes-into-the-future tag to describe films as diverse as Fight Clubhttp://www.villagevoice.com/livoice/9942,movies,9396,0.html and Demonlover. So what do you think? What's a snappy term for a movie that takes place in a few minutes?