HarlanEllison

Who doesn't love A Boy and His Dog? People who haven't seen A Boy and His Dog, that's who. After all, I'm fairly certain it is a metaphysical impossibility for anyone not to get a kick out of a post-apocalyptic movie about a teenager (Don Johnson) and his telepathic dog who wander the junk-laden wastelands of the future looking for women and food. Well now Quiet Earth tells us an animated remake of sorts is in the works.

The man stewing it all together is My Suicide director David Lee Miller. Details are a little scarce at this point, so it's unclear whether Miller's A Boy and His Dog is a remake of Jones' film or Harlan Ellison's novella that it was based off of. If it's the latter, hopefully this time around we might see some of the mutated fallout victims the book mentioned that Jones' film never does.

With a tentative 2012 release date, this animated A Boy and His Dog is a ways away, but we'll be keeping our eyes peeled for any kind of clues as to the animation style, voice talent, and so forth.

This week finally sees the release of Youth in Revolt, the film version of C.D. Payne's 1993 novel. Considering the book's length (about 500 pages), director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Gustin Nash faced the unenviable task of deciding what should remain and what should be excised. How do you make a 90-minute film that pleases the novel's legion of fans while remaining accessible to a larger audience that has never read it?

It's a challenge familiar to sci-fi fans. We've probably all experienced that moment of utter disbelief that a favorite story or novel has been twisted and mangled beyond recognition. But when the filmmakers get it right, honoring the spirit and creating a work that lives apart from its inspiration, it's magical. Regrettably, I don't read as many novels nowadays as in my earlier years, so I've never read the source material for some of my favorite science fiction films (e.g. Children of Men, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Planet of the Apes). Still, it was difficult to narrow my choices down to just ten. Here's what I ended up with: a list of my ten favorite sci-fi adaptations. What are yours?

1. Slaughterhouse-Five
Screenwriter Stephen Geller took on a near-impossible job, adapting Kurt Vonnegut's wondrous novel, which was inspired by Vonnegut's real-life experiences during World War II. Oddly enough, George Roy Hill's direction is as sprightly as you'd expect from the man whose previous film was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Yet Hill's jaunty approach was exactly the right way to capture the spirit, the basic trajectory, and much of the flavor of the novel, producing a picture that feels both tied to the year in which it was released (1972) and transcendent of time and place.

I don't think anyone saw this coming. Harlan Ellison, the prickly sci-fi author best known to Star Trek fans for spending the last forty years bitching about changes to the only episode he ever wrote ("City on the Edge of Forever"), has opened his arms to J.J. Abrams, asking to be part of the new Star Trek creative team.

"If anyone out there thinks this melding has legs, let Abrams or anyone else with the chops to get in touch with me directly," Ellison pleads. "I am without full-time film-agent representation, by choice, at the moment; so if the job presents itself, I will work for pay."

Ellison has been a vocal critic of the late Gene Roddenberry for years, and he couldn't resist the urge to get a few cracks in, "Where's the 'downside' to getting topside the radar of J.J. Abrams? This guy ain't Roddenberry!...He's a writer I respect, whose work has frequently blown the lid off my box of surpriseability." The notoriously litigious Ellison recently settled a lawsuit with CBS/Paramount Television over monies owed from his classic episode.

I can't imagine Ellison working on the sequel to Abrams' hit feature film, but he might have a few interesting adventures up his sleeve for that new Star Trek television series that the folks at Bad Robot keep drumming up interest for. Time will tell.

(via Trek Today)

While geeks the world over are eagerly awaiting Avatar, the return of James Cameron to the original sci-fi territory he's proven a master over with The Abyss and Terminator/Terminator 2, fans of obscure science fiction novellas from 1957 are being struck with deja vu. A reader tipped off genre champions io9 to the story Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson, a story that sounds remarkably like Cameron's supposedly original script that revolves around humans that use the bodies of an alien species via a mental connection as physical avatars, and proceed to use said avatars to exploit the resources of the alien's home world.

From the io9 post, "Like Avatar, Call Me Joe centers on a paraplegic - Ed Anglesey - who telepathically connects with an artificially created life form in order to explore a harsh planet (in this case, Jupiter). Anglesey, like Avatar's Jake Sully, revels in the freedom and strength of his artificial created body, battles predators on the surface of Jupiter, and gradually goes native as he spends more time connected to his artificial body."

[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where every day we'll be supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

There are four brilliant minds in this 1997 clip from the dearly bereft Sci-Fi Channel but the center of attention is notoriously cantankerous (and prolific) writer Harlan Ellison. The man who wrote the Trek episode "City on the edge of Forever" feels personally wounded by the popularization of the term Sci-Fi at the degradation of science fiction, "it diminishes anything, it's like referring to the feminist movement as 'fem-lib'".

Ellison raises a few great points, the spearhead of which is that a term like Sci-Fi has become a blanket for global phenomenon, like Independence Day, that have become more successful than the legitimately intelligent works of science fiction to which all of their debts are owed. Though I may not agree with his sentiment overall, I think the debate is a wonderful one to have.

Does Sci-Fi cheapen the heritage of science fiction? Can the two not co-exist? How did Harlan Ellison survive the Great Scorn that is the re-branding of the very network on which this debate took place? If he's that passionate about dumbing down his art form, I'm amazed he didn't climb a clock tower after Syfy was unveiled.