Tuesday 26 August 2008

Top 48 SF&F Book-to-Film Adaptions

I normally don't do memes, but what the heck?

Lifted from Pat's Fantasy Hotlist.

The rules:

From Box Office Mojo's list of Top 48 Sci-Fi Films Based on a Book (or Story) (1980- present).

Here are the rules.

- Copy the list below.
- Mark in bold the movie titles for which you read the book.
- Italicize the movie titles for which you started the book but didn't finish it.

1. Jurassic Park
2. War of the Worlds
3. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
4. I, Robot
5. Contact
6. Congo
7. Cocoon
8. The Stepford Wives
9. The Time Machine
10. Starship Troopers
11. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
12. K-PAX
13. 2010
14. The Running Man
15. Sphere
16. The Mothman Prophecies
17. Dreamcatcher
18. Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
19. Dune
20. The Island of Dr. Moreau
21. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
22. The Iron Giant(The Iron Man)
23. Battlefield Earth
24. The Incredible Shrinking Woman
25. Fire in the Sky
26. Altered States
27. Timeline
28. The Postman
29. Freejack(Immortality, Inc.)
30. Solaris
31. Memoirs of an Invisible Man
32. The Thing (Who Goes There?)
33. The Thirteenth Floor
34. Lifeforce (Space Vampires)
35. Deadly Friend
36. The Puppet Masters
37. 1984
38. A Scanner Darkly
39. Creator
40. Monkey Shines
41. Solo(Weapon)
42. The Handmaid's Tale
43. Communion
44. Carnosaur
45. From Beyond
46. Nightflyers
47. Watchers
48. Body Snatchers

(we'll ignore the fact that Children of Men, Total Recall, The Prestige and Minority Report should all be on this list as well, and as far as I can tell Cocoon was not based on a novel)

Well there you go. For what it's worth, Jurassic Park was a bad book but completely upstaged by The Lost World. Both books were so horrendous I've never been tempted to pick up a Crichton book since. On the other hand, David Brin's novel The Postman is a pretty good book. This may be down to the fact that all the novel and the movie have in common are exactly two scenes and a few character names and absolutely nothing else. Battlefield Earth is obviously a near-unreadably bad book as well, although I did nearly make it to the end before having to give up when nuclear bombs started blowing up and leaving the unprotected other nuclear bombs sitting right next to them completely unharmed. Carl Sagan's Contact is a good book and it's a shame he didn't write more fiction. 2010 is the first adult SF novel I read when I was ten years old and got me into the genre in the first place. Nightflyers is a very good story from George RR Martin's Dreamsongs collection. I left The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine blank as I'm pretty sure I read them when I was younger but don't recall much about them. A HG Wells reread may be in order!

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