Reading the book 'Bets scifi films never made' made me think of books that I would like to see made as films. Writing that line made me wonder why and I suppose its a combination of wanting to see a book made real and also the pleasure of having a story told in a slightly different way as I'm not too precious about people taking a book and adapting it however they see fit (e.g. Naked Lunch, Blade Runner etc) as I like the fact it often gives a different slant on the same idea. Anyways here are my nominations:

The Man In The High Castle - Philip K Dick
A story that tells of a world several decades after ww2 with the idea that the Axis powers won. Its not written as a precise analysis of how the world could be but has some really interesting ideas about how culture (in Dick's version of the world) went in a different direction and how peoples approach to the world and each other has changed. It contains many of the themes Dick's work is famous for such as the nature of reality and whether something is real or unreal, authentic or inauthentic.

At the end of the book is a character who has written a book about a world where ww2 was won by the allies.

This really got under my skin in ways I can't really describe which is why I think it would make a really interesting or unusual film.

Cats Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut Jr
A mad scientist invents a substance called ice 9 that when in contact with water freezes it instantly. So if you licked it you would die instantly from all the water in your body freezing and if you dropped it in the sea the whole world would freeze up. Has some other strange things in the book like a religion called Bokenon but has so many scenes that would be good visually it could make for a very cool film. Not seen either Vonnegut adaptations Breakfast of champiosn or Slaughterhouse Five so I may be wishing a terrible film into existance.

Wikipedia claims: The book has been optioned by Leonardo DiCaprio's production company, Appian Way Productions. James V. Hart, screenwriter for the film Contact and his son Jake Hart have been linked to the developing script.[7]

Good thread.

I can't help but 'adapt' books as I'm reading them. Sure, there are tons of terrible adaptations, but I'm not overly precious about films from books as long as they retain some influence of the source material.

Here are some that I think would be great, well interesting at least:

Samuel Delaney's Dhalgren

It's like a twisted, surreal and sexually explicit sci-fi version of James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake - probably unfilmable to some extent, but Cronenberg did an extraordinary job of Naked Lunch so why not.

Irvine Welsh's Porno

The hilarious sequel to Trainspotting. Not sure if Danny Boyle or the original cast would come back for it, but I can really imagine Michael Winterbottom getting his teeth into it.

Albert Camus' The Outsider

Amazed this hasn't been adapted. There's so much potential for this wonderful existential story. Personally I'd like to see a sci-fi setting.

Anything by Dan Simmons, but in particular:

Ilium and Olympos - Shakespeare meets Homer in a space opera. If you're familiar with Simmons work then you know he loves literature and attempts to integrate the classics with mind bending sci-fi - simply breathtaking.

Hyperion Cantos - Keats meets Chaucer in a a staggering sci-fi tale that is expansive beyond imagination. The main draw for me would be the imagining of the baddie 'The Shrike', look here for a description.

Drood - a brilliant story that interweaves fact and fiction. The story follows Victorian author Wilkie Collins through a descent into madness and hysteria with tons of Dickens references. I think del Toro has talked about doing this - not 100% sure though.

Yeh, Simmons is the man.

These are the first ones that spring to mind, but I'm sure I'll think of more.

Not heard of many of those but the sci fi ones sound incredible.

A follow up to Trainspotting seems like a no brainer and it must have been optioned by someone.

Blade Runner is either a good example or bad example of how to adapt a book. I'm sure there are Dick fans out there who consider it a poor film as it is not much like the book but then its so different as to be a different thing anyway.

Here are 2 more-
The Bridge - Iain Banks
Films have been made that allude to different characters in the film being parts of the same person so this wouldn't be unfilmable.

A loose description of the story is a man crashes his car near the Forth Bridge and in a coma reimagines the Bridge as spanning hundreds of miles and built like a city. The film version I imagine could have shades of Jacobs Ladder and Del Toro style designs for the bridge ala the elf underground kingdom in hellboy 2.

Leviathan - D'Israeli aka Matt Brooker
Originally published in 2000AD as 1 core story and several short spin offs. I love this book not just for the ilustrations but the story and ideas are great as well. Basically around the turn of the 19th Century a massive city sized ocean liner takes off from the UK but never reaches the US because the architect of the ship sold his soul to the devil for success and immortality and the devil has now reclaimed the ship and all the people on it in return. What happened to the ship is it slipped into an endless sea in purgatory and has been sailing for years living off its own supplies and what it can grow with the devil powering it from inside the engine room.

This reminded me of an 80s TV miniseries I half rememebr about a ship that sank without trace but when they found it instead of a wreckage they found it had been converted into an underwater city.

Yeh, Bladerunner's Marmite for sure, but pretty much any Dick adaptation is bar A Scanner Darkly. For me the film is great (Director's cut) and the story is another fine slice of Dick's paranoiac twisted brilliance.

Agree with The Bridge a lot of potential for a great screenplay there. I love Banks's work, but his sci-fi stuff, in particular his 'Culture' books are the ones I enjoy the most.

I thought the TV adaptation of The Crow Road was a valiant effort, but I've never got round to seeing Complicity.

If you're a fan of The Bridge then I highly, highly, highly recommend Lanark by Alasdair Gray, an extraordinary piece of fiction that has influenced just about every Scottish writer from the early 80s onwards (it took Gray the best part of 30 years to write it).

I used to read 2000AD, but don't recall Leviathan, but flippin' 'eck it sounds amazing.
From those hallowed Fleetway pages I'd love to have seen Grant Morrison's Zenith realised in a Sin City style - bold black and whites (also Brigand Doom - such a sucker for those simple black and white strips).
Also I was a fan of The Button Man, which would be a perfect film to me anyway seeing as a number of films have used a similar formula - hit men, illegal gambling, everything goes pear-shaped.
But my ultimate 2000AD adaptation would be John Smith's Revere - a complete head trip of a post apocalyptic magical tale with incredible artwork.

I'd also love to see someone wipe Stephen Norrington's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen off the face of the earth and give it a genuinely worthy effort.

There's a cracking short story that I loved as a child by Robert Westall called Sergeant Nice (the book is called Break of Dark) about a policeman in a seaside town who is investigating mysterious thefts going on around an old horse trough, which leads him to question his sanity and the likelihood of supernatural or otherworldly goings on . Sounds pretty tame, but it really shook me up as a youngster and I reread it recently and it still blew me away. Westall is up there with Dahl as the best children's writers.

Massive in scope and epic in scale is David Mitchell's The Cloud Atlas - one film would not be enough, but his incredible detail and emotionally entangled plots are something I'd love to see on the big screen, but to be honest my own movie in my head as I read this will suffice.

Finally, probably one of my fave books ever written and like The Cloud Atlas almost impossible to adapt would be George Perec's Life: A Users Manual - a series of interweaving vignettes set in an apartment block that is based upon a series of chess moves, that bounce back and forth through time - phew, what a literal spectacle so just imagine a visual one?!

I saw The Crow Road adaptation before reading the book and it is really good. Made me realise that a tv miniseries adaptation of books gives the property time to do it justice and hence while I liked the Watchmen film but always thought it would make for a better miniseries.

Leviathan came out in 2006 so it is quite a recent 2000AD strip. The images of it finally crashing into NY are very good indeed. One of the spin offs is about a pithhelmeted adventurer type venturing into the depths of the boat to raid a cargo load of alcohol that is rumoured to be down there and in doing so he encounters a tribe of savages.

The authors also did 2 follow ups to War of the Worlds which are great as well.

I didn't mind LOEG at all and was surprised to find out how much it is hated.

It's in the works, or at least the wheels are starting to turn on the project. See here. While I could envisage a film of each individual story, I can't see how they'd do the whole book within a film's running time.

Hey, this sounds great! Just been reading up on it on amazon - you reckon you have to be a Dickens nut to fully enjoy it (I'm not) . . . ?

Nah, you don't have to be a Collins or Dickens nut. Just get a brief background of them on Wikipedia or something.

Simmons is such an amazing storyteller. I mean, most of his books reference classical literature and to some extent I've learnt more about the classics via Simmons than I probably would have done if I was left to my own devices.

He really is the dogs knackers.

Scott to do Man in a High Castlemini series.

Read here.

The fact Preacher has still not found it's way to our screens, big or small, is a mystery to me. I think it is still my favourite graphic story of all time.

As for novels, I think Tom Piccirilli's A Choir of Ill Children or anything by Harry Crew would be awesome. They are real weird southern gothic stories that in my head could look amazing as films.

I'm also absolutely amazed there has never been a Hap and Leonard movie. Joe R Lansdale is a big writer in the US and his books are awesome and practically screenplays (with all the quick fire dialogue) anyway. The Coen brothers would clearly make something amazing out his stuff. If you've never heard of them, Hap and Leonard are two middle aged friends; one a white, leftist ex-hippy, the other a black, gay Vietnam vet and they basically get into scrapes. It's been called 'The Hardy Boys for adults'.

Awesome stuff.

Roger Ebert just twittered this:

http://www.screenhead.com/reviews/the-u ... s-to-film/

The cogs turn ever more for Cloud Atlas.

Update here.

The Wasp Factory would be an excellent low budget cult movie, it doesn't require a mega budget, it's very atmospheric, as well as some very disturbing scenes, as well as very dark humour in places.

Also James Herbert deserves his books turned in to films, especially the Rats trilogy, The Fog, a proper version of Fluke, as well as my favorite The Magic Cottage.

Also Brian Lumley's Necroscope series would be a great horror franchise to start up, that would certainly be better than current horror franchises that are being spewed out of Hollywood.