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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

Here are your top five movies adapted from a science fiction short story from the poll I ran last week with more than 350 votes:

25% – 2001: A Space Odyssey, from “The Sentinel” by Arthur C. Clarke
17% – The Thing, from “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell
12% – Total Recall, from “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick
9% – Enemy Mine, from “Enemy Mine” by Barry B. Longyear
9% – Minority Report, from “Minority Report” by Philip K. Dick

2001: A Space Odyssey is the clear winner here, and I’m not surprised at all. Of course, there were some huge films that I overlooked in the list, including Charly from “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes, A Boy and His Dog from “A Boy and His Dog” by Harlan Ellison, The Brave Little Toaster from “The Brave Little Toaster” by Thomas Disch, and The Day the Earth Stood Still from “Return to the Master” by Harry Bates.

There were also a few films that I didn’t include because I was purposely trying to stick with science fiction over genre in general, so we missed out on Conan the Barbarian, The Mist, Call of Cthulhu, Memento (and does that even count, because was the story ever published? Published before the movie came out?), Heavy Metal (technically short fiction adaptations), or even The Illusionist.

So here’s the question: are there stories out there that you would love to see made into films? Or, any stories you never want to see made into films? Feel free to use stories that were expanded into novels for the purposes of this discussion. My choices:

LOVE: “Hell is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang (heck, anything by Ted Chiang)

NEVER: “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Jeffrey Ford (I just think the imagery would be too difficult to come across non-cheesy)

[image from Flickr user jurveston, CC-licensed for commercial use]

About the Author

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John Klima

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If you want to get in touch with me, use editor[at]electricvelocipede[dot]com rather than posting here. I don't mind the e-mail and you'll have a better chance of hearing back from me. I edit the Hugo Award winning speculative fiction magazine Electric Velocipede. In 2007, Bantam published Logorrhea, my anthology of stories based on spelling-bee winning words. EV Website Blog Logorrhea You can also find me online at Facebook [John Klima], Twitter [johnklima], and Flickr [johncklima]. If you can guess what the 'c' stands for in johncklima, I'll give you a cookie. If you are a publisher of short fiction anthologies or single-author story collections, I want to see them! Please send material to: John Klima, PO Box 266, Bettendorf, IA 52722
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