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We haven’t had a parlor game in a while. Let’s play Elevator Pitches.
You, a not very inspired writer, have the movie producer/TV studio exec of your choice trapped in an elevator. You know SF&F genre is hot these days, and after Bridget Jones’ Diary you know the classics of English literature are ripe for ripping off^H^H^H reinvention. What could sell better than a crossover?
Make your pitch: classic novel/play/movie/epic poem/whatever recast into an SFnial setting, real or generic. Here are a couple to start off.
- o0o -
“Lord Elléot, of the household of Kellinch in Lebennin, was a man who, for his own amusement, never perused any tome but The Lineage of the Great Houses of Gondor; there he found occupation in his idleness and consolation in his distress; there were his courage and his nobility roused by the deeds of former heroes; there were the trials of daily life turned to pity and contempt in the contemplation of the recent decline of the noble bloodlines of the White City — and there, if all other tales held no power, he could read his own praises with an interest that never failed…”
It’s the story of one of the noblest houses of Gondor, now fallen into disrepute. We follow the middle daughter, Einne, as the Ranger she once loved returns from the defense of the borders. About half of the action is set in the plains of Gondor, and half in the provincial capital of Osgiliath. There’s a very dramatic scene at the riverside pier at Pelargir as well - we could crowd in lots of dwarves and elves, maybe even a few orcs.
NEXT!
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times in a galaxy far, far away…
During the Rebellion against the empire, two men fall for the same woman against a backdrop of betrayal and mistaken identity.
Commander Sidney Carton of the Imperial Fleet and freighter pilot (and sometime rebel) Captain Charl Dar-nay, are both in love with the same Imperial senator. As the action shifts between the Imperial city of Coruscant and the spaceport at Mos Eisley, the two men contend for Senator Lu-Cie Manet’s affections. It ends with Commander Carton falling into the maw of the dread Sarlacc in payment for Captain Dar-nay’s debt to Jabba the Hut.
NEXT!
Ishmael sets "sail" on an interstellar ship, which is out harvesting beings which live between the stars.
His captain is a madman, and has a psychotic desire to chase down the one which cost him his leg in a previous encounter.
Storm
A group of corrupt space-freighters jettison their commander out of an airlock into a strange stellar phenomenon, intending to split his prosporous business between them. Years later, they are marooned by a strange accident on a planet where the landscape is heavily psychoactive, and find strange beings, Ariel and Caliban, whose mysterious "Master" has dire plans in store.
Jigsaw meets HAL in a gripping and surreal story of revenge.
#2: Nah. Sounds like a remake of Forbidden Planet.
Not British but:
The young lord of House Atredis, recently relocated to the desert world of Arakis, meets a street urchin who is his exact likeness. Each boy imagines the other to experience the joys they lack and so they switch places, never realizing that their fates cannot be thwarted. One boy is destined to be God Emperor of the Known Universe, the other, to die fighting for the love of his life.
Keith @4:
English as in language, not national origin.
(Good choice)
Jason, of the Sons of Comp, and his mutant brother Ben investigate the mysterious death of their brother Quentin and disappearance of their sister Candace. Accompanied by their faithful droid Dilsey they travel through the Yoknapawtapha Galaxy. They find Candace as a slave girl of the interstellar adventurer Dalton the Ames.
Lord Alan Quixote, the impoverished scion of a once well-to-do planet Mancha, has had his imagination fired by the holovids of noble astronauts from the dawn of the Space Age with which he has occupied his youth. After catching a glimpse of the beautiful alien Dulcie, he leaves home in his rattletrap schooner Rose to woo and win her. Along the way, assisted by his faithful retainer Sam Panza, he lands on many different planets and has a series of largely humorous adventures. One high point is when, confused by alien technology, he flies Rose into the power plants supporting a neighboring planet, causing an intergalactic incident and putting Dulcie even further from his reach.
Reading it over, it sounds more like TV series than a movie....
Oh shoot, mine wasn't English in either origin or language either.
I hereby waive the language requirement.
But entertaining, none the less, Annie.
#3: A fair point. Another try:
In the aftermath of a brutal zombie apocalypse, a small commune of survivalists in rural Scotland becomes beset by infighting when the wife of a former Royal Marine begins pushing him to assume leadership. Not far from the community, a trio of gorgeous bisexual women seek a way to control the shambling horrors that prowl the countryside. In the climactic moments, an inoculated son of the murdered leader opens the gates and allows the zombies to consume the murderous Marine and his wily wife.
I've never seen a comment box struckthrough before. Interesting.
And corrected, in the time it took me to type it.
#11: Can we change the zombies to ents? They're much cooler.
Tom Buck, a mild-mannered judge, is kidnapped by aliens from his home in Santa Clara and forced to pull a grav-sledge on the ice planet, Al'Ask! His innate strength allows him to rise among the slaves until he leads a team... but then he is sold, and forced to fight in the gladiator pits!
Two droids are waiting for a Jedi Master. While they wait they have fun with a rogue and his seemingly speechless Wookiee.
G. Ramsumair, a young resident of a far colonial planet becomes a traditional Indian guru, but is gradually assimilated to the imperial norm and is sent as an emissary to the imperial planet.
#20: an Addams Family spinoff?
@1: Bruce Sterling already wrote that one (Involution Ocean).
Paddington Bear and Winney the Pooh make a minor living working as asteroid miners, when they are forced out of business by the ever expanding population of Rabbits. With the price of honey and marmalade reaching every higher levels, they are forced into one last desperate gamble. Retrofitting their ship with gravitational anomaly sensors and magnetic clamps, they take one final make or break trip out beyond the asteroid belt. Will they find a black hole suitable for leading the rabbits down, or are they doomed to die out beyond the stars? Instead they are the first to meet an alien race of woodland animals, who have fled the horrors of spring cleaning, and offer to trade their knowledge of boats, and the messing about in thereof, at highly favourable rates. High jinks ensue with reckless driving, imprisonement, and laser battles with squatting space weasels. However, with the help of the gruff badger lords of the Redwall planet, and their fanatical mouse-men armies, our heroes prevail, and the Christopher Robin can take his place as the rightful Emperor of the Galaxy.
Greta and Hans are abandoned in the woods by their desperate parents when the latter are unable to feed them. Wandering lost, they come upon a beautiful castle which seems to be made of gingerbread! Inside is a very friendly woman who puts them up for the night and feeds them a fine dinner.
But all is not as it seems. Their hostess seems both frank and furtive, and the children are convinced that the hunchback butler and inappropriately sensual maid are up to no good. And Collie, another child rescued from the storm, behaves oddly too. Soon they discover that their hostess is engaging in forbidden scientific experiments, and is in fact not their hostess at all...but their host!
Loveable young scamp-of-the-future Jim lives with his mother in an inn that they run... on another planet! Jim stumbles across a futuristic, holographic treasure map and organizes a trip to the purported location of the Treasure Planet... aboard a spacefaring galleon!! But space mutiny erupts aboard the ship, led by the shifty space cook John Silver, and--
What do you mean, "it's been done"?
"Sir, I have this great idea for a space adventure movie... Space raiders frequently drop down on an isolated planet's impoverished population. After the last such raid, some decide that their world can't take this anymore and they go to another star system where they enlist the help of mercenaries to rid themselves of those raiders once and for all."
"I like it, kid, but..."
"But what, sir?"
"It sounds like Pixar's A Bug's Life."
"Not the same. That one has insects here on Earth today."
"Ever seen John Sturges's Magnificent Seven?"
"That was a western. This is science-fiction."
"Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, kid?"
"Of course. It's set centuries in the past, in Asia. Mine is set in outer space."
"Sigh... Ever seen Battle Beyond the Stars?"
"Crap."
Serge @26:
Actually, the desperate characters in A Bug's Life don't enlist warriors, but actors that they think are warriors.
This makes it identical to Galaxy Quest. (h/t the Hub for pointing that out)
East of Endor
After fighting with his brother, our small, furry hero leaves the family treehouse to enlist in the war against the evil Empire, spending a long and drawn-out youth chittering at Stormtroopers and dropping rocks on AT-STs. When the war is over, he drifts around the galaxy for some years (note: we could get some Planet of the Bikini-clad Slave Girls scenes in here, right?), eventually settling on the newly-colonised moon of Sal-i-Nas. Can he learn to make a new life alongside the strange clan culture of his neighbours? Will the story of his own childhood repeat itself in the form of his twin cubs? We end with a perfect lead-in to a sequel, as Cub #2 heads into exile aboard the star freighter Timshel.
Waiting For Gandalf: Two hobbits eat, sleep, talk, argue, make up, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide while sitting in the Prancing Pony, waiting for a wizard who never arrives.
16-year old Holden Anderson is kicked out of school, and wanders lonely in central New York during Christmas while contemplating his place in the world around him, unaware that he is The One, who is destined to destroy The Phony, the artificial world in which mankind has been trapped by hyperintelligent machines. His beloved sister is revealed to be an agent of the resistance, who has been protecting The One under the guidance of the rebel leader Antolini. Finally, Holden realizes his true self and fights the Phony under the alias "the Catcher".
Three Upper class young feiuwios, declaring that they desperately need a change of scene given their difficult occupations, go on a rowing holiday along one of the major methane rivers of their planet. Accompanied only by their faithful qu'sciem, the four of them discover that their comfortable daily lives have been remarkably bad preparation for the task of rowing their craft upstream. Along the way many adventures ensue, as they pass from local landmark to local landmark. Foul weather threatens disaster, but their good spirits are undamped, and all declare the holiday a great success. Told from the perspective of one of the boaters this classic will amuse young and old alike.
Heathcliff, orphaned by a freak space mining accident, is taken in by the nearest colony and grows up fond of the chief's daughter, Catherine. Thwarted in his love for Catherine by her status-oriented family, he develops new space mining techniques and eventually takes over both Catherine's colony and the neighboring one, to the detriment of everyone's happiness, including his own.
Abi @ 27... Bah! You're splitting antennae.
Louisa May Alcott's Incredible Microscopic Women.
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Tri-Lobed Eye.
Both write themselves.
"Across the Milky Way, with ramscoop and laser cannon"
Accompanied only by his faithful spanial, our hero records his sporting endeavours wherever he can in this part travelogue, part sporting guide to the Milky Way.
"The Secret Life of Walter Mitochondria"
Shagrat and Gorbag Are Dead
(including the game of Curses)
Down and Out in L-5 and Polaris.
C'mon, guys, more details! I only know of one movie that was sold on title alone, and it wasn't Tribbles on a Starship
My Family and Other Nine-Eyed, Multi-Flippered Bat-Creatures: one boy's heartwarming tale of a childhood on the Jovian moons.
Young R. Singh grows up to discover that the people of his native planet are all phonies who mimic behaviours from elsewhere in the galaxy while not really believing in them.
Slacker and part-time musician Don T., pursued by a gang of genetically enhanced wolf/human hybids, falls through his native urban landscape into a hidden world and discovers the secret post-Singularity nano-technological afterlife that awaits him and all of humanity. Guided by an androgynous AI, Don engages in an allegorical tour in which not only overcomes his own faults and but deconstructs the social and ethical shortcomings of our time. Through the course of this trilogy, Don achieves a spiritual renewal and returns ready to help shepherd humanity to its future among the stars.
This one is more SF/Horror: An explosion on a space colony leaves our nameless protagonist alone and starving, with no hope for escape. Half mad with hunger, he is visited by a twisted eldritch messenger from beyond space and time. The messenger's only apparent goal is to seduce our starving hero into saving his own life... by eating the flash-frozen remains of those who were killed in the explosion. To persuade him, the Space Alien Messenger (or SAM) directs him on a mystic psychedelic odyssey through space and time. Can our hero keep his sanity, and will saving his mind cost him his life?
It's Solaris, meets Event Horizon, meets the last half of 2001. I fully expect "Soylent Green Eggs And Ham" to be a box office smash.
Abi@42 - Which movie was that?
We begin with a riot on the colonial prison planet in which the leader of the political liberation movement is wounded by an angry man of similar ancestry who mistakes him for an imperial oppressor. The bulk of the story is taken up with flashbacks of the protagonists life, his career in the Imperial Space Force, his education on the imperial capital planet, and his return to his home planet determined to liberate its people. His girlfriend, one of the prisoners, weeps inconsolably when he dies.
"So these two positronic robots walk into a platinum-iridium bar..."
"...that was no Singularity, that was my *wife*!"
Let us speak of the Star-Riders of the Crimson Toque, a band of colorful (if diminutive) itinerants who ply their centuries-patched hyperspace caraveens through the galactic backwater. The Festival of Vosant approaches, and so the Rider mesofamily has set their course for Uema's Star, where the Great Clan-Mother waits to welcome them. The Star-Riders will lay their traditional gifts before the Clan-Mother; she will bless their ships and marriages. Spare parts will be swapped for exomatter source patches, databases for genetic grafts, beneath the Clan-Mother's eye.
But the road to Uema's Star runs through the Wald Expanse, a beaconless reach of space in which even the mighty Bright Sky Liners steer warily. Enter the Wald Expanse, and you are like as not to meet one of the Starveling Packs -- vicious hyper-predators, always hungry for low-entropy computing cores and uncorrupt genetic code.
The Star-Riders moved slowly through the Expanse, always aware of the Pack hunters wailing in the distant high-frequency bands. When a Starvelinger approached, the Riders would circle their caraveens and cry forth, "Molest us not! For we travel to the gates of the Great Clan-Mother, to present our gifts! Harm us, and her wrath will fall upon you, and your world-lines will be uprooted back to your grandmothers' birthtime!"
The Starveling Packs are a superstitious lot, and these warnings stayed them. But cunning they are as well. The strongest of the Pack hove ahead, quickly through the Wald towards Uema's Star. There he broadcast the identity-signals and gifting-manifests of the Star-Riders (For the Riders, being unallied and alone in the galaxy, have no trusted certificate upon their comms.) The Clan-Mother accepted the Starvelinger's signals -- and in moments, he owned her comms and crypts, down to the lowest delving of code.
Soon enough the Riders came to Uema's Star, with their gifting-manifests blazing before them. "Welcome!" was the signal they received. "Open your comms to the Clan-Mother, that the Festival may begin!"
But the Riders hesitated, for the signal came from Uema's Star through many layers of encryption and contextual cloaking. "Oh Great Clan-Mother," they replied, "what cold ICE you have..."
(Further deponent is driven off the stage by a hail of tomatoes.)
Dave Hutchison @47:
The tagline was "I've had it with these goram tribbles on a goram spaceship!"
Or something like that.
Abi@47 - Ah. Gotcha. Sorry, I'm having a slow-brain day. Very neat reply, by the way.
Riffing more on #46:
It's a thrilling adventure set in a future where global warming has sent the world into a perpetual rainstorm. Humanity lives in a roofed-in network of arcologies where the central computer (called "Mother") provides for all their needs. Inside one of the arcologies, a rogue AI in the guise of a holographic cat avatar befriends two goodhearted children. The AI cracks all the DRM and security systems in their house so it can take the kids on a whirlwind tour of the "fun" that humanity could be having, if it only knew how. The children's caretaker, an uplifted dolphin, tries to stop the AI, but to no avail. What will the children do when they need to decide between supporting the AI's dangerous anarchic vision, or ratting it out to the central computer?
What would you do, if your Mother asked you?
That should have been Abi@50. See what I mean about the slow-brain day? Apologies.
Journey to the Core
A lowly subroutine attempts to become fully post-human, but it annoys the inhabitants of the local matrioshka brain that used to be the Solar System so much that it is expelled, embodied and frozen in the heart of a long-period comet. Millennia later, it is unfrozen by an avatar of the matrioshka brain and sent to accompany a recreation of Vernor Vinge and some uplifted animals on an expedition to the wormhole at the centre of the galaxy to get a new version of the matrioshka's operating system.
A spaceship crewed by an advanced reptilian race suffers an infestation of pesky primitive humans, in... Humans On A Starship!
Or...
Forget the sleek and shiny world of the elite travelling between worlds on pleasure cruises... come with us as we explore the gritty life of the poor souls who run the ships. Tar'quuul, son of a merchant on a wealthy world, joins the crew of the decrepit but spaceworthy old starship Port St. Jolie, and discovers a life he never expected. The ship calls at the most backwater ports, where tiny colonies of intrepid humans cling to life, even as they're beset by harsh conditions and raids by hostile aliens. Will sheltered young Tar'quuul learn to be a salty old space hand, or will he fold like a cheap suit in an automated suit-folding machine? Find out, in... Two Years Before The Matter-Antimatter Reactor.
M'kel Entchit, a skilled flyer mechanic, his wife Soria, and baby daughter journey from their home in the West Sector to Fairport, where the annual Choosing for colonial allotments will take place. The night before the Choosing, the Entchit family camp out with other hopefuls, spending their last credits on food. The Arkarian woman who runs the food tent has the Sight -- or at least knows a good mark -- and offers M'kel aruum, a powerful Arkarian intoxicant. Out of his head (and in a bad temper), M'kel pays his bill by auctioning Soria and the baby off to a crewman from a freighter.
The next day, overcome with guilt, M'kel leaves Fairport, bound for the colonies.
18 years pass. Having taken a vow never to touch arrum, M'kel has gone from flyer mechanic to respected 'businessman' and has just been elected Boss of Bridge's Camp, a bustling market town known for its trade in custom-built racing flyers and, more importantly, for the high-stakes flyer-races that bring in customers from all quadrants...
On that very same day, a woman and her lovely 18-year old daughter arrive in Bridge's Camp. They are poor, but honest. The daughter, Eli-sageen, finds work in a tavern...
Serge at #39 -- wasn't that Outland?
A group of teenagers with more then their fair share of romantic entanglements become entangled in something even worse when their woodland vacation spot becomes ground zero for an alien invasion! The two alien commanders, Oberton and Titanon, are in a foul state after Oberton managed to gain sole experimentation rights on Titanon's prized human subject. Now back on Earth to collect more samples, the crew encounters the teens and Oberton sets to work to decipher "This strange human emotion called 'love'." Pheromone injections are liberally applied by Oberton's annoyingly cutesy CGI lackey, the hapless nerd of the teen group is transformed into a half-alien hybrid for Titanon to obsess over, and everyone learns a valuable lesson before the spaceship returns to the stars come sunrise.
An extremely wealthy business family eagerly awaits the decanting (decansion?) of their firstborn child-- but they receive an anonymous message, untraceable and self-destructive, that tells them the boy has been tampered with. Once the son reaches puberty, he will begin to produce a deadly virus targeted toward his male genetic donors, which include most of the men on the Board (nepotism, you know). The family and Company agree to send the bottled baby away before decantation (?) and have better lab security next time.
Years later, a familiar face comes to the Board with a proposal. He's been raised by disgruntled employees and decided to end the corrupt Company once and for all, by retroengineering himself to be chemically charismatic and, not coincidentally, just a little lethal. In the end, half the Board is dead by the time the rebel son merges his own young company with that of his unknowing family and merges the female half of the Board's DNA into a mother for his children.
Our unnamed narrator, an intrepid intergalactic historian and treasure-hunter, journeys to a watery and canal-covered planet in search of the Aspernometer, a wondrous device made by the great prophet Jef'Ree. The device is controlled by the planet's monstrous dying queen, and will descend to the queen's niece who will give it to our hero--IF HE BECOMES HER SLAVE OF LUST...
A horrible teleporter accident scatters the family of a wealthy space-merchant all across the galaxy. The merchant searches for his lost family in vain. Unbeknownst to him, the teleporter accident not only scattered his family, it duplicated his son Folous and his robot servant DRM10. Both boys have grown up separately without any knowledge of each other, but hilarious hijinks ensue when the father, both DRMs, Folous and Anti-Folous find themselves unwittingly reunited at a starport in the Effy System.
#54: I have nothing to add, I just wanted to type "The Great Process Equal to Kernel".
#44 ::: Fragano Ledgister
Young R. Singh...
You found an excuse to be "R. Singh" us around?
I was having a great little trip building scenarios with "Phantom of the Paradise" when I realized...
Abi, are meta-crossovers okay?
Another Damned Medievalist @ 57...
You mean "Outland - In Space No One Can Hear You Shoot Because Your High-powered Rifle Punched A Hole In The Wall And The Atmosphere All Vented Out" ?
I don't see the similarities with my proposal. I just don't see it.
The True Confessions of Bromium Doyle
On the long, grueling journey from Arcturus to Boötes, where she will be raised into a proper lady by her maiden aunts, Bromium Doyle's safe passage is threatened by a vengeful captain and a mutinous crew. The plot thickens when Bromium is accused of murdering a crew member. Overcoming the odds, Bromium emerges unscathed from the tumult and finds herself commanding an entire fleet of interstellar cargo ships.
I see Diatryma's already done this, but ... not as Noir Space Opera!
The Eyes that Blind
When Lord Supideo killed that stranger in a bar-brawl on the godforsaken planet of Trivium, he could never have known that it would turn out to be his fatal mistake. Of course, he was just plain Supideo, then: and in the meantime things hadn't turned out so bad. He was now Ruler of Sebeht, the planet he had saved from the terrifying Xnihps, and he had married its queen; but now there seemed nothing he could do to prevent it being sucked into a black hole.
But then he remembered the prophecy of the psychic El Caro. Could the stranger have been Lord Suial, the former Ruler of Sebeht? Could he be this planet's missing prince? Could he really have blundered into the worst menage-a-trois in the universe?
Okay, think "Pirates of the Caribbean" crossed with "Home Alone," but with a kind of "ET" sci-fi twist. Amleth, a sexy alien orphan prince in tights, kidnaps three kids and transports them to the Never Planet, where, with the help of a robot crocodile, they battle an evil pirate with a mechanical hand. After a spectacular fight -- the pirate has a ship full of mammoth robotic mastodons -- the kids win and make the pirate walk the plank, in a kind of comic relief. Then Amleth, still brooding over the death of his father, begs the kids to help him win back his kingdom from his evil stepfather. The kids assemble a makeshift army of giant toys, and -- well, you can just read the script to find out what happens.
Great vehicle for an ensemble. I see Brad Pitt as the alien, Lindsey Lohan as the luscious indigenous princess who leaps to her death when Amleth rejects her, Meryl Streep as both Amleth's mother and the frantic mom searching for her kids. Oh, and Johnny Depp as the pirate, of course.
Whaddaya say? It'll be another ten minutes before they can cut through that door.
War is brewing, but one man, bitter over a badly ended affair, sits it out, prefering to run his own little space station, which is frequented by forces from the conflict's many sides. Then the Woman floats back into his life, reminding him that he can't escape his responsibilities.
Jack Spratt has grown up knowing only the hallways of M.G. Laboratories as his home. Discovered at birth to have a metabolic disorder which prevented him from digesting lipids, infant Jack was sent to M.G. Labs for genetic rehabilitation. Over the course of twenty years, not only have the M.G. Labs geneticists not found a cure for Jack's problem, they are responsible for the accidental release of a genovirus which has made billions of humans unable to eat anything except grease, suet and lard.
As the entire world succumbs to morbid obesity, M.G. Labs scientists are poised to sacrifice Jack's life in order to find a cure for Earth's population. It is during Jack's harrowing escape that he meets Jane -- a grease-eating sufferer who may hold the key to the planet's metabolic demise. Together, Jack and Jane will discover the true nature of their yin-yang relationship and attempt save the world.
Tara@69 - Good golly, that's brilliant.
A Fistful of Credits
"When a 'bot with needler meets a clone with a blaster, you said, the 'bot with a needler's a dead circuit. Let's see if that's true. Go ahead, charge up and shoot."
Another Damn Mediævalist #56: This takes place on the planet Wessex?
A civil war is raging within the Star Federation, and three men who hate and distrust each other come across separate coordinates that, if put together, will lead them to a wormhole at the end of which someone has hidden the Rebellion's last financial resources.
Carol Kimball #63: Not at all, but I'm certain you can Ranjit.
A man is yanked out of the Present and finds himself in the Far Future, where he is is mistaken for the Heir to the Star Empire, a role that he must assume to avoid War. In the process he encounters the Heiress of another Stellar Group, whom the true Heir was going to marry as a way to seal an alliance, but the man from Today falls in love with her and... Wait. Edmond Hamilton already did that one.
A Spaceship Named Desire
Okay, so I see William Shatner in the Brando role, and...
Serge at #64 -- and possibly the end of Silent Running?
Fragano Ledgister #72 -- Hence the West Sector! And Bridge's Camp. (Glad somebody got it ;-))
The rulers of a small backwater planet in great need of modernizing its civilization declare war against the nearby Federation, knowing that they will lose and that the Federation will help them in their efforts. Unfortunately, they win.
Space wanderer Saint Maël's escape pod lands on a frozen planet. Almost blind, he finds refuge in an alien infested colony. Soon, his gentle manners and aura of holiness have him adopted by the aliens, whose acidic blood mysteriously seems to have no effect on him.
Believing them to be humans the Saint starts preaching the gospel, and before long decide to administer baptism to the space monsters.
Soon after Paradise becomes the scene of a heated debate between Saints and angels trying to decide what exactly is the status of those baptized aliens. It is decided that, to repair the honest mistake of Saint Maël, the aliens will be changed into humans.
This is when the Predator's spaceship lands, its occupant eagerly waiting for the good hunt they had been planning to have. Night falls for the next 30 hearth-days.
Will Maël and his flock manage to survive the merciless intersidereal hunters without turning into moral monsters ? And what of the archangel, still lurking in the colony ?
Tara@69 - Love it. Have your people talk to my people.
In the near future, an artificial virus is developed to fight heart disease. Unfortunately, the virus mutates to attack cardiac muscle, and soon most of humanity is wiped out. A small band of surviving scientists works frantically in a biotech lab. They discover that one of them, thanks to mutant strain in his genetic makeup that makes him different, is immune to the virus. In order to buy time, the scientists hook him up to a machine so that his heart can drive the circulatory system of each scientist as, one by one, they fall to the plague. That's right--our hero is The Loaner of the Only Heart.
Married to a successful, though uninspiring, manager of virtual reality experiences, young BeauVaree engages in a series of affairs in the flesh and in VR, searching for an elusive sense of fulfillment. She betrays her family and herself, sinking into despair and debt. She begs her lovers to help her get funds from her accounts in the colonial bank on N19rYa, if they will only share their account with her to facilitate the transfer. She has no takers.
Dissatisfied and distraught, BeauVaree overrides the safety features on the VR equipment, and commits suicide by immersion in the artificial environment, allowing her body to starve.
Ch4r, BeauVaree's stolid and practical husband, has patiently tried to understand the flighty ways of his wife. Tragically, he too submits to the lure of the VR realm, and dies as did his beloved BeauVaree.
Three Clones in a Spaceship: to say Nothing of the Droid
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single trill in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a host.
I first heard Alphaville called Awfulville by a red-headed starmucker called D’Kyy Hyu’eyeh in the Big Ship on Betelgeuse. He also called his v’hahl a l’hahv. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the artificial asteroid’s name. Later, I heard other species, ones without mandibles, give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the sort of meaningless humor that used to make thalidomide the thieves’ word for dilithium. A few years later I went to Alphaville and learned better.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Brigadoon actually works if you add in relativistic effects. Add in a plague or something endemic to the ship so if anyone leaves, the entire world dies, and we're set. And just wait for the bagpipe synthesizer!
Serge #78: You need to put in the romance between the leader of the victorious expeditionary force and the ruler of the small backwater planet (with a grandiose name).
In a dystopian future, [insert almost any Dickens plot here].
Or:
The Merchant of Venus: Sh'lok, the despised Martian moneylender, lends space merchant Anton money on security of half a kilogram of his personal genetic material. When an asteroid storm wipes out Anton's fleet, Sh'lok wants to collect... with extreme prejudice.
How much trouble do I get for P.G.Woodhouse with Asimov. I Butler.
Young bohemian Berenger Carter takes up residence in an Arkham boarding-house, hoping to find refuge from the banality of the workaday world. But his tranquility is short-lived when it becomes clear that his upscale New England neighbors are mutating one by one into hideous, corpse-eating ghouls! Will Carter resist the temptation of monstrous, eldritch power... or will he, too, capitulate to a gruesome transformation?
Jon @ 11: Can we change the zombies to ents? They're much cooler.
That's another pitch entirely:
Saruman shall never vanquish'd be until
Great Fangorn Wood to Isengard
Shall come against him.
Fragano @ 87... the ruler of the small backwater planet (with a grandiose name)
Grand Duchess Asphyxia of Fenwick?
Has anybody done The Count of Monte Cristo?
WHOA! Is this all a trick to turn us into scabs?
Stefan Jones #94: If any of us is an evil corporate union-buster, I bet it would be abi. I think you're on to something...
TW @ 89: How much trouble do I get for P.G.Woodhouse with Asimov. I Butler.
Probably quite a bit. Jeeves is a valet - he serves Bertie personally rather than being head servant of a household.
Thus, the Three Laws of Valeting
1. A valet shall not cause his master embarrassment nor shall he, through inaction, allow his master to embarrass himself.
2. A valet shall obey his master's instructions except where such obedience would conflict with the first law.
3. A valet shall protect his own employment except where this would conflict with the first or second laws.
Serge @ 93: Apart from Bester?
Hmm...there's one of these that I actually intend to write, so I'm not mentioning it here.
Serge (#93): Has anybody done The Count of Monte Cristo?
A pair of wisecracking explorers stumble on a singularity whose wormhole leads, every hundred years, to a lost colony asteroid ejected from the solar system at relativistic speed when one of its founders made a terrible, arrogant mistake in his experiment. The explorers bring with them an ephemeris showing that the asteroid will soon enter a black-hole-binary system whose gravity will either destroy it or return it to normal velocities and wormhole access, but no one can tell for sure. Singing, dancing and romance ensue.
Serge #92: That would work!
MD² @ 99... What about The Man Who Would Be King?
Mike@88 -- good, but I think we can pitch it better with a good announcer:
HE's the Martian who's been done down by the rich kids once too often -- and now it's payback time!
SHE's the lawyer who's got to stop him - or her boyfriend will die tomorrow!
TOGETHER, they'll learn the lessons of high finance, high romance... and a little genetics. All in A Pound of Flesh!
Faced with another difficult harvest season on their moisture farm, the dour siblings Owen and Beru Lars ask the Jawas to sell them a new vaporator droid to help them out. Unfortunately, due to a garbled translation in the ordering protocol, they accidentally select a holographic projection of Princess Anshir Liye from the planet Novascootine. Once she arrives to join them, the green-eyed redhead enriches their lives with her dreamy visions and soon learns to shoot womp-rats with Dia Naberrie, her best friend and "kindred spirit" from the farm next door.
Paul 96,
So long as Mr.Fry gets to be a gentleman's gentleman again. How he rocked the bowler hat.
#91: Great Fangorn Wood to Isengard
Which is exactly why Tolkien put that in. He thought Shakespeare had botched the idea. No joke.
Julie at 104, MAKE THAT.
A frontier family meets a big scary alien (I'm thinking something arthropod) that defends them against various things, including a larger and more dangerous alien carrying a prion disease. The elder son has to put it down. Expect tears and an eventual very badly thought out pet food tie-in.
This doesn't quite satisfy the requirements of the challenge, but the following movie sprang fully formed into my consciousness the other day while commuting to work:
1972 -- A once-respected Austrian psychiatrist turned counterculture guru, on the run from the authorities on various drug and sex charges, takes his group of followers to Angola, where they establish a commune and consciousness-raising center in an abandoned Portuguese-colonial convent in the jungle. Ignored by the authorities and bypassed by civil unrest, the international group of hippies, freaks, and disaffected bourgeoisie feel invincible in their African redoubt, and are content to fuck each other silly, get high, trip balls, sing songs, and paint daisies and slogans on things. That is, until rumors reach them of a previously unknown hemorrhagic fever decimating local communities.
Against this backdrop of disease, the little commune becomes increasingly paranoid and fortified. Internal divisions and cliques form. Their guru is revealed to be a psychopathic cult leader interested only in personal power and pleasure. Finally, in an attempt to reunify his once tight-knit group, the guru plans to hold one last massive drug-fueled orgy. But an unexpected guest appears....
I can't decide on a title. Either "Orgy of Blood" or "Sex, Drugs, and Raging Hemorrhagic Fever." I would pay to see this movie.
Was given a script to read that was prefaced by a seven-page single spaced essay on angels. If you hadn't read the essay, you wouldn't understand the script.
So far, nothing's grabbed me, except that Don Quixote thing.
I was under the impression to help sell the pitch one should include either a director or lead actor name attached to the project.
Riddley Scott and Emma Thompson, Sense and Singularity.
ADM@77: that was one of the few I \did/ get; 11th-grade English must have been good for something. (The rest of you: I wouldn't mind if people rot-13'd their sources, for the benefit of those of us slowed by fever.)
Dan@90: I can just see Helena Bonham Carter as a wild-eyed Daisy (or whatever she's called in the original).
Serge (#99) Not that I know.
Just realised Gaston Leroux's La Mansarde en or (a conflict betweent two artists trying to know if they can equal their respective characters in nobility, with the writer slowly becoming mad, unable to say where the events he staged to prove himself end and where reality begins) would work great in cyberpunk context (something in mood similar to Kathryn Bigelow's "Strange Days" ?). The idea's twisted enough to amuse me at least...
A young shy undergrad is assigned to a brooding climatologist on the Mars terraforming project.
Jane Air.
I should hide under my desk now.
Actually, Paul at 96, that first one's not remotely true; Jeeves pitches Wooster into embarrassing situations frequently, if it's necessary to the scheme then brewing. No, the three laws are
The Three Laws of Valeting
1. A valet shall not assist his master to marry nor shall he, through inaction, allow his master to become married.
2. A valet shall obey his master's instructions except where such obedience would conflict with the first law.
3. A valet shall protect his own employment except where this would conflict with the first or second laws.
I wonder how many tales are out there that were inspired by The Odyssey. I remember that it was retold as a space adventure by Lafferty. Jacques Lob's graphic novel of the 1970s kept the tale set in Ancient Times, but used the premise that the gods were aliens, and had the bittersweet ending that, after Ulysses came home, he left again, unable to settle down because of all the things he had lived thru.
Captain Gray, adventurer and bon vivant, has his holo picture taken by Professor Hallward, a very talented holo artist. Some time later, his crew rescues the SPACE DEVIL from an evil alien attack, and the space devil grants Captain Gray one wish. The captain wishes that his marvelous holo picture should grow old instead of him, and with a sinister laugh, the space devil obliges.
Soon Captain Gray realizes that he is now not only absolutely invulnerable and unaging, but also that the space devil has cured him from any sort of moral hangover. Hijinks ensue, involving space opium, a short fling with a beautiful actress from Plebeius 9, and a climactic battle of Captain Gray versus Space God, in which the good captain uses his supernaturally good looks to blind the deity and then makes off with all his stuff. Stuff-less, Space God commits suicide-by-atheist.
Back on the Henry Wotton, our captain starts to realize the wrongness of his ways when Sybillia Vane's brother, a tentacled space creature with five hundred eyes, begins stalking him. During a "hunting accident", Sybillia's brother is vaporized by fourteen quantum torpedoes, but Captain Gray is tiring of his nefarious life style. In a heart-wrenching dialogue with the ship computer, Captain Gray confesses all his sins and finally asks the ship to "absolve him". However, due to inferior spiritual routines in the ship computer and also due to the main network administrator's very outdated sense of humour, the only answer the ship has for him is, "I'm sorry, Dorian, but I'm afraid I can't do that." Finally at his wits' end, Captain Gray deletes the holo picture and instantly explodes all over his quarters.
When his crew finally find the absence of him, they can only identify their late Captain from the DNA of one of the few hairs that survived the violent explosion.
@Serge (#115): Pour continuer sur ma lancée...
Chris @ 114: Good point. I haven't read them all (or seen all the Fry & Laurie adaptations) but, from what I recall, when he does thrust Bertie toward embarrassment, it's for his own good. This implies a zeroth law.
TW @ 96: Not only did he rock the bowler, he delivered the lines so perfectly that no-one else will seem right in the role again.
A young man, Ed Staden, is about to be promoted to Commander in the Time Police. He's also having a hot love affair with a sexy female Agent, Mercy. On his last mission as Agent, he delivers a message for a dying friend.
Unfortunately, that message passed along the decryption key to a secret Time Terrorist conspiracy which is, luckily, thwarted. Another agent, Demongo, learns of Staden's innocent involvement. Jealous of Staden's success, he lodges an anonymous accusation against him. Forvillet, the senior officer who hears the charge, wants to cover up his own part in the plot, so he strips Staden of English, imprints him with Arabic, and dropping into 2002, turns him over to American forces as a low-ranking member of al Qaeda.
The stunned Staden is sent to Guantanamo, where he suffers dreadfully for years, until he meets another prisoner, the wise Abu Raifa, who teaches him wisdom and patience. The two plan an escape, but Raifa dies before they can succeed. Staden disguises himself as the dead body, and manages to escape.
He retrieves his time travel bracelet, and, unrecognized because he has been so changed by his suffering, sets about taking a long, elaborate revenge on those who betrayed him.
CHip at 111: Hell, let's get Johnny Depp for the lead, since he's reimagining all the old Gene Wilder roles anyway these days.
(I had forgotten until now that there'd been a film of that. And an S.T. Joshi endnote tells me that "Pickman's Model" was adapted for Night Gallery. See? It's pure Hollywood gold!)
The year is 2165-SET (Sidereal Earth Time); the place, the sprawling, ultra-modern compound of Spacefleet Academy on Titan. Young Alice Liddell [Jessica Simpson] becomes the youngest woman (and certainly the most beautiful!) to graduate from Spacefleet Academy's elite SpaceSkiff Pilot Training Program. And withing a year, she is promoted to Captain, with the strong endorsement of her beloved professor and mentor, old Dr. Dodgson. (NOTE: Alice is characterized by giving a sexy toss of her long, blond curls, every time she makes a notable accomplishment or wins a battle.)
One day, while on a solo pleasure cruise in the intraorbital space between Pluto and Eris, followed by another SpaceSkiff piloted by her nearly-as-adept and nearly-as-lovely sister, Alice sees a strange, tiny, white spacecraft and gives chase. The unidentified craft leads Alice into a wormhole to an unknown galaxy!! While in the wormhole, Alice and her faithful ship Dinah are exposed to cosmic rays that have major spatial effects. At one point, while Dinah is very, very large, it jettisons its wastewater storage, then suddenly becomes much smaller and is swamped by the gigantic water pool, but Alice's superior spacemanship gets her through the crisis. In the new galaxy, Alice encounters more trials, her unpredictable spatial transformations continue, she gets caught in a feedback loop, and encounters a gigantic animal-like space-being, but miraculously and competently makes it through every time. She follows various entities to solar system after solar system, encountering many new races and new technologies and making wonderful friends (and a few enemies!), but begins to realize all is not right. Apparently the entire galaxy is controlled by twin races of 2-dimensional wafer-beings, who in turn are controlled by the queen of one of the races, a most evil, cruel, and violent being. Alice through her amazing intellect, finally defeats the evil queen and escapes her denizens, but is thrown into another wormhole, loses consciousness, and Dinah is all but destroyed. She awakens in a Spacefleet Medical Unit, with her loving sister and devoted Dr. Dodgson by her side.
SEQUEL!
Alice is all well again and with Dinah miraculously rebuilt with new technology, in a program that created two additional "clone" SpaceSkiffs, Nobody and Somebody. She undergoes top-secret training on the new technology in a secure, undisclosed location, along with the pilots of Dinah's two clones. One is an Earth man named Walker G. Holly, who is handsome and swashbuckling and given to wearing bomber jackets when not in his pressure suits. The other is a being from another planetary system, an odd looking, wide-faced creature with a perpetual frown, apparently female, who has a nearly-unpronounceable name consisting of long strings of repeated consonants followed by similar stings of single vowels. She appears to be very intelligent, but has a habit of saying nothing when she talks. Alice finds these two somewhat unpleasant--the man is bombastic; the alien woman boring. Alice also notes that the two seem to have an odd, enmeshed relationship that she decides not to delve further into. She is glad she won't be assigned to the same mission as they.
Two days before reporting to her newest assignment in the Alpha Centauri system, Alice is on another pleasure cruise, entertaining her long-time curiosity about the unusual gravitational fields around Neptune, when she encounters a strange "mirror singularity" in the extra-ringular space between Neptune and Triton! She cannot escape the strange pull of the singularity, and is pulled through it into what appears to be a parallel universe, where the space between star systems is like flowing, mirrored glass. Each inhabited planet in this universe seems to have a common custom. Upon being taken to the ruler-being, Alice in each case is required to prove her intelligence in order to show her worthiness of help and guidance to find a way to exit this horrible mirror-universe! She meets a poet-philosopher who requires that she interpret bizarrely-encrypted messages in the form of nonsensical poetry (with the help of a hugely-fat being with a calcified shell instead of skin). She convinces the Flower People that she is one of them. She wins over the poetry-spouting twin rulers of a kingdom consisting of two planets who revolve around each other and orbit a binary star. Finally, she matches wits with the noisome King of the Walrus Beings, convinced that this is her last trial, and that she will finally be given the key to locating and exiting the mirror singularity. Instead, she find herself in yet another star system, once again in the control of an evil queen, and forced to be a pawn in a cosmic game of chess! Although her physical prowess, incredible ability as a pilot, and astonishing intelligence get her out of a few close calls, every time she begins to make headway on the gigantic chessboard, the evil queen changes the rules. Eventually Alice wears down and realizes she is simply a prisoner.
Just as all seems lost, Walker G. Holly, her old nemesis from her secret training at an undisclosed location shows up, like a white knight, and rescues her. Together they vanquish the evil queen and turn her over to her political enemies for execution, and after the final battle Alice realizes she has fallen for the handsome pilot. In a telling moment after a close call, she looks at him with eyes full of love and desire and says "you're pretty special, Captain Holly," to which he grins and drawls back, "just call me George." Now a couple, they then use their remarkable intuition to appoint new leaders that install democracy among the warring factions of the star system that was previously the evil queen's domain. All the beings of this star system greet them with flowers.
In a touching private moment, Alice is weary of fighting in space and wonders out loud what's wrong with her, when George explains to her that she is finally fulfilling her natural role as a wife, and that she will be happier if she simply submits to his superior will and lets him rule the roost. She realizes how right he is and settles into her new job as wife of the man who conquered all the surrounding planetary systems and is now their "commander and chief." She begins to prepare for the journey back to Sol, when George tells her he still has some unfinished business. Even though he has taken out the evil queen who killed his father and nearly killed poor Alice, he has realized that the next star system has an even more evil ruler, who was previously in league with the evil queen and the other bad rulers, and who secretly financed an attack on Mother Earth Home several Sidereal Earth Units previous. He has learned that this new evil ruler has acquired cosmic weapons which have the power to reach outside the Mirror Universe and destroy our own! His plan is to send his alien female associate, Kkkkoooggggggpppuuuuuuuqqqqqqqqyyyyyyyyyrrrrrrrreee, the pilot of the clone Nobody, to strike up a diplomatic relationship and distract the mad and evil ruler. While the ruler is distracted, George will engineer a massive, shocking attack on the evil forces and wipe out their WUDs (Weapons of Universal Destruction), and bring democracy to their star system, too!
Can he do it? Will he prevail? Just wait for Part III, coming next year!
[You did say trapped on that elevator.]
Diatryma @107: Oh dear. And here I was trying to work out other Girls' Own Terraforming sagas, frex Laura "Ender" Wiggins's struggle with remorse after unwittingly spearheading her world's conquest of Formic Territory to protect her blind sister Valentine.
Or perhaps Mary Lennox escaping as the lone survivor of the space colony where she was born; she reaches the apparently empty Station Misselthwaite and tries to get the hydroponics system back online so life-support will have enough resources to revive Colin and Archibald Craven from cryosleep, but unfortunately the Weyland-Yutani Corporation had seeded her cat with embryonic xenomorphs. Faces are hugged, chests burst open etc. Final confrontation: powered mecha smackdown between her and the alien queen "Mrs. Medlock".
Flora Post has found herself orphaned by a transporter accident which killed both of her parents. After searching out all of her available relatives, she finds the only ones who are able to take her in are the Star-Kadders, who are mining a desolate asteroid named "Cold Comfort". Will Flora be able to disentangle the complicated affairs of the Star-Kadders, and lead them all to happiness and sensible behaviour before the Nasty Thing In The Woodshed comes to devour them all?
Meg: Something Nasty In The Wormhole, maybe?
When Starfleet captain Art Ello promotes Lt. Michael Cassio to be his first officer instead of his Security Officer, Mr. E'ago, he sets in motion a chain of revenge and betrayal. E'ago alters security recordings, manipulates the holodeck, and rearranges duty schedules to fool Captain Ello into believing his wife, Des Demona, is having an affair with Cassio. In the end, Ello locks his wife in an airlock and depressurizes it, despite her pleas of innocence. When an ensign provides him with proof of Des Demona's fidelity, Ello kills himself with his phaser.
We open with a scene in the orbital HQ of the Merc Coalition, which is assaulting the planet Yort VII. Captives from a raid are being distributed as slaves, cue babes. Killer A, one of the Merc leaders, doesn't get the hottie that he has his eye on, and is so pissed off that he tells the other capos he's pulling his group the hell out. Pat Treeclaws, his 2ic, figures this is seriously lame, since there's
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