science-fiction

Halloween is fast approaching, as is the opening of the new film, The Box, starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden in early November. Of course, many great books have been made into movies, and sure, there's the Twilight series and Cirque du Freak, both book franchises with new movies coming out, but what are the some of the best horror and science fiction books for adults that have been made into films that you may or may not have heard of?

• Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison for Soylent Green
• The Box: Uncanny Stories by Richard Matheson for the new movie of the same title and a new Twilight Zone “Button, Button” episode from 1986. Also, don't miss his novella for "I Am Legend" [see the film]
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick for Blade Runner
• Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (translated by Ebba Segerberg) for the film of the same title. The U.S. version of the book is sometimes entitled Let Me In. A bestseller in his native Sweden.
• The Ring by Kôji Suzuki for the 2002 U.S. remake with the same title of the 1998 Japanese film, Ringu.
• For an example of Hollywood going to the book first, check out the first of Guillermo Del Toro (The Orphanage, Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) and Chuck Hogan's new vampire trilogy, The Strain.

I’ve only seen one episode of The Twilight Zone. In this episode, a woman undergoes a battery of surgeries to look normal. At the end of the episode, viewers learn that this latest surgery has failed: the woman is still hideous. Except that to the audience she is beautiful. Online research led me to another episode where teenagers are surgically altered to live longer and conform to a unified standard of beauty (based on a limited number of acceptable “models”). Uglies (2005), Scott Westerfeld’s dystopic novel, plays similar games of perception.

The novel starts with Tally Youngblood a fifteen-year-old girl desperately waiting for her sixteenth birthday when she will be reunited with her best friend and, more importantly, when she will finally be pretty.  read more »

I was one of those kids who visited his neighborhood library in Brooklyn several times a week and always came away with an armload of books. It was a profound rite of passage when I graduated from a children’s card to an adult card and was allowed into the sanctum which contained Lady Chatterley’s Lover and other such mysterious things; until then, however, there was more than enough to beguile me in the children’s room. Since there was always plenty of time for everything back then, any book I really liked I borrowed and read repeatedly. One book in particular which seized me and set up subterranean forces in my personality that I haven’t shaken to this day was a young adult science-fiction novel called Danger: Dinosaurs! by Richard Marsten, about a group of time travelers stranded in the Jurassic era. Some children might have been traumatized by Bambi’s mother in the forest fire, but I had my first adult lesson in the fragility of life when one of the main characters of Danger: Dinosaurs! was trampled to death by a stampeding herd of brontosaurs. Interestingly enough, for someone who has trouble remembering what movie he saw last weekend, I can still visualize the exact corner of the children’s reading room and even the middle shelf where this book could be located.

Do you have similar books which helped (for better or worse) to define you?  read more »