The Tag Shields Are Failing Cap'n!

We've tried to avoid becoming part of any meme or tag by ensuring that we have no friends on the internet[1]. As this post shows, our strategy has failed. Clearly we haven't worked hard enough at this, so our next move will be to create some internet enemies[2]! But before that, here's the 48 top sci-fi adaptions meme:

SF Signal started it.
The Crotchety Old Fan was caught in a crossfire and hit twice with it.
He passed it on to us.
There's probably a moral here somewhere.

The rules are:

• Copy the list below.
• Mark in bold the movie titles for which you read the book. [Edit: bold isn't showing up, so I've changed to Pink and Bold]
• Italicize the movie titles for which you started the book but didn't finish it.
• Tag 5 people to perpetuate the meme. (You may of course play along anyway.)

The list:

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

A little embarrassing I know. One or two thoughts:

Jurassic Park - I would happily, or at least stoically, finished this, if I hadn't picked it up to look at in a friend's house while said friend got ready to go out. 40 minutes later they were and I left it behind.
War of the Worlds, Island of Dr Moreau, Time Machine, Invisible Man - H G Wells studied at the Normal School of Science, which later became the Royal College of Science and is now a constituent college of Imperial College London. By a staggering coincidence, along with my degree from IC, I became an Associate of the Royal College of Science. Apart from allowing me to put ARCS after my name, this link with H G Wells has lead me to read far too many of his books. If there were four I'd recommend reading, it's these four. If I was going to film one it wouldn't be any of these (or even the others that have been filmed - The First Men in the Moon. The Shape of Things to Come, The Sleep Wakes) but The War in the Air.
Starship Troopers - The book's good (even when I disagree with it), and the film is good as a Robocop-in-space. But where do they connect?[3]
Hitchhikers - grew up with the TV series, later read the books and heard the radio version. The film hadn't quite gutted it as Hollywood was expected to do as you could still see bits of the original in it. One thing that worked in the film - Ford Prefect claims to be from Guildford, but is clearly an American, which would have fit in perfectly with the original(s).
The Running Man - If there's anything of the Stephen King novel left in the film, you could have fooled me. Hmm, must add The Running Man onto our list of Arnie films.
The Iron Man - the film came out too late for me as I'd outgrown the book ("Where did he come from? Nobody knows") but it's still haunting.
The Postman - probably the only David Brin book I've not read.
Nightflyers - never seen the film. Read the novella recently when I got hold of the George R R Martin retrospective story collection. Good, but it feels a little old fashioned, probably because the whole crossing horror with space travel has reused these ideas endlessly since then.

As I said we don't have internet friends so I'm not tagging anyone. Breaking the chain will add karma to my soul and mean I never find true love and all my finances will fail, damn it, but that's the price you pay for blogging. Heckler and Kochk - breaking internet chains so you don't have to.



[1] This isn't quite true, but most of our internet friends know us under different names, and don't blog about sci-fi. Who would have thought!
[2] Maybe we'll start with The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. I read them anyway, so it would make any feud much less hard work.
[3] By a staggering coincidence, our notes from Starship Troopers 3 seem to have fallen through a time-rift from when we're going to be able to see it in the UK in September. They seem to have been distorted by their passage, or maybe that's just Heckler's handwriting (spoilers):

His Chief of Staff used to polish my brass, if you know what I mean!
It only took me 8 years to make colonel.
What I do out of uniform is off the clock General.[4]
Asking the Sky Marshall for an autograph.
Johnny Rico - Hero of Planet P.
They'd use heavier firepower, but it would damage the set.
We lost the Sky Marshall. Good we'll all hang together.
It's only 100 klicks away. - We ain't got rations for that. - You're
fat, you won't need them!
They should clone Dix so there's an army of Dix.
Controversy with a Q
He thinks God is a bug!
Sure he's gone - but he left us with a song!

[4] Heckler as capitalised General, but left colonel lower-case. Due to the different usages here, I'm not entirely sure that's wrong.