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I brought up Foundation because it and the Empire side of the series are 'sort of like' the Star Wars line...but one's had plenty of movies made and the other's had none. Hollywood's just been rehashing the same old stories now, over and over, so something genuinely new (but familiar-ish) might do well.

You're in luck. I'm not sure if Roland Emmerich is the right man for this job, though.

Yeah, not sure how I feel about an "Independence Day"-esque Foundation series. I'm guessing that the trader stories will fare well with that style.

You're in luck. I'm not sure if Roland Emmerich is the right man for this job, though.

would also love to see a film from the Foundation series, or a Riverworld film that doesn't suck.

I have good news and I have bad news. There's a Foundation movie in the works. Roland Emmerich is directing

http://www.scifimoviepage.com/upcoming/previews/foundation-movie.html

From http://www.scifimoviepage.com/drstrang.html :

Peter Sellers was cast in four roles, but experienced problems when trying to develop a Texas accent for Maj. T.J. "King" Kong. After Sellers broke his ankle, Stanley Kubrick was forced to find another actor. Convinced that nobody could have acted the part as well as Sellers, Kubrick decided to cast someone who naturally fit the role. The producers first approached John Wayne, who did not even bother to respond, and "Bonanza" (1959) star Dan Blocker, who declined the role because of the script's progressive political content. Remembering his work on the western One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Kubrick cast Slim Pickens as Kong, the gung-ho hick pilot determined to drop his bombs at any cost. Pickens was never shown the script nor told it was a black comedy; ordered by Kubrick to play it straight, he played the role as if it were a serious drama - with amusing results.

Hey, we've already been there.

Well, as soon as someone writes the Firefox plugin.

Baranovich: "You must think... of Russians!"
Andropov: "Are you enjoyink your ride, Mister Gant? Do you like our new toy?" Gant: "Boy, is this a machine!"

If you have a talented author who is able to work with interpersonal issues, relationships and so on, they write "respectible" fiction. SF only get the stories written by no-talent hacks or the stories by good authors that *can't* be told as non-SF.

I disagree, but would like to include a brief and admittedly vague anecdote. Ursula K LeGuin, who became famous for her SF exploring sociological and anthropological themes---but could The Left Hand of Darkness have been told without genetically engineered androgynes?---and later tried to distance herself from her SF roots, to be more palatable to The Literary Establishment. She ended up writing a lot of bad work.

You say, That said, I'd be happy to read a SF novel which focused on interpersonal or other "non-SF" sources of conflict, where the future is just a scenery choice. There's plenty of work that does just that. It's not SF; it's a Western or a crime drama with the word 'boat' crossed out and replaced with 'transgalactic skipship' or some similar verbal frottage.

SF is about hwo technology changes us. Vinge's "Realtime" series for stasis fields, "The Left Hand of Darkness" for a lack of gender, "1984" for two-way television and "Brave New World" for a genetically engineered caste system. I say that no really great work of SF could be re-cast in what you call a non-SF locale.

SF isn't just scenery. A lot of it is crap, but that can be said for general fiction as well. It's been unfairly ghettoized, its authors shunned until after their deaths, then grave-robbed for buzzwords and plot points. (See: Philip K Dick, Paycheck; Isaac Asimov, I, Robot; Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers.)

And the shunning of SF continues into other media, TV and movies. With the exception of Trek, which has its own problems, and which (I'm told) has gone straight to hell lately, what SF is there on television? What was the last SF movie you saw? And I mean real SF. Look what's considered SF.

There's a tendency among the general readership to shun SF. I can't imagine why someone would have such an aversion to picking up "The Left Hand of Darkness" or "A Deepness in the Sky". Do you know what causes it?

--grendel drago