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It seems that so many Sci-Fi films lately are pretty shallow treatments of 'big-name', classic (i.e., dead) Science Fiction authors: Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Paycheck, Total Recall), Isaac Asimov (I, Robot, Bicentential Man); Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers).

If I must resign myself to the American movie industry's intellectual cattle-rustling when it comes to choosing movie plots, I'd like to put in a request for anything by John Brunner. His novels are perfect for the screen in many respects: set in the near future, very plausible, and in fact scarily prophetic, dark, gritty, and human - a pre-cursor to William Gibson in many ways, absolutely brimming with ideas, situations, and social consequences of technological choices that urgently need to be explored, and often exploding with visual imagery.

Interestingly, Brunner seems to have imagined much more of the Internet (in 1975's The Shockwave Rider) than many people even today are able to envision. Back then, video terminals were pretty new, and rare, and 110 baud connections were considered high speed. In this context Brunner seems to have invented the idea of the internet worm, years before anything remotely like the internet existed. He also seems to have had amazing foreknowledge of nano-technology, genetic engineering and molecular biology, and a number of other fields that didn't come into existence until decades later. But what's more interesting than mere technological predictions is his amazing insight into the social and cultural implications of these technologies.