Now and then aspiring screenwriters tell me they’d like to do a script of my novel Software. I encourage them, but don’t enter into agreements with them — the guys I want to make agreements with are, of course, producers. I definitely don’t want to p*ss away time collaborating on spec scripts. I prefer to p*ss away time making complicated web pages!
Here’s one of my favorite covers for Software (Avon 1987), with a classic-type robot tuning up a cute android-type robot. Not a scene that’s actually in the book, but, hey, it should be.
Software was in fact under option for the last ten years of the 20th Century, and I have eighty pages of journal notes about this experience, including three unsuccessful Software treatments I wrote during that period. And today, just for the hell of it, I decided to post this info as: Software in Hollywood (1990 – 1991).
Do note that the film rights for Software are presently available.
Like Software, Wetware won the Philip K. Dick award; I think I’m still the only person to get that award twice. This is the Japanese cover; just about all my science-fiction was translated into Japanese in the 1990s. I like this image a lot, it picks up on thing about couples soaking themselves in “love puddles” filled with a drug called merge.
Unfortunately Wetware is a little hard to find these days, I think Avon let it go out of print. This was maybe the most cyberpunk of the Wares. Some other guy wrote a book with the same title a year or two ago, not to be confused with mine. I was annoyed when that happened, and to make it worse, his publicity said something like “in tradition of writers like Philip K. Dick…” If they're gonna lift my title, what would be wrong with saying “in the tradition of Rudy Rucker…”?
I’ve had a good run in Italy lately, here’s the Italian Freeware. What seems to happen with individual countries is that someone will get hip to my work, and most of my books get translated over a period of five to ten years. Germany did me in the Eighties. France seems like it might be starting up.
The film rights to Freeware are under option to Multiversal Entertainment.
Last in the Ware tetralogy is Realware. Will I ever write another Ware? Probably not, but you never know. Right now, I wish Avon would publish the four together in a single massive volume, but I don’t think they want to bother.
Re. Hollywood, my best shot these days is that Michele Gondry wants to make a movie of Master of Space and Time, which he's optioned. I talked to him a little about it, and he's pretty encouraging. We'll see.
September 23rd, 2005 at 11:02 am
For a while I’ve been hoping any number of your books would turn up on the big screen. I’m wondering if anyone who does anime has consider animating one of your books. Maybe I should read the pdf before asking the question.
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Maybe they could package the latter two Ware novels as a follow-up to “Live Robots.”
“Software” was the Rucker book that won me over. I think it was the brain-eating Mr. Softee truck.
September 23rd, 2005 at 2:38 pm
When I think about someone making a movie out of your work, I wonder if they shouldn’t use a short story, expand on a theme or two and really get the point across. In Transreal!, I see Pi in the sky, Storming the cosmos, and In frozen time as having the base for a film.
I think In frozen time would make an amazing arthouse flick. Thanks for Transreal!, also; whenever I’m short a new book for a long ride, it’s right there on my shelf waiting to mess up my head with nightmares of hypercubes and topologically inverted kitty-cats.
September 23rd, 2005 at 7:55 pm
Quantaware?
Howabout Frek as a movie. It could be made like the christmas movie last year, all blue screen and the rest animation (of course I never actually saw it:-). Only the heads of the of the, of the … you know modified people would be real.
September 24th, 2005 at 7:36 am
WOW! Thanks for posting the “Software in Hollywood”.
Great details on a deal going sadly wrong.
But you don’t seem to come to any conculsions
about what went wrong?
Was it mainly the fault of your agent Freedman do you think?
I’ve heard that in Hollywood, if you don’t get
the deal you want within 3 meetings, then you
should forget it and go somewhere else.
But they kept renewing the option.
You should send Software to Alex Proyas (Dark City, I Robot)
He would do a good job.
September 24th, 2005 at 5:59 pm
Michele Gondry is a terrific director; he could do a good job, I think.
What about As Above, So Below? It would make a great movie.
September 24th, 2005 at 6:44 pm
Boy, I just finished reading your notes, and it would make a good outline for a paranoid SF novel!
No wonder PKD dropped dead after dealing with Hollywood. He must have thought he’d fallen into one of his own stories!
September 26th, 2005 at 6:04 pm
Wow those covers are great.
That scene wasn’t in software?
There used to be an Irish band that Played around NYC.
They were called “Those Bleeding Tulips”
One of there songs had a lyric that went like this
The movie is never as good as the book
The book is often better, not read
But what about the movie in my head
WHAT ABOUT THE MOVIE IN MY HEAD!!!
and I can never get those lyrics out of mine
party on
December 19th, 2005 at 6:43 pm
The Wares were so cool – the little Kidders are just ready for primetime I think. And what happened to Anderson after he took off with those golden sparkles like the P-Funk?