Over on No Fear of the Future, Jess Nevis has posted an entertaining historical retrospective of Chinese science fiction that could only be made better if it had actually happened.

Fanqi Mieville’s Mengzi Street Station (4698). Mengzi Street Station may be a controversial choice. Mieville seems to have as many detractors, or at least readers who are unable to derive any enjoyment from his work, as devotees. But Mieville is the leading figure in what might be called the New Decadence.

And our own Stephen Dedman chips in with an instalment in what should prove to be a fertile field: a history of films that fell foul of circumstance, ego-clash, or Hollywood politicking and were either cancelled or transmuted into something unrecognisable from the source material. Anyone who has ever wanted to see Orson Welles’s original vision for The Magnificent Ambersons will be a sucker for this stuff. Stephen has written the untold story of Starship Troopers, the version that clung to Heinlein’s story.

Unlike Paul Verhoeven and Edward Neumeier, writer/director/producer Smithee was not only a huge fan of the novel but a great believer in the idea that films should be as faithful as possible to the source material - as evidenced by his thirteen-hour director’s cut of Atlas Shrugged.