Today we lost the last of the great 3 masters of science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke passed away at 1:30am local time in Sri Lanka, where he’d lived for over 50 years, of breathing complications. He was 90 years old.

Pay your respects to this science fiction (and science fact) legend by re-reading your favorite novel of his. If you’ve never read him, do yourself a favor and try any of his extensive bibliography.

There is a good semi-obit at BBC News, and you can learn more about this amazing man at his wikipedia article.

With the loss of the great Gary Gygax just two short weeks ago, this is truly a sad month for us geeks.

Godspeed you, Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

The movie I, Robot was originally a spec script, titled “Hardwired,” by screenwriter Jeff Vintar. It was later infused with elements from Asimov’s short stories and retitled after Davis Entertainment aquired film rights to it from the Asimov estate.

As an avid reader, one has to realize nobody will EVER perfectly reproduce a great story or novel as a film. It can’t be done. Something always gets horribly fu$@ed up. Look at Dreamcatcher: 130 minutes of pretty damn good work, and 6 minutes at the end of classic hollywood bullshit that left me crying in the corner of the theater. This leads me to view movies, like i tried with I, Robot, with the very critical Sci-Fi loving part of my personality bound, gagged, and in my trunk. Because if I tried to review this movie as being “based on a novel”, not only would it look immature and ignorantly stupid, it would, frankly, look exactly like this.

However, I MUST take into account the fact that the idea of robots becoming violent is exactly Asimov was writing against in his work as an author. Indeed the act of placing the three laws into his stories forced him to write more complex plots, with robots who were more then just weapons. They had personalities, human-like traits, and sometimes, feelings.

So… the verdict? They shouldn’t have called it I, Robot, because it didn’t do the story justice. It should have been like Minority Report, where it was based, from the start, on a short story. Instead, they used the popularity of the stories to draw a crowd to a movie that had only four similarities to the stories:

• The title, “I, Robot”
• It boasts The Three Laws
• Asimov has a writing credit
• It has a character named “Susan Calvin”

Yep, thats about it.
So as a movie, it was good, no big stereotypes, the CG was impeccable, and the script wasn’t a bloated P.O.S.
I was riveted through most of it, and it really drew me in. It was quite well made.
However, I still think it was false advertising and they should have left the script as it was in 1995.

You can read further about the evolution of the I, Robot script here.