Plans are afoot to make a movie out of the famous Asimov Robots novel.

Caves of Steel movieDirector Henry Hobson and writer John Scott 3 has been tasked with making Caves of Steel into a live-action movie for Fox.

Caves of Steel is of course one of the best-known books of sci-fi author Isaac Asimov (Fantastic Voyage, Bicentennial Man). It is actually the first of four books to feature a detective character named Elijah Baley.

Set in Asimov’s Robot future known for its famous laws of robotics, Caves of Steel is a whodunit in which Baley and a robot partner has to solve a murder that threatens to disturb the uneasy peace between two rival factions, namely Earth inhabitants and off-world colonists known as “Spacers”.

Previous recent Asimov adaptations such as Bicentennial Man and I, Robot haven’t been particularly good or true to the spirit of Asimov’s work. (Asimov wrote his first Robot stories in reaction to the many robot uprising stories prevalent in the genre at the time. The 2004 I, Robot movie starring Will Smith featured . . . yup, a robot uprising. Did the screenwriters even read any of Asimov’s work?)

Asimov is flavor of the month it seems. Director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, 2012) recently finished his script for a planned movie based on Asimov’s Foundation books.

Henry Hobson and John Scott 3 (3 is actually a part of his name, go figure) are currently working on Maggie, a spec story which chronicles the six-week metamorphosis of a teenaged girl into a zombie.