Daniel H Wilson writes IQ test books. If you walk into someone's home and their shelf is filled with the kind of junk he writes - books like How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion, Bro-Jitsu: The Martial Art of Sibling Smackdown, The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame: Muwhahahaha! and Where's My Jetpack: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived, you can bet that person is not too bright. Or, alternately, they get a lot of lazy gifts from people who shop at the paperback tables of Barnes & Noble. Wilson seems to excel in what I call Stocking Stuffer Books - ie, flimsy, poorly written pieces of crap that your mom buys you because she knows you like science fiction.

Now he's got a fiction book coming, and it sounds like it's a blazing tale of originality: Robopocalypse (you can tell this is a 'serious' book because it has no colon and subtitle). It's the tale of humanity's struggle in the face of a robot uprising, a story no one has told on film this past summer. And it's been optioned and fast tracked by Dreamworks.

What I like best about this story is that Wilson's How To Survive a Robot Uprising has also been optioned and is being adapted by Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, which means he has two completely identical movies in development. It's like if you sold your movie and IMMEDIATELY sold the remake of your  movie. Or if you had pitched Armageddon and then run across town to immediately pitch Deep Impact to someone else. Wilson has Paramount and Dreamworks covered - surely he can think up robot uprising movies to sell to Universal, Warner Bros, Fox and Disney, right?

via Hollywood Reporter