Thread: Galileo

Ok, here is my book/film idea (copyright to me) it's called Galileo and it's about the first manned mission to Europa (a large, icy moon of Jupiter) where the ship crash lands on the surface. Luckily the drill (for water) still works and the astronaut digs for water to drink, but the drill stops working. the land around him starts to crack (as it does on Europa) and water bursts from the cracks, but a distinctly fish-like creature flops out of a crack. He goes to inspect, as they had only thought that bacterial life could live deep in Europa's underground seas, when the ground cracks beneath him, and he falls kilometers into the moon's seas, blacking out as he hits the water. He wakes up in a small cell with tiny windows all around, wearing a wetsuit, wondering where he could possibly be, when a robot wheels in food and his spacesuit and leaves. He goes to look through one of the windows and sees a beautiful underwater city, with lights lighting up the blackness of Europa's seas. As he watches, a beautiful woman with reptilian skin is pulled out of another cell next to his roughly by two (also reptilian) guards, and as she tries to escape she's electrocuted by the guards, and drops down dead.....
I haven't finished the plotline yet but I know that the entire moon is going to be in a globe-wide war and the Earth is caught in the crossfire. What do you think of it? If you like it how do you think it should be written, film or book? (P.S it's called Galileo because he discovered Europa and the opening scene involves him seeing the war erupt through the crust and is so traumatized by the vision of hell he has seen that he never mentions it to anyone.

Your story has potential. As far as book vs movie, why not do both? Many books become movies and many movies/TV shows spawn books. I know little about screen plays except that they are shorter than books. (Although as our attention spans get shorter, books are getting shorter, too.)

If you write with a lot of description, that can be easily excised when you convert to a screen play. It's that picture vs 1,000 words thing. A movie can show in a few seconds what you might need several minutes to describe verbally. If, on the other hand, you write lots of action and dialogue that will be more difficult to cut out for the screen play.

You could add a sub-plot or two or a red herring or two to the book that you leave out of the screen play. You could also decrease the number of obstacles that the protagonist must overcome before he can resolve the conflict.

I like it, and the whole idea has a definite movie feel to it. Animated movie perhaps?

I'd surely read a book or watch a movie about this. I'm a sci-fi freak, so that also adds to my interest.