Look, I'm being called to settle an argument:

A friend and I have been arguing about which science fiction writer has been most successfully adapted to film. I say it's Michael Crichton, but my friend says he doesn't count as a science fiction writer. Does he? And if he doesn't, who is the next most successful?

A very good question! Unless we have actually do have the ability to reverse-engineer the dinosaurs from the dead (Jurassic Park), or create time machines (Timeline), or have ever battled space viruses (The Andromeda Strain), then yes, in fact, Michael Crichton was a science fiction writer, did write science fiction, and had enormous success transferring his science fiction books to film. Crichton is occasionally dismissed from science fiction circles mainly because he wasn't marketed primarily as science fiction (i.e., you found his work in the general fiction section in the bookstore) and because he played around in more or less current time rather than in some far-flung future. He also didn't just write science fiction, even if most of his work did have a technogeek bent. So perhaps he's a writer who wrote science fiction, rather than a science fiction writer, if you know what I mean.

But I find all of that silly hair-splitting. The dude wrote science fiction novels, those novels got made into movies, and those movies were generally successful. Certainly among science fiction writers alive and active in the last 50 years -- an important qualification, as you'll see -- he's at the top of the heap.

Next on the list is likely to be Philip K. Dick, whose film adaptation success owes less to his novels than to his short stories: and Total Recall, the two most financially successful Dick adaptations, were from the author's shorter work (Blade Runner, adapted from a novel, was dramatically overhauled from that work, albeit with Dick's enthusiastic approval).

Dick and Crichton, incidentally, are an interesting study of contrasts, in terms of paths to film success. Crichton was successful in Hollywood from an early age; his first book under his own name (The Andromeda Strain) was made into a successful film, Crichton segued into screenwriting, producing and even directing (The Great Train Robbery, Runaway) in both TV and film and became, of course, very wealthy and successful. Dick, on the other hand, never found a huge amount of financial success in his lifetime and died close to poor in 1982, before the release of Blade Runner, the first film based on his work. All of Dick's film success came posthumously, which is nice for Dick's heirs and estate, but less so for Dick.

All that said, if you really want to know the most successful science fiction writer in film history, the name to know is H.G. Wells. It's no exaggeration to say H.G. Wells' work spans the entire film genre of science fiction, since the very first science fiction film, 1902's La voyage dans la lune, was partially based on his work, and new film versions of The Invisible Man and Food of the Gods are in production. In between those are dozens of film adaptations, ranging from the wildly successful (the 1954 and 2005 versions of War of the Worlds War of the Worlds) to the deeply questionable (the 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau). Wells even wrote the screenplay to the 1936 adaptation of his novel The Shape of Things to Come. It was, ironically, was not the best ever adaptation of his work to screen, but then authors aren't necessarily the best interpreters of their own work when it comes to film (it was at least better than the appallingly bad 1979 adaptation of the same novel, starring Jack Palance).

Wells' only challenger to his film preeminence is not any modern writer, but a man whose literary career overlapped his: Jules Verne, who will see yet another film version of his novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea arrive in theaters in 2012, 143 years after it was first published. That's career longevity any science fiction author would like to have.

Neither Wells nor Verne are likely to be challenged as the most successful science fiction writers in film. For one thing, they both have more than a hundred year head start on any new challenger. For another, current copyright law keeps work from going into the public domain until decades after the death of its author, meaning that anyone who wanted to make a movie on the novel Jurassic Park without dealing with Crichton's estate will need to wait until the last quarter of this century. By that time there are likely to be another couple dozen Wells and Verne adaptations, some of them very successful indeed. But don't be too sad for Crichton. He certainly did well enough.