Michael Bay has taken us to outer space, given us a hidden world filled with clones, and slammed a bunch of robots together, but his most sci-fi-y movie may still be yet to come. According to Publishers Weekly and author Wesley Chu, Paramount has optioned his new book specifically for Bay to direct and for Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Transformers) to produce. It's called Time Salvager and it sounds loosely like a mash-up of Looper and Wall-E.

Time Salvager takes place in a future where mankind has abandoned the toxic wasteland of Earth and has taken to colonizing the stars. This expansion is only possible by using time travel to go back to Earth's past and steal certain resources without altering the timeline. The people who do this are called Chronmen and the story tracks one of them who, on the verge of retirement, decides to break the law and save the life of a woman in the past. He then brings her to the future, where the two become fugitives trying to survive in the remains of the dying (or is it?) Earth.

That's actually a pretty great premise and seems like an interesting match for someone like Bay. It's got a high concept in a future world, which means plenty of oppurtunity for flashy CGI, and it's got a built-in action movie premise. The one thing it has that most Bay movies lack, however, is an emotional core. If he can pull off a love story that spans time and space and possibly culminates in saving Earth, this may just be a very special Michael Bay movie.

And as you can imagine, Chu, who will be an executive producer on the movie, is a little bit excited about all of this:

The speed that Mark, the president of Di Bonaventura, pushed for Paramount to close the option, and the enthusiasm Michael Bay showed in attaching to Time Salvager, has been nothing short of astounding. Often, getting this far in the process can take months, if not years. This went down in a matter of weeks. It’s still going to be an uphill climb but I have complete confidence in the team that Di Bonaventura and Paramount are assembling to usher Time Salvager to the big screen.

If you'd like to read Time Salvager you'll need your own time machine-- it doesn't hit store shelves until July 7, 2015.