Holy CRAP this is good news: Bradley Denton's incredible comic sf novel Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede is being made into a movie directed and written by Robert Rugan.

Buddy Holly is the story of Oliver Vale, whose mother was obsessed with Buddy Holly, and who one day discovers that Buddy Holly is on the TV, on every TV, on every station, with a guitar around his neck, standing in a bubble on the surface of Ganymede, disoriented, musical, and periodically reading out a sign saying that further information is available from Oliver, and supplying his home address.

The entire world chases Oliver at this point: cops, radio cops, televangelists and their flocks, aliens — you name it. And Oliver begins a road-trip across America to Lubbock, Texas, there to exhume Buddy Holly's corpse and verify for himself that the famous musician is not on a distant, airless moon.

When this book came out, I was a bookseller at Bakka in Toronto, the venerable science fiction bookstore. If you were a science fiction reader in Toronto in those days, it's a damned good bet I sold you a copy of it. I hand-sold about 750 copies of that book, and would have sold more. Will sell more.

Bradley Denton is a stone comic genius and no two of his books are alike, but this is the one I love — I worship — as the apotheosis of a certain kind of gonzo, brilliant, marvellous thing that is to American science fiction comedy what Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' series is to British sf comedy.

To see it come back and to the big screen, too — marvellous. Congrats, Brad, and well-deserved.

Jon Heder to star in 'Buddy Holly'

(via IO9)

