Posted on 07/27/2006 6:49:43 PM PDT by marc costanzo
The essay below was originally written in the early Spring of 2001:
With the passing away of LEXX ends an intriguing albeit tawdry experiment in Sci-fantasy. One that breaks with conventions, or should I say cliches of TV sci-fi of the 90's . The politically correct pabulum, the multicultural indoctrination, the BladeRunner motifs, and not the least; the steroid mutated superbabes that can punch the lights out of men, but never get punched back in return !?
How about creating a new sci-fi anthology with none of the puerile baggage of Rod Serling, Rockne Obannon, Michael J. Stracinsky, etc .. It is time to end their reign of un-American cynicism and fatalism !
It's a fine but useful distinction. "Sci-fi" is as SF is imaginned by outsiders.
The kind of people who say: "thanks Gene for showing your idea Star Trek. But we've decided to go with a similar show Lost on Space"
Although mainly space-opera, Star Trek had asopirations of, and occasionally achieved Science Fiction. Lost on Space never aimaed to be and was never more than skiffy.
>>Blah! I like Blade Runner and just about every bleak insane future P.K. Dick cooked up. Looking forward to seeing them ruin "A Scanner Darkly".<<
That movie stars Keanu "dude" Reeves :-(
Do your own conclusions . .
Even Dr. Who is annoyingly PC.<<
Yes it is, the new series, and to some extent the old, but the older series had its' charms !
If Arthur C Clarke were dead, that sentence would have him spinning in his grave.
I liked the job Keanu Reeves did in "Constantine", which might make an interesting series, albeit not Sci-Fi, now that I think of it.
I am siging off now, nice chatting with you, and providing interesting and positive responses !
You've restored my sanity, for now at least .
I will check up on some of the links you posted, when I return . .
Bye for now . . !
Yes, definitely that as well. But I recall how newbie it was to use anything but the term "SF" to distinguish the genre from fantasy, sword & sorcery and horror.
I like those you mention and revere other great ones such as Theodore Sturgeon, C.M. Kornbluth, Clifford D. Simak, L. Sprague de Camp, Murray Leinster and many others. Those people really stretched my mind.
Some of us even write it too.
His instruction to Nathan Fillion on playing Matt Reynolds was "John Wayne"
"I liked Firefly. Never saw it on TV but I have all the episodes on disc. "
Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can't take the sky from me...
http://www.fireflywiki.org/img/Ballad_of_Serenity.mp3
I suggest all the stuff by Ringo, the Niven/Pournelle collaboration Angel's Down, the stuff by Rick Cook, Eric Flint's 1632 universe and the Honor Harrington books. I think you'll be pleased.
Good suggestions. Thank you.
I have a question you might be able to help with. There was a series of books written by Barry Sadler (the Green Beret who had the hit song "Ballad Of The Green Berets") about a Roman legionnaire named Casca Rufio Longinus who was the soldier who pierced the side of Christ at his crucifixion.
For this action he was cursed with immortality and condemned to wander the Earth as a mercenary until Christ's return. The series was called "Casca: The Eternal Mercenary". Do you know if anything has ever been done screenwise based on this series or concept?
H Beam Piper is my all-time favorite, and SPACE VIKING is my favorite H. Beam Piper. The man was just uncompromising: he prefered Order to Chaos, Civilization to Barbarism, and benevolent Feudalism to amoral capitalist democracy -- and he wasn't shy about making those preferences plain. He felt that some people were naturally better than others, and that such people had a God-ordained duty to protect the weak, preserve culture, and prevent the rise of demagogues to power. By today's standards Piper is unpublishable -- even hardass SF types like Eric Flint deride him as a "naked apologist for colonialism", as if that were a bad thing. Yet Peper never apologized for anything. He was an entertainer, not a philosophy teacher. His books were never polemic (a la Ayn Rand and RAH), were blissfully short (SPACE VIKING packs a trilogy's worth of fun into 191 short pages) and conained no mother-son or father-daugter sex scenes. Noblest of all, he never stooped to writing Mary Sue stories (i.e. "self-insertion fiction"). He was hard, clean, and pure.
Maybe that's why he blew his brains out young.
What a waste.
I hope nobody ever makes a filmed version of SPACE VIKING, because they'd ruin it. Instead, it's my wish that technology continues to improve to the point where I can make my own animated version of the story... because only I, B-chan, can do it justice!
Um...
Anyway, if you like good, classic SF, you might also check out Lee Correy's works. Correy (pen name of famed rocket scientist G. Harry Stine) pemned some of the coolest nuts and bolts SF ever back in the '50s. One of my favorites is CONTRABAND ROCKET, which was half of an Ace Double in which three young ham radio nerds living in a world where space travel is considered a bit nutty salvage an old military spaceship from a junkyard (!) and rebuild it for a moon flight. Stine/Correy lovingly describes the entire rebuilding process from his own POV as a crack engineer. A more recent work of his, SHUTTLE DOWN, is equally good, though in a different vein. It's the story of a Space Shuttle launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base that goes wrong, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing on Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island). The story from there is a mix of political intrigue and NASA procedural as the Shuttle team struggles to retrive the crippled bird from the remote and decidedly un-space-age island. SHUTTLE DOWN is easy to find at used bookshops, but Correy/Stine's juveniles are a damn sight more rare. Most are owned by book collectors and command high prices IF you can find them. A copy of the one I want most (STARSHIP THROUGH SPACE) will set you back about $250. Ouch!
The SF book I would most like to see made into a movie is FOOTFALL, by Jerry Pournelle.
I would like to see ARC LIGHT by Eric L. Harry made into a GOOD 12-hour TV miniseries.
Michael McCollum wrote an interesting series of books beginning with ANTARES DAWN. Worth searching for.
I like Philip K. Dick a lot -- but who doesn't? My favorite is TIME OUT OF JOINT.
The late Jean Raspail's THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS is creepy, thrilling, and more timely today than when it was written. This comes close to being a "must-read".
If you're of a mind for something a bit more substantial, I can't recommend DIE GLASPERLENSPIEL (aka MAGISTER LUDI aka THE GLASS BEAD GAME aka MASTER OF THE GAME) by Herman Hesse mighly enough.
And my favorite SF novel of all time? You'll never guess. It's not what you'd expect!
How would you classify it? It's a horror story using science fiction to deliver a social commentary, isn't it?
Or is it a social commentary using fictional science...?
The vast majority of sci fi has had a white male as the leading character. Janeway and the black guy in deep space nine are the only exceptions that I can think of.
otherwise it is has been a steady diet of captain kirk, scott blacula, commander adama, captain picard, etc.
Roger that! I started out with Rocket Ship Galileo, and began to drift away somewhere around Farnham's Freehold. The early stuff, serialized in Boy's Life, was great stuff.
I loved the outer limits both the old bw and the newer series too.
The best episode had to be "the stream".
It is where everyone has an internet connection (called "the stream") tied directly into their brain except for one person who can not do this.
eventually, the stream developes almost a totalitarian grip on society.
SF/FR ping! If you like alternate histories and such I remember a short story from about 30 years ago called "Custer's Last Jump", the internal combustion engine and heavier than air flight are achieved a tad earlier, in time for the US Civil War.
I won't say any more but the 7th are a parachute balloon infantry unit.
Freegards,
skepsel
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