Posted on 04/12/2007 10:53:09 AM PDT by pjd
Sorry I miss you main point.
I guess I never thought about Golden Man and X-men since Golden Man was not a beneficial mutation to humankind as a whole.
I think the big thing that inspires X-men was the success of Peter Parker, a teen age super hero and so why not follow that up with a team of teenage super heroes.
Probably at the time there were lots of mutant stories in the SF magazines to draw inspiration from that were much more positive then Golden Man.
I think Baby is Three might be more of an inspiration, I think that’s the name of the story about a group of mutant children who form sort of a super-organism when they work together.
Drawing a blank on other good 20th Century American authors.
Guess that says something right there.
Willa Cather? Pearl S. Buck? Steinbeck.... T.S. Eliot, if he counts as ours. Hemingway, Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor .... hmm. Yikes.
Graham Greene and Tolkien blow that crowd out of the water from across the pond, that's for sure.
Ray Bradbury. Yes, he's an LA liberal, but boy can he write a story. He also appropriated from Shakespeare what is perhaps the coolest title for a novel ever: Something Wicked This Way Comes.
I think I'll go over to my TV, wrap my hands around its grips, and get Mercerized.
In his notes regarding A Scanner Darkly, Dick had this to say about drugs:
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgement. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.
“This thread was supoposed to have an anti-abortion theme, but it apparently has gotten hyjacked by drugs. “
Who says we’re not still talking about abortion? Hard drugs and abortion-on-demand both boil down to the same thing - a coward’s way out of a serious difficulty. What I mean is this: Hard drug users are (in my personal experience) fleeing from a deep inner pain which they cannot identify, let alone alleviate; people who abort their kids are fleeing from the (supposedly) terrifying and burdensome responsibilities of parenthood.
I like PKD quite a bit.
Check out Harlan Ellison for another good 20th Century author.
This, and "Love Conquers All" by Fred Saberhagen, helped turn me from pro-choice, to pro-life... so very long ago. Much to remember...
His fiction is brilliant---his non-fiction is electric!
I remember when "Repent Harlequin..." was required reading in my eighth grade class.
I agree with you about how badly Hollywood butchers his stories. The the best one that actually tracked his story resonably well was Blade Runner. The short story was, Do androids dream of Electric Sheep?
I consider Ellison overrated, not least of all by himself.
Late SF writer Keith Laumer also has an anti abortion short story, though it’s not very subtle. He also has an anti socialism short story, also not too subtle.
He wrote some nice stories.
My problem with him is that he's so arrogant, and it comes off in his writing. A certain amount of what you might call arrogance is required in a writer, but Ellison's is utterly on display, always. It turns me off.
Mark Helprin qualifies, IMO, as a great American writer of the 20th century.
Which, of course, is L. Ron Hubbard and his E-meter.
Actually, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was a full novel, not a short story. Also, the film and the novel differed greatly. The two written sequels to Blade Runner, authored by K.W. Jeter and authorized by the , stuck more closely to the screenplay and not to the novel upon which it was based.
It seems to me that this trilogy was simply madness put to paper and I found it interesting but when the Timothy Archer story came in, I was baffled.
Hell, I read Foucault's Pendulum By Umberto Eco and wasn't nearly as confused.
Just a small gripe about a great writer.
On a side note, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died today. I know he is a left-winger but I enjoyed his writing.
Arioch7
I have to agree with you there, except for the first of the series The Divine Invasion which I enjoyed quite a bit. Was hoping the other two would be similar, but they each got increasingly weird.
I thought that Minority Report and Paycheck were pretty good adaptions of the short stories. Except, in Paycheck, they changed the ending quite a bit. However, most of the story was there.
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