MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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Star Wars
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The Matrix is a heavily-buzzed, supposedly innovative science fiction movie that friends have told me I simply must see. I'm sure I'll catch it eventually when it hits HBO or comes out on videotape, but I'm in no hurry. From what I've heard, The Matrix doesn't have a single idea in it that hadn't been done to death in written science fiction by 1965. So if I wait a few more months to see it, no big deal.
Science fiction movies and TV shows generally run 20 to 40 years behind written science fiction. Intelligent machines flummoxing humans into thinking they're someplace or somewhen they really aren't was a common plot device in the early 1950s, when computers were just being developed. So I should get excited about the idea now, in 1999? Oy!
The first science fiction book I ever read -- in 1960, at the age of seven -- was The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. Van Vogt. It was a collection of short stories written in the 1940s about a starship crew that roamed the galaxy, discovering new planets, meeting strange life forms, and generally going boldly where humans had not previously ventured.
When Star Trek first hit TV, it was a very "So what?" thing for me. Quite frankly, the mental images of the starship, its crew, and the alien planets they visited that Van Vogt created were far better than Gene Rodenberry's low-budget sets and special effects.
Last week a friend was telling me how emotional he'd gotten over some scenes in Blade Runner. For me, that was strictly a ho-hum movie. I'd read the book on which it was based years before the movie was made, and found the screen version pallid by comparison. Ditto Soylent Green. I won't get into The Postman, Dune or any one of a dozen movies that have used the titles of science fiction classics, but managed to dumb down the concepts in the original books to the point of unrecognizability.
And now we are being swamped with pre-release hype for yet another Star Wars movie. Every single idea in the entire Star Wars saga was used -- and used up -- long before World War II by penny-a-word writers for magazines like Astounding. With a multi-multi-million dollar budget, you'd think George Lucas could afford to buy an original plot idea or two. So Star Wars, the Pre-Prequel (or whatever it's called) is another movie I can wait to see on HBO or videotape. Letting ideas that are already 60 years old age a few more months won't kill them.
The funny thing about all this is that there were plenty of science fiction novels written in the 1950s and 1960s that were full of stunning visual concepts and ideas that couldn't have been made into movies at the time because the special effects then available wouldn't have been able to do them justice, but could be made -- and made beautifully -- with today's film technology.
Two in particular that I've always wanted to see brought to life on the big screen were The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, and The Reefs of Space, by R. A. Lefferty.
The Bester book was so powerful to me, as a teenager, that I first took LSD to try to recreate some of the sensory effects experienced by marooned spaceship crew member Gully Foyle, the book's main character, an objective I only partially achieved.
Lafferty's Reefs didn't lead me into any drug experiments, but took me on a mental exploration of an outlaw culture hidden in a thin series of jewel-like, life-bearing habitats in trans-solar space, beyond Pluto, out where comets hit the apogees of their decades-long orbits, inhabited by friendly, dolphin-like space-dwelling creatures.
In RAH's original Troopers, the human soldiers wore armored "suits" with rocket boosters that made each of them more formidable than a present-day M-1 tank armed with nuclear weapons, along with the ability to fly like an Apache helicopter.
I wanted to see those suits. They were as important to the original plot as Rico or Sergeant Zim, the two primary human characters, and they should have had a similar role in the movie. But no. The only movie in which I've ever seen an armored fighting suit like the one RAH described so well in Troopers was in a small-time, humorous flick called Suburban Commando (starring Hulk Hogan, of all people), which may have been shot on a low budget but captured the physics of manuevering under rocket power better than those stupid Star Wars one-man fighters, which move like prop-powered fighter airplanes even when they're supposed to be in airless environments.
So I guess I'll keep on getting my science fiction from books, not movies, for the forseeable future. Unless, of course, an alien race descends upon the Earth and gives us some sort of chemical (or perhaps a ray) that can increase the intelligence of movie writers, producers, and directors to the level of the average science fiction novelist, a concept that might make a fine science fiction short story, but would probably be bungled if it was made into a movie or TV show.
Robin Miller is a free-lance writer and limo driver who lives in a Maryland trailer park so upscale that its residents refer to themselves as "Manufactured Housing Refuse."
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Either of these books would make a delightful movie. But I thought Robert A. Heinlein's excellent novel Starship Troopers would make one too, and it didn't. You think RAH wrote about generals stupid enough to send mobs of half-clad mobs humans on foot up against giant fire-spitting insectoids? No way!
© 1999, GENERATOR 21.
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