50 YEARS OF SCIFI AND CURRENT EVENTS

kuvasz- Good to see you too. Take a look at this:

http://www.kith.org/logos/journal/show-entry.php?Entry_ID=905

Yeppers,..there was a film "The Beginning of the End",..with Peter graves and some giant locusts.

For my money, if you want big bugs, "Them" is my choice!

Sci Fi / Fantasy are some of the best genres for reporting on the human condition.
Especially when you look back at more predjudiced, war-torn times,..the stories parallel actual situations using aliens, monsters or other made up characters in place of the actual human characters.

I think it's alot of fun looking back at some of these films and picking out the actual storylines.

yeap, but that film was not really the story in wylie's book. the film was about giant grasshoppers coming out of the mexican desert, (of course, this was before insect immigration was a problem and grasshoppers moved freely across the border) and i think either james arness or his brother peter graves was in that one.

it was a lot like the film "Them!" about giant ants that grew so large because of the nuke explosions in the new mexico deserts. james whitmore was in that one.. and as i recall..they finally lured the ants with suger to their demise in sewers.

both of these dovetail with what pheonix said about the cultural attitude of fears of nukes and what they might cause if exploded.

wylie's book was about the demise of advanced human society by environmental diaster due to human actions.

GREAT LINK, GAL. THANKS.

i first heard the radio program when i was a kid in the late 60's and was an avidereader of sturgeon's works even in junior high school. and the link you gave was right on as to what i caught of the story too.

sturgeon is my favorite writer, period. and i will let another of the giants of the genre speak of sturgeon.

Robert Heinlein considered Theodore Sturgeon the best science fiction writer, and perhaps writer of fiction he ever read and who am i to argue with Heinlein? In the Forward to Sturgeon's "Godbody." Heinlein wrote:

"Godbody is written in multiple first person, a difficult narrative technique, believe me. Try this experiment. After you read Godbody, open it up anywhere, read three lines. Note the page, number and write down who, in your opinion, is speaking. Do this several times.

"Better yet, have someone help you, so that you do not know where the sample comes from-- the beginning, middle or end .I predict that you will call correctly which of eight characters spoke each of these small samples. Yet Sturgeon makes almost no use of spelled- out eccentricities of speech or other flags to mark his characters. Flagging is mechanical, a device any hack writer can copy. What Sturgeon does is subtle-each character has his own voice. How do you know at once who is calling on the telephone, if the caller is one familiar to you? By out the caller's voice, of course. How does Sturgeon do this?

"First let's dissect- Paderewski's hands to learn how he played a piano; then we'll dissect Sturgeon's brain to learn how he could give an imaginary person his own unique voice. Art on this level resists analysis; to the critic who tries it gets egg on his face."

For those who consider Heinlein, the best writer of science fiction, I do not conform to this opinion. In agreement with Heinlein, I consider Ted Sturgeon the best, for the reason Heinlein illustrated.

The Day the Earth Stood Still starred Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe and Sam Jaffe

The Time Machine starred Rod Taylor, Yvette Mimieux

Soylent Green starred Charlton Heston, Chuck Connors, Edward G. Robinson and Joseph Cotten

Them starred James Arness, James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn and Joan Weldon

I wish the would film "Player Piano," but, alas they haven't.

Here's my wish list of sci-fi that's never been filmed (and some have had the rights bought for filming but never came together):

"The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester
"Gravy Planet" (or "The Space Merchants") by Pohl/Kornbluth
"Mission of Gravity" by Hal Clement
"Santaroga Barrier" by Frank Herbert
"Slan" by A. E. van Vogt
"The Caves of Steel" by Isaac Azimov

I greatly enjoyed Heinlien while a kid in the ninth grade. In later life I cannot read his works. His celebrated Stranger in a Strange land was to me a disappointment. The first pages had my senses on alert for a tale probing the breadth of an alien intelligence, but it quickly degenerated into a story about a person starting a run of the mill religion.

Imagine an inch wide Christmas ribbon, twelve feet long. Make a circle with it so that the ribbon is on edge. Place a candle in the center.

Now for scale... the candle is a sun, and the Ringworld is a million miles wide and 300 million (more or less) in circumfrence, a radial distance of 93 million miles from the sun. Spin it for gravity, put walls a thousand miles tall on the edges to hold the air in.

Populate.

Then the infrastucture breaks down (a superconductor eating virus). What happens to the huge population?

Louis Wu, 200 year old bored human, Teela Brown, young human bred for luck, and Speaker-to-Animals, a Kzin (think Klingon in cat costume) are kidnapped by Nessus, a puppeteer... a three legged, two headed insane alien, to surey the newly discovered Ringworld.

Their ship is attacked by automated meteor defense and they spend the rest of the book trying to get off...

A damned good read. Better than the (inevitable) sequels...

Destination Void-Herbert

When i was a child, i found a book from which the cover and the title pages had been removed, and greatly enjoyed it. Turns out it was Children of the Stars. I quickly became a Heinlein fan. I read dozens of his books--including Starship Trooper and Farnham's Freehold. Then, not quite twenty years ago, a friend of mine who was an avid reader of Heinlein lent me Starship Trooper for a re-read. From the outset, i was disgusted with Heinlein's personal philosophy. If you've read it, you might recall that he starts this novel with a literarily very awkward passage intended to introduce his concept that only veterans be allowed to vote. I then re-read Farnham's Freehold. It was chocked full of hatred for women, for blacks, of the middle-aged man for the young man--it was sickening. I was dismayed to think that i'd ever admired him, or enjoyed his writing. Quite a lesson in that about the process and meaning of maturity.

Setanta
I thought I was the only one...

Heinlein's earliest work, especially "The Green Hills of Earth" and the beginnings of the Future History series are classics and well worth reading, before his writing was permeated with outre and alarming social and political philosphies. He's the darling of many far right minds, not realizing that the old paranoia towards "the intellegensia" is also embodied in concepts such as Heinlein expoused.

"Stranger in a Strange Land" by the way is somewhat of a cult favorite, not receving reviews from the major sci-fi periodicals at the time which one would write home to Mom about.

Cannot get over the fact that there has been so much talk about Heinlein, without a mention of his "I Will Fear No Evil" -- one of his most clever books.

I also have to mention that I probably use the word "grok" more than the average bear. I've used it in this forum and Abuzz -- and occasionally in ordinary conversation. Amazing -- I almost never have to explain it.

Of course, I also too an EST type of awarness expansion training -- and I use the word "get" in much the same way. Don't have to explain that either.

"Methuselah's Children"

Rah Rah R.A.H.!

Love his stories more'n his politics...