Science Fictions |
Meandering towards the singularity |
Wired.com have a new feature on the best Science Fictions films of the 60's and 70's. There are lots of old classics like THX1138, Clockwork Orange and Barbarella in here but also quite a few I really want to see and have never even heard of before.
Looking forward to Avatar. Hopefully it will be a return to classic form for James Cameron - a thoughtful movie not just an action fest. Still if the trailer is anything to go by....
I think that the 'Human Vegetable Farm' by Coyle and Sharpe is an amazing eerie and very funny short film Everybody should watch it. Unfortunately the only place I know it exists is on the Official Coyle and Sharpe website (not so weird I suppose) but it does mean no lovely embedded You Tube video.
The first time I saw it I was reading 'Helstrom's Hive' by Frank Herbert - and from that day to this, the two are inextricably linked in my head - and if you have read the book, you will probably understand why. 'Helstrom's Hive' tells the story of a human hive, an experiment in social control and eugenics. Despite it's age, or maybe because of it, it remains a though provoking book and a damn exciting read. Given the age of the book written before genetic engineering and cheap, powerful and ubiquitous IT, the story remains uncluttered by the detail with which so many SF writers obsess and which usually detracts from their actual stories. in fact this is a strength of Frank Herbert in general and the lack of specific detail is a almost a signature of his work, always tantalizing the reader and remaining suitably timeless.Released in 1972 Silent running is the story of Earth's last forests carried in a fleet of spacecraft to be preserved for the future, but which instead are just abandoned and destroyed. Beautiful music for the film provided by Joan Baez.
I've just finished reading William Gibson's Spook County - a bit late I know (it was published in 2007, but I've been busy) - but anyway it's a book set in the perpetual now so I don't think that it really matters.
Spook County is one of those books that tells a truth. The precise events recounted in the novel (probably) never happened quite like they do in the book, but something very similar has happened many times in recent years and I have little doubt that they continue to happen. William Gibson is primarily a Science Fiction writer, but then he has never been terribly easy to categorise except in retrospect. He helped define the Cyberpunk movement with books like Neuromancer and Burning Chrome (which contains some of my favourite short stories) but has subsequently continued to wind his own merry way without any concern for prevailing SciFi fashions. I'm not sure how to categorise this book though; I enjoyed this book immenseley but it doesn't look or feel much like a Sci-Fi book (not that it matters) it reminds me of Thomas Pynchon or maybe Douglas Coupland more than anything else. Plotwise the novel exists in a similar time line to Pattern Recognition blends together a number of strands: Money laundering and where so much of the Iraq re-construction money disapeared to, what happens to ageing rockstars and ageing spooks have to make their way in the world again, and the voracious appetite of the advertising and the modern media. William Gibson on great form as usual.
My earliest memories of TV where in the early 80's watching Star Wars' the first time it appeared on TV one Christmas, and cowering behind the sofa in terror watching Disney's 'Black Hole'.
My mum introduced me to SciFi and once your imagination and your intellect are engaged you are hooked forever.
