They decided to Malcolm for all he's worth.
This is correct. A very brief introduction -- maybe two or three pages or less?--quickly dismantled the book's ending (in which they did find Sanctuary, which was not a myth) and conveniently put Logan and Jessica pretty much where they were left at the end of the movie version.
Re: Logan's Run: I never read the book, and I think I only saw the movie once, in a network TV airing (probably a tie-in with the debut of the series). I kind of liked the series.
I'm too much of an optimist to be particularly into dystopian fiction. Indeed, I'm the very definition of an optimist (in the glossary of Joan Hughes' classic textbook, PL/I Structured Programming, "Optimist" is defined as "a programmer who codes in ink").
I'm too much of an optimist to be particularly into dystopian fiction. Indeed, I'm the very definition of an optimist (in the glossary of Joan Hughes' classic textbook, PL/I Structured Programming, "Optimist" is defined as "a programmer who codes in ink").
The three are very different from one another -- so much so that it's hard for me to imagine how the world of the novel could be changed to resemble that of the movie in just a 2-page prologue. I mean, in the novel, the youth-ruled society (where the mandatory death age is 21, not 30) is global, not limited to a domed city in a post-apocalyptic world. Then again, the premise of the novel is that the world is falling apart because young people lack the experience and foresight to run things, so maybe an apocalypse is a plausible end result of that. (I've seen some people compare it to The Hunger Games and other YA books about young people rebelling against tyranny, but that couldn't be more backward, since the novel was a conservative satire of the liberal youth movements of the '60s, so its oppressive dystopia was the result of the young rebels having overthrown the old, more functional society.)
I’m reading an anthology of stories based on the Halo game series, and there’s one writer I’m very glad has not done any Star Trek. You get a lot of initialisms in military fiction, and this guy has a weird habit of spelling them out phonetically and italicizing them. A CO (commanding officer) is a sea oh. An LT (lieutenant) is an ell tee. An SOB (son of a… well, you know that one) is an es oh bee. An M831 (a military vehicle in Halo)? It’s an em eight three won. (Yes, won, not one.) All in italics.
About two thirds of the time he does this; sometimes he switches back and forth between the actual initialisms and his versions. Why the editor let that sail through… ugh. No one else in the book so far, or in any of the Halo comics and novels I’ve read, has done that, so it’s not a house style or something.
I can just imagine him writing Star Trek. The you es es Enterprise, en sea sea 1701, was the pride of Starfleet…
About two thirds of the time he does this; sometimes he switches back and forth between the actual initialisms and his versions. Why the editor let that sail through… ugh. No one else in the book so far, or in any of the Halo comics and novels I’ve read, has done that, so it’s not a house style or something.
I can just imagine him writing Star Trek. The you es es Enterprise, en sea sea 1701, was the pride of Starfleet…
And as I recall, in the series, Logan and Jessica encounter all sorts of interesting pockets of civilization in their quest to find Sanctuary. Sort of like Janeway and her crew encounter all sorts of interesting civilizations in their quest to go home. Probably why I liked it better than the movie.
Ever notice how some people can read a dystopian novel, cover to cover, and not even recognize it as being dystopian? Seems like these days, a disturbingly large number of people have that kind of reaction to The Handmaid's Tale.
I think there was a short-lived period where the novels were spelling it "DS-Nine" instead of "DS9." There's also the rarely-seen "DSN," which I think I've only seen in a crossword puzzle clue.
I don't remember that particular quirk and I believe I'm current on my Halo anthologies, unless I missed the Waypoint one coming out (I've been thinking lately about how the internet's democratization of art has meant I don't reread anything anymore, there's just too much interesting stuff out there vying for my time), but I wonder if the author might've had a history with Star Wars and picked up the habit from "Artoo" and "Threepio."
Son of Belial?
(It works if you would rather get Biblical than invoke female canids, and still keep the same initials.)
Jack Williamson, the Golden Age science fiction author responsible for coining many familiar terms like "terraforming" and "psionics," referred to antimatter as "seetee," phonetically spelling out "CT," short for "contraterrene matter," i.e. the opposite of Earthly matter. Pretty easy to see why that one didn't catch on.
It was frustrating, though, since they kept overthrowing all these oppressive pocket dystopias week after week, yet were somehow unable to deal with their own oppressive dystopia. It's particularly bizarre in the pilot, where they spend only about 10 minutes in the City of Domes and then spend the rest of the expanded pilot overthrowing two similarly oppressive societies in a row.
That's because a disturbingly large number of people want society to be like that. Which is exactly what Margaret Atwood was warning about.
I think there's a general stylistic rule that you spell out numbers in spoken dialogue and use numerals in non-dialogue passages.
Precisely. One of the rankest 3rd-person insults I know is to describe someone as being "someone who could read The Handmaid's Tale cover-to-cover without realizing it was intended to be dystopian."
It's supposed to be a warning, not a guidebook. Sadly, too many
Politics and philosophy aside, some of the worst-written books I've ever come across. There are 3, maybe 4 characters in her entire canon, with different names slapped on them. It is actually comical when you read one of the longer books, and the exact same character is introduced multiple times
Really?!? In my experience, one of the most fun parts of writing was creating characters!
I question the manhood of anyone who has a need to treat women as chattel property. He may be one who (to use a phrase that turns up six times in the KJV, all of them between 1 Samuel 25:22 and 2 Kings 9:8) "pisseth against the wall," but that doesn't qualify him as a "man," and I quite agree with the scholars who assert that the phrase means more than "adult male," and is a very earthy and dysphemistic way of saying "lowlife."
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I think the problem that War of the Worlds encounters is that the authentic way to do a modern adaptation (aside from the more positive atmosphere) is closer to Independence Day. The modern world doesn't correspond well to the events of the original novel.
To be fair, that is the original ending.
Yeah, but I promise you they didn’t know that…
I know a lot of rich people that really enjoy her works.
I have more of a problem with art that pretends to be pro-working class that make the creators wealthy. That feels more wrong to me than pro-capitalist works that make the creators wealthy.
What about art that is neutral on the subject?
Not quite sure I get the semantic distinction between "a fan of" and "a fan of." The typographic distinction, on the other hand, is pretty obvious.
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