Rob, you wrote ENDER in the headline. Is that a subliminal that Card should be ranked with Herbert or LeGuin?
On an eyeopening note: Sparrowhawk isn’t white? Seriously did not notice that when I was 14.
Remember, if you walk without rhythm, you won’t attract the worms.
More alternate-timeline movie histories: John Boorman manages to adapt “The Lord of the Rings” in the mid-1970s with a killer soundtrack produced by a Led Zeppelin / Pink Floyd supergroup. No “Zardoz”, no “Excalibur” as we know them.
The story was so contrived, like the convienient way that force fields made knife fighting so important and the bans on using computers, while somehow managing to have faster than light space travel. It was borderline fantasy and so didn’t make much impact as SF.
There was actually a good version of The Lathe of Heaven" from 1980 that was shown on PBS.
Youtube link to 1980 version
And another horrible version from 2002 or so that really sucked.
The spice must flow is a common saying around our house, and a quick search shows an apron for sale on ThinkGeek. Seems like Dune is not that far out of touch with people?
Would? It did. Have you seen the execrable SciFi/Syfy network version? It was horrible. At least Lynch tried to do something interesting with the source material and, imho, succeeded.
I read Dune when I was 7, and didn’t have a problem following it. I missed a lot of the social and political subtext - I just saw it as a heroic yarn about this noble guy called Paul Atreides, who everyone thought was a messiah. I re-read it when I was about 17 and got my mind blown.
I wouldn’t call that the story, so much as the setting; those are the rules of the world, for better or worse. Usually a contrivance is something which breaks the context to further a plot detail.
Anyway, having any FTL travel/comms at all, strictly speaking, makes any story a fantasy. Or take Vernor Vinge; that’s relatively hard SF, and in his world the maximum speed of computation varies depending on where in the universe you are, which is utterly ridiculous, but it works anyway since the story is carefully built around this.
Come on, it’s not Starship Troopers. You have all the Bene Gesserit women, you have Jessica struggling to save her husband and son, and having to let one of them go, you have Chani falling in love with a person who is becoming increasingly non-human. It is more of a sausage-fest than later books, to be fair, but better than average by science fiction standards. It lacks a golden bikini moment though, which probably kills it as convention fodder.
“David Lynch’s version made me think I was having a fever dream.”
So, it was, at least, a very successful David Lynch movie.
Man, I want to see that version of Return of the Jedi.
sourced from an actual candy company! (click on “alternate images” in the left sidebar): http://www.candywarehouse.com/candy-type/gummy-and-jelly-candy/gummi-worms/products/blue-and-red-giant-2-foot-long-gummy-worm/
There was also the mid-90s rave-tacular electronica song “Spice” by Eon. That was everywhere for a while…
Edit: Dear god, really? 1990? I am old.
"You could be into Earthsea, which has had two movies … both replaced the protagonist of color with a white dude. "
On the other hand, there was Lathe of Heaven, which replaced all colors with neutral gray. Not a terrible idea, because we’d never agree on another replacement color, and it kind of sums up our overall mental caste.
Ursula LeGuin has said that she actually quite enjoyed the making of the Lathe of Heaven film. Conversely, I sense that if she could exist in a world with legal murder she would abandon her other principals, hunt down the creators of the Earthsea miniseries, and end them.
But she’d have to beat me to it.
I came here to mention that line. The best bit of Dune on a screen is Christopher Walken dancing and flying with that line. They need to reboot the franchise around him and that.
No, that It wasn’t a pop culture phenomenon.
I did, and it startled me. He’s not African either - kind of a reddish dark brown if I recall. I seem to recall Heinlein has a black protagonist, but I don’t recall which one.
WHIIIIIIIIITE
Speaking of Vinge, I’d love to see a FutD movie, but I’m afraid that almost certainly all of characters would be made white, despite that all the humans in the beyond are described as dark-skinned, and Pham Nuwen would probably be best played by an Asian (although he also has greyish skin and red hair)
One of our summer interns was reading the Star Trek books and I told her it was past time for a college freshman to stop reading stuff like that unless it was an exercise in the literary criticism of truly awful writing.
