The guns? They were revolvers with each chamber holding a special round. If I recall they were: Homer, Ripper, Needler, Tangler, Vapor, and Nitro. Homer was a homing charge set for human body heat, Needler was self explanitory, Tangler hit the target with a tangling wire mesh, Nitro was a big boom, Vapor was a Tear-Gas like round (Sandman had noseplugs, IIRC) and I have not fricking Idea what Ripper did (no Buffy jokes, please).
Nerd moment: I had a bunch of nasty anti-super hero agents carrying DS guns in a Champions campaign. They caused much dread for the players.
Big big spoiler, don’t read this if you plan to read the book and want the surprise revelation unspoiled.
Many people have mentioned that in the book the character of the “Old Man” was Ballard. Here’s the kicker. Ballard, who is only 42 years old, but an “Old Man” to Logan and Jessica, is in actuality Francis, Logan’s partner Sandman. Francis is helping runnners get out because he feels that the computers controlling the world are breaking down. Francis/Ballard explains to Logan that when he (Francis) reached 21, he did not have a “Lastday”–his palm flower did not start blinking and did not go black.
Also, a slight correction to an above post about the book. Logan doesn’t become conflicted and want to run when his palm flower starts blinking. He does feel, as many people do, that he hasn’t “done enough” with his life. Therefore he decides to become a runner and find Sanctuary and destroy it. Then he will be hailed as a hero and will die knowing he did something great for his fellow man.
He becomes conflicted during the cross-country run with Jessica when he begins to realize that there is more to life than living for the state and blindly obeying it and dying like a good little citizen. The book was written in 1965, and published in 1967.
Well, the book never said exactly what it did, but one Ripper round was sufficient to take out two robots who were trying to kill Logan and Jessica.
It was not mentioned in the initial description of the Gun, but a later chapter mentions a Blister round, which apparently packs enough heat to cremate a human-sized object. (One of the hazards of having two authors working on one book.)
Another interesting weapon in both book and movie: the Icicle, a refrigerated billy club, that will freeze your heart and lungs if you get hit in the chest.
Here’s as good a place as any to ask. I’m cosplaying Jessica 6 at Dragon*Con this year. What should my “palm flower” look like? And what should I make it with? I was going to just fill in one of my palms with a black Sharpie, but they’re more like crystals, aren’t they?
The book called them “palm flowers,” crystals came from the movie. And, iirc, only Logan was on LastDay. Jessica, again, iirc, was only about sixteen or so and would have a flower colored whatever color it was. The colors are different between the book and the movie.
I can look her age up for you. Wikipedia has an entry for both the movie and the novel and there is a palm flower color chart on both pages.
Sir Rhosis
EDIT: I was wrong. Jessica is 21 in the book–her twin brother tried to run on LastDay.
They were also modified to look like the old western Colt .45 Peacemaker and they were imprinted to each individual Sandman, so if someone else tried to grab it, it exploded. I believe the Ripper ( from the description from the first and second books ) kind of functioned like a lesser Nitro round, basically blowing apart the victim. In the second book they mentioned space shuttles shattered by Nitro charges, so I’m assuming they were a bit too much for close in work.
But based on the way the novel phrases the passage where it points out his palm has begun blinking ( not to mention the descriptions of his life and his vague dissatisfaction ), my opinion is that he is conflicted from the start. Your description of his initial motivations is how he is justifing his actions to himself. But I also think he’s at least partially lieing to himself. He doesn’t know what he wants to do. He wants to both do his duty, but he also wants to live and is torn between the two. I think this is the case even before he heads out with Jessica. MHO only :).
^^^Well put. With this discussion I’ve dug out my old original paperback copy (one from before the movie tie-in version) and may give it a third or fourth read, being glad that at 43, like Ballard at 42, I’ve lived two lifetimes (plus a year)
Bit of trivia: I haven’t been able to find the site in a while, but at one time William F. Nolan posted the small note from which “Logan’s Run” sprang. He was giving a lecture at a college in 1963, and was showing how “SF writers got their crazy ideas.” He gave an example of inverting a cliche.
The example he gave was “Life begins at 40.”
Well, he asked, what if it ended at 40 instead. His note was something like. “Future policeman in charge of hunting down everyone who turns 40 and does not commit suicide as society demands. Policeman panics as his 40th birthday approaches, goes on the run, but at midnight on the day he turns 40, he cannot defy his own conscience. He raises his pistol to his temple and pulls the trigger.”
Somehow, George Clayton Johnson and he hooked up and wrote the novel over a three week period in 1965. Originally the title of the book was A Wild Run For Morgan 3.
Nolan says that between '65 and the time it was published in 1967, he did more solo rewriting and polishing.
Just thought someone might be interested in the trivia.
If I recall, the Sandmen in the novel weren’t just swingin’ cats with good hair who chased down Runners in the giant shopping mall where they all lived. They were some bad mofo’s, trained to go anywhere in the world, live off the land if need be, and survive by their wits. More like special forces.
I was living in Dallas, Texas, when some of the movie was filmed there in 1975 (the scenes with the plaza of futuristic-looking concrete fountains; that was part of the new civic center or something). There was an article in the paper about a casting call for attractive people in their twenties to be extras.
It’s not true, although often repeated, that everybody in the City was white. Almost everybody.
As I remember, quite the opposite. Farrah was already a bombshell and the producers were trying to exploit her popularity on the cheap. I saw the movie in the theater at release and we were all let down that she was barely in the movie despite being featured prominently in the ads.
I really liked this movie as well. I’m enjoying this discussion, carry on.
One thing to add: This was a clear-cut case of “they all look alike to me”. I remember having a hard time differentiating between all of the handsome, young, blond men. (I think this was that movie, anyway.)
I’ve noticed that about a lot of 80’s sci-fi. Everyone is pretty much cut from the same mold. White guys can all “look alike” just the same as any other race.
Thanks to the IMDB, we don’t have to trust our memories for such things.
Charlie’s Angels premiered in fall of 1976, and that’s when she became a star, although she’d been acting for several years. She had a recurring role in then-husband Lee Majors’s The Six Million Dollar Man from 1974-1976.
Logan’s Run came out in June of 1976. Her famous red-swimsuit poster also came out in 1976, but I don’t know when exactly.
I would expect her star was on the rise in 1976, but not in 1975 when the movie would have been made. So she had only a small role which was overstated in the movie’s ads.
