I’d love to see some Varley. Millienium was so awful. And so much of his work would be great to watch.
There was also a cable adaptation of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank starring Raul Julia. I haven’t seen it but I’ve never heard anything too good about it.
It wasn’t cable – it was PBS, and that’s why it’s surprising they did such a bad job of it. The whole Casablanca sequence isn’t i the story. Usually PBS does a better job (as with the first Lathe of Heaven). When MST3K got hold of it they poked fun at PBS as much as at the movie itself.
But if you take your average blow 'em up action movie and put laser pistols in it, it’s science fiction then, isn’t it? Are you people trying to tell me that isn’t all it takes?
(I’ve been reading sci fi since grade school like I’m sure the rest of you - I didn’t know RAH was any great shakes when I started reading him; I just knew I liked his stories. I too have seen many sci fi adaptations come and go, but hope remains alive in me.)
I’m an admirer of the fiction of Harlan Ellison, own just about every thing he has published in book form, etc., etc., but just wonder why “The Discarded” was chosen. I’ve heard that originally he was going to adapt another of his stories (forget which one), but changed his mind in favor of this 1959 short story about mutants on a spaceship.
I won’t give away any of the plot, suffice it to say even when I first read this story as a teenager 30 years ago, it struck me as an obvious foregone story, i. e., the story was extremely predicatable and really said nothing new about anything. Reread it last night after spotting this thread. Still is a lame, predictable work, albeit comeptently written.
Yes, it will certainly be visually arresting (Ellison himself will play a background mutant in full makeup). I’m also assuming that it is being expanded somewhat as the story only contains about three scenes which could literally be filmed word-for-word and only last 25 minutes at most.
So, glad for the serious effort, but disappointed that he chose such a lesser work for adaptation.
Sir Rhosis
Just thought I’d bump this as *Masters of Science Fiction * premiers tonight ( “A Clean Escape”) and there may be some science fiction lovin’ Dopers who missed the thread. I heard a very positive review of the shows on NPR yesterday (Friday) so, as an old *Twilight Zone * and *Outer Limits * fan, I’m excited about seeing this.
Saturday, August 4, ABC, 10:00 PM EST. Be there!
Pretty good, but at the end…
did anyone not think she was going to shoot herself instead of the President? 
Agreed, I told my daughter that she did.
Color me disappointed. Overblown, badly acted (who though Waterston could be so pathetically bad?) and about as subtle as painting a couple guys half black and half white.
And no, of course the ending was never in doubt.
No wonder the network didn’t pick this up, if this is an indicator. I hold out hope for the Heinlein and Ellison adaptations, not much, now, but some. What is next week’s story?
Sir Rhosis
I am not an sf fan, but I thought that was fairly well done. The actors were good. The story was pretty predictable.
The chance to watch Sam Waterston outside of Law & Order was what held most of my interest. The story itself wasn’t that great. Post-apocalyptic paint-by-numbers. Heck, it didn’t even make being holed up in an underground bunker seem all that objectionable. First-rate medical care, reasonably decent food, people seeming to get along with each other … uh, how awful?
I thought it was pretty solid. She knew she was a goner anyway and had achieved her goal (or so she thought) of bringing the President back to the reality of what he had done. It didn’t have the standard happy ending that American audiences demand. That’s why the network suits (and many viewers) probably didn’t know what to make of it.
Of course, that’s just that one episode. The others may stick closer to the standard, comfortable American television dramatic formula. You know, the predictable, tired everything-wrapped-up-neatly-with-a-bow-in-one-hour. Wouldn’t want to agitate the masses. Wouldn’t want to stimulate their thinking muscles tooo much.
Come to think of it, even that’s pretty much getting replaced with reality and game shows. Oh well, there are books I haven’t read and movies I haven’t watched piled up around here.
As far as the first episode goes:
Good idea, rotten execution. They basically did nothing for the first half hour, then crammed the whole story into the second. Heavy-handed, predictable drama, cheesy dialogue, gratuitous horror shots. Not the actors’ fault, and I’m glad Sam Waterston got to chew the scenery for once.
Verdict: Trainwreck. And it was such a nice train, too!
This was just one episode. Hopefully the others will be intelligent episodes of Science Fiction, original and worthwhile, with well-drawn characters and mind-expanding concepts, with or without happy endings, instead of “paint-by-numbers, post-apocalyptic” nonsense.
But I respect anyone’s right to enjoy it, and am glad that some did.
Still think they could have chosen a better Ellison story, though, so…
Sir Rhosis
EDIT: To make clear that I wasn’t responding to the poster who posted while I was composing
I agree with that. It felt like one of those one-hour *Twilight Zones * (original series) that had a half-hour story stretched to fit the longer time.
Damn it! I thought that this was airing on Sunday! :smack: Somebody bump this thread next week so I don’t forget.
I missed the first ten minutes, but I don’t think it mattered. Color me another unsurprised one. i wonder if they did this one first because the budget was about $1.98, and they could get it done real fast. Could easily have been a Twilight Zone episode, and would have looked just as good in black and white.
BTW, I thought the Bush references were a bit heavy handed.
I just read the original story (IASFM, May 1985.)
Evans doesn’t shoot him, or herself, but it appears that she loses her memory also, and the story ends with him entering the office again, just as at the beginning. He did launch a first strike, but there was nothing about a super weapon.
It’s a little weird that they didn’t flesh out the international crisis part a bit more, they certainly had the time. Guy gets to office and decides to kill everyone - why? we don’t know. Vague notions about protecting the country.
It makes more sense as a cold war story, because the cold war provides the backdrop of why someone might try to launch a pre-emptive strike. But in 2010+, whenever it happened in the story, it doesn’t intuitively make sense to the viewers. So why not explain it? Certainly they could’ve taken 5 minutes from the boring parts of the story to tell us how the world reached the point where this happened, and it would’ve been a lot more interesting.
And the way it was done didn’t make all that much sense. So their magic weapon sets off fissionable material - how then did the entire world get nuked? Silo fields in russia would’ve made some nasty fallout, but the images they showed were of cities taking direct nukes. Ballistic missile subs could’ve launched some sort of counter-attack, but then we’re talking about a limited supply (especially in 2010, who would be fielding all these missiles?) - and why would these limited missiles be used on London or Sao Paolo?
There was a decent to good story hiding in there somewhere, but they chose to obscure it.
Think of nuclear power plants. One of the nastier strategies for a nuclear attack is to target your enemy’s nuclear power plants. A direct hit produces a horrendous amount of fallout.
Per the major, six countries launched retaliatory strikes.