In my last post on obscure sf films, I wrote:
In fact, with the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still
According to the LA Times, a remake of When Worlds Collide
So there you go. It’s the 21st Century and we’re strip-mining the 20th Century for culture.
I’ve not written about sf for a while. Or posted a list. People like lists, if only to argue over. So here’s one likely to generate some debate: the best ten obscure science fiction films*. My definition of “obscure” alone is probably open to interpretation – at least three of films below I also included in my list of best sf films since 1991. I also wouldn’t, for example, describe Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris
In fact, with the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still
Anyway, below are ten science fiction films for which I feel the word “obscure” is a reasonably accurate description. One or two might be considered turkeys – certainly you’re only likely to find them in budget sf movie DVD sets, or being broadcast at 2 a.m. on some TV channel no one ever watches. That doesn’t mean they’re not good films, just that you have to dig a little harder to understand why they’re not bad films. Trust me on this.
The list is in chronological order by year of release, not order of merit.
The Silent Star, dir. Kurt Maetzig (1960) – AKA Der Schweigende Stern. Which should clue you in that this film is German. In fact, it’s East German, one of four sf films made by East German studio DEFA. It’s perhaps best known to US audiences by the title of its badly-edited and -dubbed English-language version, First Spaceship on Venus. The story is based on a novel by Polish sf author Stanisław Lem, and concerns a message discovered embedded in a crystal found at the site of the Tunguska Event. The message is partially decoded, and appears to have originated on Venus. An international crew of the best scientific brains is recruited – Soviet, German, Indian, Japanese, “African”, Polish, Chinese – and sent on the rocket Kosmokrator to Venus. En route, they finally decode the message fully… and learn it is a plan to invade Earth. But what they find on Venus is not at all what they expected… The sets of Venus are bizarrely alien, the model work is excellent, and the whole film has a peculiarly Soviet scientific internationalist atmosphere.
Queen of Blood, dir. Curtis Harrington (1966) – this film’s low beginnings are a matter of record. It’s one of many Russian films bought by Roger Corman, edited, dubbed in English, and with additional scenes starring US actors added, which American International Pictures released in the 1960s. Queen of Blood was based on Nebo Zovyot, and it looks weirdly compelling, despite its B-movie story. I reviewed it last year here.
Galaxy Of Terror
Corman’s New World Pictures intended it as a cash-in on the success of Alien
Humanoid Woman, dir. Richard & Nikolai Viktorov (1981) – AKA To The Stars By Hard Ways. This is a Russian film and, sadly, the only edition I have is a badly-mangled English-dubbed version released by some cut-price B-movie re-packaging studio in the US. Even so, the film is clearly bonkers. The opening scenes, in which a team of cosmonauts explore a derelict alien ship in space were plainly filmed underwater. But at least it looks like zero gravity. They find one member of the ship’s crew still alive – Niya, played by the weirdly alien Yelena Metyolkina in a strange wig. The film is sort of a love story, and sort of a first contact story, and sort of a cautionary tale of ecological catastrophe. It has to be seen to be believed. It can’t really be described. I’m told the original Russian version is very good indeed, and a new director’s cut was recently released by the late Richard Viktorov’s son. Unfortunately, no edition with English subtitles is available.
Le Dernier Combat
Delicatessen
Until The End Of The World
Possible Worlds
Avalon
Natural City
(* in my own DVD collection, of course)
This last year, I’ve had an occasional bash at writing poetry. I don’t think I’m any good, despite having read quite a bit of it recently (see here, for example; and here). What I – try to – write is science fiction poetry. Because, well, I like science fiction. And it’s as fit a subject for poetry as anything else.
So here’s one of my meagre efforts.
Observer Effect
As functional and contained as coffins,
ships hang like bats against the void
while captains haggle for air,
for fuel and supplies.
At rest but forever in motion,
they spin about the stars,
painted by the light of other suns.A beacon flashes,
urgent in the void, as
one ship slips her mooring.
The gentle blown breath of her
manoeuvring thrusters, and she slides
easily and inevitably
from the station’s replenishing fold.With illusory speed, she flees –
there are no visual cues against
the thrown cloth of black, vaster than empires,
and pierced by pinpoint furnaces which stare
unceasingly from the deep heavens.Abruptly,
she’s gone –
in pursuit of otherwheres,
otherwhens;
I can see her destination,
a tiny dot of distant brightness.I know she will be there much sooner
than the spent light of that remote sun
has taken to reach me.If I could collect the photons from that distant star
and render the images the quanta encode…I’d see the past as present:
dinosaurs thundering across a fetid Earth.
… is out now, with my review of Michael Andre-Druissi’s Lexicon Urthus, Second Edition
October’s book for my 2008 Reading Challenge was Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier
However, The Good Soldier
The novel is set just prior to World War I and is narrated by John Dowell, a wealthy American mostly resident in Europe. He and his wife, Florence, spend several months each year at Nauheim, a spa in Germany. While there they’re chiefly in the company of another couple, Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, who are English. Edward is the good soldier of the title. Dowell’s narrative skips about in time, describing incidents in no particular order from the decade or so during which the Dowells and Ashburnhams are friends. What Dowell does not initially reveal – although it’s later clear that he knows it at the time he is recounting the story – is that Edward is a philanderer and having an affair with Florence. And she has also had a succession of lovers – beginning with a blue-collar thing, Jimmy, whom she was sleeping with when she married Dowell.
As The Good Soldier
Ford originally titled the novel The Saddest Story, and Dowell repeatedly describes the story as the saddest he knows. Perhaps too often. I can understand how a chronologically non-linear narrative might have been seen as something new and astonishing in 1915, when the book was first published, but it’s an unremarkable technique nowadays. The same is also true of using an unreliable narrator (if you’ve read anything by Gene Wolfe, you’ll be only too familiar with unreliable narrators). Which means that much of what’s interesting about The Good Soldier
Ford’s maintenance of Dowell’s voice throughout The Good Soldier
In all, I find it hard to consider The Good Soldier
* to spoof Burgess’ infamous: “He breathed baffingly on him, for no banquet would serve, because of the known redolence of onions, onions, onions” in Enderby Outside
… the person who threw seafood all over my yard last night.
I left the house this morning to be confronted by a carpet of prawns, cockles, mussles and calamari. I suppose they could have been deposited by a storm, or a tsunami, but I very much doubt either would have shelled the prawns. Or the cockles and mussels. Not to mention cutting the squid into rings.
Um, perhaps there’s a story in there somewhere…
You can find the strangest (SFW) things out there. Some of them even approach the truth…
Class:
800 Literature
Contains:
Literature, criticism, analysis of classic writing and mythology.
What it says about you:
You’re a global, worldly person who wants to make a big impact with your actions. You have a lot to tell people and you’re good at making unique observations about everyday experiences. You can notice and remember details that other people think aren’t important.
Saw Anathema live last night. I first saw them two years ago in Glasgow, but this time it was local. Not a big gig. Intimate, almost. But very loud. And excellent. Definitely one of the contenders for the best gig I’ve attended this year.
Here they are playing their “hit single”, ‘Fragile Dreams’. It’s from their Were You There?
I can’t wait for the new album.
One of the things which really annoys science fiction fans is non-sf authors writing science fiction novels but refusing to admit they have done exactly that. There have been plenty of examples – PD James’ The Children of Men
Of course, the reverse is also true to some extent. We fans of science fiction are happy to claim for the genre works which we feel fit the genre’s remit, even though they were not written by sf writers, or even identified as sf by their authors. Such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
Which brings us to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
It’s a mainstream novel by a mainstream author. Literary fiction, if you will. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. And yet comparisons with sf novels are inevitable – George R Stewart’s Earth Abides
Incidentally, I dislike the term “literary fiction”. It’s mis-used too often as a genre tag, a handy way to label fiction some people don’t like. So rather than being descriptive, or perhaps even aspirational, it becomes a barrier, a shorthand for “I won’t read this book because I read a book once that wasn’t a simple escapist tale and I didn’t like it, so all books like it must be rubbish”.
I prefer to think of fiction as occupying a scale similar to food. At one end you have fast food – junk reading, intended to entertain but doesn’t require much thought. At the other end, you have gourmet reading – prose to savour, books to think about after you’ve finished them, products of great talent and skill. And, of course, there’s everything between those two extremes.
But The Road
Few sf novels, even ones about the end of the world, are as bleak as The Road
In fact, there’s very little in the way of explanation in The Road
And then there’s the prose. Which is a great deal better than that you’d expect to find in a sf novel. There are indeed well-written (gourmet, so to speak) sf novels, but the genre is not known for the quality of its writing for good reason. McCarthy’s prose is spare, often stark – frequently forgoing even verbs – and is as responsible for the novel’s sense of bleakness as its dour premise. Some of it works really well:
The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.
Some is less successful: the occasional odd verb, such as “… glassed the valley below them with the binoculars” or bizarre terms like “the snow lay in skifts all through the woods” and “the snow stood in razor kerfs atop the fencewires”. Skifts? Kerfs?
McCarthy’s punctuation is also… odd. Paragraphs are formatted as they would be on-line, with no indents and a line or two of space between them. But dialogue in a single paragraph is indented, and does not use inverted commas. This lack of quotation marks does somewhat distance the speech, which may have been the intent. McCarthy clearly doesn’t want the reader to get too close to the man or the boy. Or he would have named them.
I can think of no good reason, however, why he chose not to use apostrophes for certain constructions. The apostrophe is there in “there’s” and “they’re”; but not in “wont” or “cant” or “wouldnt”. I don’t understand the logic in not using it only for the elided “o” in “not”.
The Road
You elected the right man. The world can sleep easier now.
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 