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Here's something I ran across today in my daily surfing. Seems like someone has leaked some plot notes from the proposed Alien: Prequel movie in the works. In the Spoilers are details that sound like the script writers have been reading TG fiction. Here's the link with the Spoiler warning. Personally I'm guessing this isn't the real thing, but amusing at least to me.
http://blastr.com/2010/10/major-spoilers-ridley-sco.php
Hugs!
Grover
Comments
Well thats gonna be awkward
Don't think that screenplay is going to fly with the masses.
Why
Do you think I found it amusing? LOL I think that gimmick has been used so many times in TG fiction, but nope I don't think mainstream is ready for it. However, really I don't think this is the real thing, but you never know with Hollywood. We've seen so many flops, that even the half decent ones seem better than they really are.
Hugs!
Grover
Alien's, the death of innocence
Prequel to Aliens? !!!
Way back in the old days, I was an avid Sci Fi reader (you know, "paper" books ? ) When the first "Aliens" book came out I was reading it until late one night but got so tired I had to go to bed. Hours later I had this really vivid nightmare about one of the Aliens attacking me. I woke up from that nightmare, and of course there were no Aliens in our bedroom. "They" were sleeping quietly in their rooms. :)
I laid there while the rain beat against the windows and the wind howled throught the trees in our back yard. In my irrational state, I rolled over and wakened my wife. "You look that way, I and I'll look this way." After that, I rolled over with my back against her, and went back to sleep for the rest of the night.
That was years before the movie came out. I don't think I have read a paper book in at least 5 years now.
Gwendolyn
Sci Fi
Today's Guardian had a piece about the best ever sci fi movies. The temptation to mal them and say "it's SF not scifi you ignorant 'danes!!" was almost too much to resist.
Terribly sorry about sci fi.
Sure SF is one abreviation, and I will freely admit that I was being lazy when I used sci fi. But, could not the abreviation also be Sci Fi?
Gwendolyn
Sci Fi vs SF
Sci Fi as a term is tainted in the opinion of SF fans by being over-used by Hollywood to ballyhoo really terrible movies in the 1950s. Any fan who was a member of fandom in the fifties through seventies tends to cringe when they hear or read the term.
Star Wars, the movie, did a little to remove the stigma but still, it vaguely annoys me because SF was the name fandom used and still prefers. "Sci Fi" is like "Pasteurized Cheese Food Product"; it just sounds wrong! LOL!
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Um...
I think I'll have to remind some people of that, then, the next I see them. :-P Since some of them are of about that vintage, they must, then, be committing this fennish sin. That said, this hasn't really been an issue for a few decades now, unless one is trying to be a little exclusive of those seen as not-as-fan as one's self...
It really isn't a big deal, and no one reasonable will be offended by someone using one term for the other.
-Liz
Successor to the LToC
-Liz
Successor to the LToC
Formerly known as "momonoimoto"
Reasonable?
I think that's in the eye of the beholder. Many fans still feel that SciFi is a deliberately insulting term used in Hollywood to describe cheaply made science fiction and knowingly and with malice deprecate all science fiction thereby. There are no reasonable arguments one can make against this belief; one either believes it or one doesn't.
Insisting that reasonable people will not be offended by something is not a productive tactic unless one really wants to get into an argument. Seriously, humans are reasoning animals, not reasonable ones. Counterexamples to reasonablness proliferate daily.
But yes, the stigma has faded, in part as I said because of the success of Star Wars and Star Trek which have much of the trappings of old-fashioned SciFi but yet are good and enjoyable entertainment with enough real SF to be satisfying.
But in many gatherings of older fans, teeth grinding could be heard when the SciFi channel recently changed its name to SyFy (for trademark reasons). It's not enough, they seem to say, that the best single source of SF on TV refers to itself by the name thought up by enemies of real SF but now they want to misspell that! LOL.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Spot on
There is a possibly apocryphal tale that Lucas and co were getting ready to sue the makers of 'Galactica' for plagiarism. They were contacted by the trade body for American SF writers and effectively told "Keep us up to date. If you win, we're coming after you with a similar suit"
Using proper English, it is Science Fiction.
Of course this dates me, LOL. I think that the first SF book I read was "Red Planet", published originally in 1949. After that there were numerous authors. Andre Norton, Ray Bradbury, Issac Asomov (whose Foundation Trillogy, shaped my view of the universe), David Weber, Elisabeth Haydon.
While doing this little essay, I found that Athanasius Kircher wrote some between 1602 and 1680! He was a Jesuit scientist-priest of all things. It is a wonder that he was not burned at the stake for um bad thinking. :)
Sorry, you now probably know things about which you could care less. LOL
Gwendolyn
No insult
was intended. I grew up in the 70's when the term wasn't considered at least in the backwaters of South Carolina as a negative term. Isolated as I was, the only person I knew who read SF was me. That continued all the way though high school. It wasn't until I escaped when I joined the Army that I met anyone with a similar interest. They of course immediately introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons, Traveler, and Star Fleet Battles, in that order! LOL
As the Aliens' Prequel, I see any mention of humans in the tale as far fetched and really reaching. Alas, to see an entire movie without a single human in it until maybe the end with the crew of the Nostromo making their ill fated visit. However, I'm afraid that would be true SF and far too extreme for mainstream. Perhaps even more so than the proposed script mentioned here.
Hugs!
Grover
No offense taken.
At least not by me, LOL. I had completely forgotten that a mere book so terrorized me. When the first movie came out, it took me several tries to get clear through it. We did not go to the theatre because at that time we were fundamentalistic Christians, and it was far too worldly. LOL
Gwendolyn
In the Theater
I did see the first movie in the theater. During the infamous scene where the alien comes down the forest of chains, I had a girl I didn't even know who I was sitting next to about pull my arm off as she screamed. I about crapped myself, because I sure wasn't expecting that! LOL
Hugs!
Grover
SF
RANT ALERT!!
There is a real snobbishness about 'dane fiction. An old friend once declared that SF could never be considered literature, and when I replied with the usual examples of Brave New World, 1984,and so on he pointed out that such works were literature, and therefore could not be SF.
A writer of SF comes out with an idea (Dick, Counterclockworld; Aldis,Greybeard) and is promptly ripped off without acknowledgement(Amis, Time's Arrow; James, Children of Men) and the 'dane press raves over their 'amazingly orignal idea'.
Worse still, look in the author information of an Iain Banks book and see the words "Iain Banks has written X novels. Under the name Iain M Banks, he has also written some science fiction", or read the academic that referred to Terry Pratchett, who writes satire, as "adolescent masturbarory fantasy" and "books for the functionally illiterate", a judgement he apparently made by looking at the covers. Then there are abominations like the praise heaped on Paul Verhoeven for the mess he made of a great Heinlein book.
Despite popular ranting about "predictions", SF concerns itself with a simple question: 'What happens if...?'
Science Fiction - SF - Speculative Fiction
Your rant is right on, many of the great writers of SF preferred that the initials be taken to stand for Speculative Fiction rather than Science Ficiton since there is very little science in much of the best SF. SpecFic, as some called it in conscious ironic reference to SciFi, did not always need rigorous science since the key point was the exploration of human interaction with the unknown. SF as Speculative Fiction could then be taken to include much of Fantasy.
In contrast, the bad SciFi of the fifties, in particular, was based on violence, monsters and a one-dimensional human reaction of fear and loathing. Hollywood chose the label SciFi for that stuff and real fans of SF objected when the label was extended to their favorite literature.
It's as if there were a lot of movies labeled TeeGee that involved crossdressing mass murderers and hermaphroditic monsters. Such movies have existed but thankfully, no Hollywood simple-genius has thought of marketing them as a genre. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Oh why not
They've completely ruined the franchise anyway. The 2nd movie was okay and the 3rd should have killed the franchise along with Ripley. Like any good science fiction there should be standards of what is acceptable and what's not. There should be a council like the oscar committee to keep some of these mind-rapes from happening. Can I mention Battlefield Earth, Starship troopers...There should be movie genre laws like the old comics code of something, Please, please stop the bleeding!
Bailey Summers
Troopers/Heinlein
Just to set the record straight about that film, for those unaware, Eico was a Filipino,not a six-foot-plus all-Amercan boy, and Ace was a man.
There is one sentence in there that still shocks me now. It is so casually terrifying, and goes something like "There was a holein his armour, and we tried to get him out, but his head came off"
No further explanation or description necessary, none given.
Maybe I am confused about "Starship Troopers".
I found no Eico in the movie, but I did find Rico, played by Casper Van Dien. Apparently, the 6th Casper in his family. Apparently a rather distinguished family history. Do I have the right person? Not filipino.
Ace is apparently Jake Busey, and yes a male.
Yes, I liked the movie very much in spite of the fact that it was pitched to 12 year olds. LOL I was very disappointed to see that the rest of the movies were animated.
Much peace
Gwendolyn
tYPOS, LOL!
Rico, of course. And in mid-rant I meant Dizzy is a bloke! They all are. Ship crews are female because of their superiority at that aspect.
Battle Field Earth
Gosh, that movie was so bad, that it was good. I wish that they had made more. It just followed old Ronnie's books. He was a Science Fiction writer, and the books were intended to be taken that way until he saw he could make money by presenting them as the truth. LOL
Starship Troopers was so campy and steriotypically propagandized, that it was fun. It reminded me of the WWII John Wayne government propaganda movies.
Don't take anything seriously unless you can see it burning up in the atmosphere and heading toward YOU!
Gwendolyn
Star ship Troopers
Hey Gwen you have to remember Paul Verhoeven grew up in the Netherlands during WWII and has memories of being in air raids. He read Heinlein's book and saw StarShip Nazi Stormtroopers. Heinlein however saw soldiers returning home and how they were being treated and saw a world that citizenship was a privilege not a right. I'm not going to really go into it given how many others have, but Verhoeven's film is far more satire of Heinlien's vision than an adaption. Look how in the opening scenes students are dissecting an 'Bug' lavea. Or how none of the bugs had guns except for the the ones that shot it out of their you know what.
As for Battlefield Earth, well ... I'm simply going to agree with the reviewers for once. However, SyFy channel which I once liked has made a habit of regularly producing and showing movies that are as bad or worse. I suppose it merely demonstrates the truth of Erin's earlier statements. They are as bad as any 50's grade B movie. Personally, I think they are even worse, but hey that's me!
Hugs!
Grover
Verhoeven's purpose
Verhoeven actually said in an interview that he bought the rights to Starship Troopers so he could make a movie with lots of big bugs like his favorite movies from the fifties, Them and Tarantula! He had no idea of the mystique of the book or Heinlein and had read nothing else by him. Some parts of the film are excellent, some are atrocious and as an adaptation it sucks big rocks!
But Heinlein told his wife before he died that she had his permission to sell the rights to his books to whoever would pay the most and not to worry about what they did with them afterwards since he would be dead and it wouldn't bother him. LOL.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
That TV channel
I caught one programme from that at a girlfriend's house the other day. People go to 'centre' of Earth, and it is a hollow sphere with physics-defying gravity, filled with monsters, etc. So, a direct riff on Edgar Rice Burroughs. The credits say "based on Jules Verne's etc."
Almost as bad as Corman's fim of Lovecraft's Charles Dexter Ward, billed as "Edgar Allen Poe's Haunted Palace"
Verhoeven admits he only read the start of the book. Erin hints at the iconic nature of Heinlein's work, but it is hard to get that across to non-fans. I must admit that one adaptation of a book by him wasn't too bad,and that's "Puppet Masters",with the great exchange where the sexy female agent flashes a teenaged boy to no reaction.
"He's not human"
"Kill him"
Check your adult brain at the door.
It's not that hard for me because I don't have much "adult brain". LOL
I watched "Independence Day" again the other day, and have to admit that none of these Science Fiction movies really stand up to stern glare of a mind that has raised children. Still they are fun, and we all need to disengage from reality once in a while. For me an exception to this rule was, Clarke's, RAMA series. It was a good read, but I found the last book to be depressingly realistic.
As far as Verhoeven's work goes, they were child's movies, and I always felt defensive if a rational adult caught me watching one. LOL
Gwendolyn