Glory Road is deeply disappointing. I hate it. I stopped reading it and read Gill’s book of Asimov science essays in preference, that’s how much I hate it. I love Heinlein but he clearly doesn’t getfantasy. It’s just stupid. And nobody saying “Oh, Scar” would be heard as “Oscar,” it’s not even plausible. It’s almost as bad as its cover, and that’s saying something, as the cover is so bad that Miss Carroll raised her eyebrows at it from her librarian desk on the other side of the room. It’s funny howTriton, which is all about sex and sociology, has a cover of a spaceship exploding, while Glory Road, which does mention sex here and there but is actually a stupid adventure story, has a cover like that.
Among Others, Jo Walton.
24th April 2012
Planeta Bur (Planet of Storms), U.S.S.R, 1962
(Source: scienceetfiction)
Reblogged From scienceetfiction
Notes: 28
Pilot Pirx’s Test (1979).
Based on a story by Stanislaw Lem, original music by Arvo Pärt.
Director Marek Piestrak, interviewed by Ewa Mazierska:
One of the most distinctive aspects of Pirx is the music. Its author is Arvo Pärt, the most famous Estonian composer. How was Pärt persuaded to write the score?
MP: He did not need persuasion—he was very happy to do it, perhaps because he was not as famous then as he is now. But we should begin by saying that the score was the responsibility of the Estonian partners and they simply suggested Pärt to me and I was more than happy with their choice. Consequently, Pärt and I met to discuss the score. I did not want to—and neither did I need to—give him precise instructions. However, we agreed at the very beginning that the music needs to be “electronic” to have an “out of this world” feel, but at the same time have a distinct melody, unlike, for example, dodecaphonic experiments of the early Krzysztof Penderecki. And Pärt fulfilled his assignment brilliantly.
The End of Eternity, based on Isaac Asimov’s novel.
Konets Vechnosti (USSR, 1987).
The book was made into a movie entitled Konets Vechnosti (USSR, 1987). It broadly follows the novel, with the notable exception of the ending. The novel ends with Noÿs and Harlan mutually deciding that Eternity’s suppression of spaceflight was not in the interest of humankind and then living “happily ever after”. The Soviet-era film, however, ends very differently. [Source: Wikipedia]
In my opinion, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy seems to have had a much wider and more transformative influence than has generally been acknowledged. That’s something else you read when you were thirteen. How did it affect you?
SAMUEL R. DELANY: Well, certainly that’s an opinion we share. The first volume—with malice aforethought on Ike’s part, I’m sure: the SF club he belonged to when he was seventeen, the Futurians, was a hotbed of hyperintelligent teenage Trotskyites—taught me what historical materialism was. By the end of the third volume, I had a pretty dramatic picture of what’s wrong with historical determinism, so that when I encountered Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism, say, I’d seen the whole thing on the big screen, as it were, in full color and with stereophonic sound. Why do you think nobody’s ever made a film out of it? It would make Marxists—or, at any rate small-m marxists—of every bright thirteen-year-old in the country. Personally, I think that’s preferable to the demagoguery of Ayn Rand.
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