Science Fiction in the Movies: "The Satan Bug" to "The Matrix"

I made a list of relatively memorable science fiction movies from the mid-sixties to the present, for another post. (June 30, 2009)

Yesterday, I started writing about space aliens and killer robots: and added to the list. I went back, today, and fleshed it out with brief descriptions of these exemplars of science fiction / speculative fiction in the movies.

See if you can spot a common element:

• "The Satan Bug" (1965)
  • Germ warfare kills lots of people
  • "...very well made. It is more germaine [!] now than when it was made 42 years ago.
    (IMDB.com synopsis)
  • Looks like "germane" is the new "relevant"
• "2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
  • A big black artifact and
    • Ape-men
    • Spaceships
  • Insane computer kills crewmates
  • One of my favorite films
  • Not much of a plot
    • But the sets were well-thought-out
      • Up to that time, a rarity in science fiction films
• "Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
  • Massive supercomputer is built
  • Takes over the world
  • Somewhat plausible, given a willing suspension of disbelief
• "The Omega Man" (1971)
  • Germ warfare
  • Charlton Heston
  • Zombies
• "Westworld" (1974)
  • Killer robots
    • A whole resort full of killer robots
  • Moderately well-thought-out, in my opinion
  • No zombies
• "Zardoz" (1974)
  • Far future with humanity split into
    • Brutals
    • Immortals
  • H. G. Wells' Eloi and Moorlocks, anyone?
  • Nitzche quotes
• "A Boy & His Dog" (1975)
  • "A post-apocalyptic tale based on a novella by Harlan Ellison. A boy communicates telepathically with his dog as they scavenge for food and sex..."
    (IMDB plot summary)
  • What, when they have each other?
• "Logan's Run" (1976)
  • A nice, neat, orderly society
    • Where life is groovy
      • Until you hit 30
      • Then you die
    • Well, you can't have everything
  • Then a crazed cop kills the master computer
• "Star Wars" (1977)
  • Princess
  • Comedy-relief robots
  • Blasters
  • Spaceships
  • Light sabers
  • Evil emperor
  • Farm kid
  • Wizard
• "The Swarm" (1978)
  • Killer bees kill lots of people
  • And make a nuclear reactor 'go critical'
  • Billed, at the time, as
    • A serious warning about the dangers of nuclear energy
    • And who says movies aren't educational?
• "Quintet" (1979)
  • "During a future ice age, dying humanity occupies its remaining time by playing a board game called 'Quintet.' For one small group, this obsession is not enough; they play the game with living pieces ... and only the winner survives."
    (IMDB plot summary)
  • I'm not making this up!
• "Mad Max" (1979)
  • Set in a "dystopic future Australia"
  • Cop
  • Biker gang
  • Vendetta
  • No zombies
    • The way those bikers looked, who needs zombies?
• "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" (1981)
  • Set in a "dystopic future Australia"
  • Cynical drifter
  • Small community
  • Bandits
  • Still no zombies
• "The Terminator" (1984)
  • Evil computer mastermind
  • Determined killer cyborg
  • Threat of nuclear apocalypse
• "Night Shadows (1984)
  • Toxic waste turns small town citizens into mutant flesh-eating zombies
  • A movie with a message
• "Steel Dawn" (1987)
  • Yet another post-apocalyptic world
    • Warrior
    • Desert
    • Settlers
    • Gang
• "Hell Comes to Frogtown" (1987)
  • A nuclear/biological war killed all the men
    • Except this dude named Hell
    • Who's held captive by women
  • And there are these giant mutant frogs
  • Really: I'm not making this up!
• "The Matrix" (1999)
  • Humanity makes an artificial intelligence
  • That takes over the world

With a few exceptions, like Star Wars, the settings aren't all that pleasant. And Star Wars is set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."

Looking for a bright future in science fiction movies? Try the Star Trek franchise, or go back before, say, 1955.

Like "Things to Come" (1936). It's post-apocalyptic - for a while. Then wise scientists build an Art Deco utopia where everybody wears really uncomfortable-looking clothes. I'm not on the same page as the underlying philosophies of that film, and admit that it's not all that realistic. But: "Hell Comes to Frogtown" is?!

I don't think I'll live to see an end to this currently-fashionable notion: that to be taken seriously, you've got to show the future as just simply awful.

It's like that period in country music, where I got the impression that a song's popularity could be measured by the suicide rate of its fans.

"Belvedere Union Grand's Room 313" - a Short-Short Story

This story originally appeared on the Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette blog, Halloween, 2009.

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"Belvedere Union Grand's Room 313"

Bran H. Gill

Most nights, the key to the Belvedere Union Grand hotel's room 313 is the last to leave its hook. Not that many guests sleeping there have complained: but as the owner, T. J. Baum, told me, it's the room that's the farthest from the stairs on the top floor.

And there's that girl standing outside the window.

The Belvedere Union Grand hotel is a landmark in Loonfoot Falls, the tallest building downtown. Its foundation was laid at the corner of Broadway and Center Street in1899, overlooking Railroad Park.

And, like many buildings a century or more old, it's got its share of ghost stories.

There's the sound of a ball bouncing down the stairs between the second and third floor, usually heard late in the evening.

Several employees have refused to enter the 'back room' in the basement: a storeroom with a small window opening onto an air shaft. Others heard voices outside that window.

Several guests in room 313 woke up in the small hours of the morning, thinking someone had called their name. Each reported seeing a young woman, with "poofed up" dark hair, as one said, standing quietly outside the window, looking in.

It's disturbing, waking up to see someone looking at you through the window. What troubled the guests even more was what they saw the next morning. The young woman had apparently been standing with nothing but about ten yards of open air between her feet and the cement floor of the basement's air shaft.

copyright © Brian H. Gill 2009

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More:

• "Stories on this Blog"

Advice from C. L. Moore, Read What You Enjoy Most; and Some Rambling

A few months ago, I started reading, rather determinedly, science fiction novels and short stories. It had been years since I'd 'really read' something. I'd been reading every day, often voraciously: but it was technical manuals, articles and posts online, statistical tables: that sort of thing.

I'd been concerned - or maybe it was worried - that I might have lost the knack for sticking with a longish work of fiction. Practically all that I'd been reading since around the eighties had been excerpts from non-fiction works, data tables, and what I found online.

The closest I'd come to reading fiction was the occasional op-ed piece.

No great surprise: All I needed to do was pick up a 'real book' and start reading.

I've been reading - and occasionally studying - stories and novels by Charles Sheffield, Poul Anderson, C. L. Moore, and others. Right now I'm getting started on something by Frederick Pohl.

Part of my reason for re-starting my habit of reading fiction is that I've also revived my ambition to write stories. I figured that reading what established authors have published might help - and I was pretty sure that reviewing the stories that excited my imagination decades ago couldn't hurt what I was doing now.

It's nice to get confirmation that I (probably) wasn't completely on the wrong track:

"...First, you have to read a great deal of the works you enjoy most. Much of it will be useless. But the trustworthy unconscious can be relied on to make lots of unseen notes, just in case...."

From Afterword: Footnote to "Shambleau"...and Others, C. L. Moore, from "The Best of C. L. Moore" C. L. Moore, Lester Del Rey editor (1975).

"Shambleau" and "Black Thirst" reminded me of a number of promising approaches to speculative fiction. One phrase in particular struck me as being suitable as a sort of introduction: "...There were races before man..." (p. 44, "Black Thirst" in "The Best of C. L. Moore")

I know: H. P. Lovecraft and a gaggle of more-or-less talented authors have arguably mined out the Cthulhu mythos and its near cousins. On the other hand, I think there are stories to write that take into account the scale of the universe - in time and space.

If we found ruins of a civilization that were a million years old: we'd have missed them by a short tick of the cosmic clock.

And, although I think the crawling horrors of the hack-work Lovecraft-inspired story miss the mark for plausibility: I somewhat doubt that encountering people whose history includes recordings of what made the Chicxulub crater about 65,000,000 years ago would be quite like the climactic scene of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Off on a Tangent: "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"

My reaction to Spielberg's UFO movie may not be typical.

My take on the show is that it's essentially a religious movie, built around the beliefs of a sort of cargo cult that was perhaps more common in the fifties through seventies than it is now.

What Were Those Aliens Really Doing?

With a little editing, "Close Encounters" could be made into a taut suspense/horror movie.

I mean to say: here a bunch of people with scarily powerful technologies have been systematically kidnapping people and stealing property on a grand scale for the last several generations.

Now, 'out of the blue,' they make a point of returning some of the stolen property - in highly inappropriate places (an ocean liner - on land?!)

Then after what the human welcoming committee think are the aliens' kidnap victims come lurching out of the mothership, walking like B-movie automatons, some of the presumably best and brightest of Earth march smartly into the great big mothership: AND NOBODY SEES ANYTHING ODD ABOUT IT?!

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¹ We never see the faces of those - things - stumping out of the mothership clearly - although apparently their physical appearance is apparently close to that of people snatched decades back.

Come Sail Away - The Universe is Full of Wonders

As I said in yesterday's post, people haven't changed all that much in the last several thousand years - including our capacity for pursuing dreams and recognizing wonders.

The song "Come Sail Away," performed by Styx in - 1977, I think - appealed to me then, and still does. Particularly the sections starting at 2:26, 4:23.

"STYX come sail away- lyrics"

aquwaman2021, YouTube (October 15, 2007)
video, 5:50

Naturally, being a bit on the geeky side, two lines that particularly appealed to me were

"...We climbed aboard their starship, we headed for the skies

Singing, come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me lads...."

A Science Fiction Song? Hardly

These comments or observations about "Come Sail Away" are, I think, sensible:

"Come Sail Away is about reaching for your dreams (not about UFOs and alien encounters). The angels and the aliens are figurative voices encouraging you to "come sail away" to wherever your dreams would take you."
"The Grand Illusion / Come Sail Away"
Unofficial Styx Lyrics Archive

And touching:

"When I was in 7th grade, my best guy-friend Jacob used to sing this song constantly...he died that November in an ATV accident and this song was played at his funeral...It brings me to tears everytime I hear it..it has so much meaning to me because of him, and I think of him everytime i listen to it..I'll always love this song because of him
"[offtopic] I miss you Jake... Nov. 9, 1990-Nov. 29, 2003"
kimberloo, comment on "Styx - Come Sail Away Lyrics" LetsSingIt

Given a Choice, I'll Pick a Sense of Wonder Over Mutant Frogs

The Wildly-optimistic Utopias of early-20th-century science fiction were fun, but I don't see me trying to write something like that. On the other hand, I do hope to capture some of the sense of wonder I experience when learning more about this creation we're in.

As someone in the Babylon 5 said: "I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the Universe."

Related posts:

• Dinosaurs, Mutant Chickens, Evolution, and Faith in God"
  A Catholic Citizen in America (June 29, 2009)
• Faith and Reason, Religion and Science"
  A Catholic Citizen in America (March 20, 2009)
  Particularly
  • What If Darwin Had Been an Astronomer?"
• Catholic Church, Creationism, Evolution, Facts and Faith"
  A Catholic Citizen in America (March 5, 2009)
• "Vatican Says: 'Belief in Aliens Doesn't Contractict Faith' "
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (May 14, 2008)

Background:

• "Ecclesiastes," 1:9
  United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

Prologue

In ancient times, after humanity reached the stars, but before the Mandate of Heaven was restored to the Middle Kingdom, there were heroes.