@ Danny Boy – Insulated by an ocean, six time zones, and a cable provider that may (or may not) offer HBO (not that I care), I had absolutely no idea what Westworld might be. Just to be fair, I decided to look it up, but in the first paragraph I ran into “based on the 1973 film … written and directed by Michael Crichton…“, and I knew that I will never need nor want to understand anything about it. Long ago I promised myself that “Sphere” would be the last Crichton novel that I would ever let him disappoint me with.
Basically, Jurassic Park was Westworld With dinosaurs.
Mr. Crichton was a writer of serviceable potboilers. They were not good but they had a compelling forward motion to them. The Andromeda Strain was both a decent novel and film (maybe because they were connected to science and medicine and he was trained as an MD). The 13th Warrior (movie), based on Eaters of the Dead (novel) was surprisingly good. Those are the only two I can say are actually good, though I’ve read and seen a few more (including Westworld; both movie and book just so-so). Rising Sun, though, is a standout in terms of badness. It was pretty racist and also factually wrong about…well, just about everything he said about Japan (I say this as a certified Japan expert).
Mostly, though, I’d say his stuff should be low on anyone’s list. It’s an okay airplane read. Better than King or Grisham, anyway.
HBO. Westworld has nothing to do with Crichton…. But everything to do with J.J. Abrams. … which means Kilby made the right decision.
FWIW my first assumption for the Sally Forth universe was the movie.
….
I liked Congo. And Jurrasic Park the novel was readable. But Disclosure and Swarm and …. sheesh, SB said Rising Sun was pretty racist. Those were “pretty sexist”. The “its a hard time to be a man since any woman can and every woman will accuse you of sexual harassment especially if you don’t give them preferential treatment” type.
I remember enjoying the Westworld film in 1973, so I watched the first episode on TV. Well, at least half of it, anyhow. I enjoyed Sally Forth for a long time, then put up with it for another year or two, then gave up any hope of it being worthwhile. As for the strip here, I don’t know where to begin — maybe in P1 with a nice beer.
I’m with you on Westworld: enjoyed the film in 1973, but I think we made it all the way through the first episode.
Though only because my wife isn’t as quick to hit the OFF switch as I am.
My son went through a Crichton phase in high school (which I honestly think is he best time for one). One of them is still on the headboard of his bed, in fact.
@SingaporeBill: what authority issues those Japan Expert certificates?
None of the panels in the comic above made any sense to me.
Carl Fink, It’s called a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Studies with a Japan concentration. They are available from a number of universities. I’ll warn you, they do take about four years to get though and some say they aren’t worth the money or effort. After that, I did a graduate programme at the School of Hard Knocks’ Japan campus for three years. That was after I read the book but it further reinforced that it was not aligned with reality.
“None of the panels in the comic above made any sense to me.”
The Forths are recalling a family trip from six years ago and what we are seeing is skewed from their impressions. In the second strip, Hilary hated the trip and all she remembers is that they kept stumbling over prairee dog holes and so that is what we see; her memory to an exaggerated extent. In the first strip … well, its just a surreal discussion they are having. Hilary says that at the time she thought it’d be better with killer robots. Ted points out at fourteen she’s too young and the memory of him would think the eight year old on the trip was still too young and neither point out that the premier of Westworld wouldn’t exist until two years in the future. Sally brings up that Hilary has seed Westworld because Ted watches it too much sole cause he has a thing for the star and Ted wouldn’t to end the conversation insists the memory versions of themselves experience a distraction that happened.
None of the panels in the comic above made any sense to me.
They make more sense if you view the entire arc. I mean, it’s still a bit crazy and all, in a Forth kind of way.
Oh yeah, the star. I thought “Thandie” was a typical Sally Forth weirdness, but I looked it up and that really is the name of an English actress who was in Westworld.
The Westworld movie did have a great advertising slogan: “Where nothing can possibly go worng.” [sic]
For me, the movie,”Sphere”, has to be a serious departure to the tedious and empty for Crichton whose movie “The Andromeda Strain” and later, the book, were very enjoyable for me (Yep, CIDU Bill, in high school, 1970s).
Oh. Westworld. I was thinking National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation.
@ Kevin A & S.Bill – Except for the final conclusion(*), I enjoyed reading “The Andromeda Strain” very much, but I found the movie rather disappointing, because I had recently read the book and could recognize all the pieces the producers had left out or had changed for no apparent reason. Perhaps now (being older), I would be able to recognize the reason(s) for the changes, but I have a feel that the film would suffer more from its age: the effects would probably look really cheesy these days.
P.S. (*) – The flagrant flaw in the ending is that after hundreds of pages of gripping, well-researched technical action, the solution to the entire problem is that “all” of the infectious agent (whatever it was, both inside and outside the research facility) had suddenly and conveniently mutated to a benign form. It was as stupid (then) as claiming (now) that the corona virus would magically “go away”.
P.S. The ending of “Sphere” was effectively the same: “…then they woke up, and the bad dream was gone away, and everything was nice.“
Kilby, that ending reminds me of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” ending. The sun came up and it was too much for the “Martians”.
Which in turn reminded me of this one: A: “I just read that the Flat Earth Society is going to be the first to launch a manned mission to the Sun!” B: “That’s impossible: they’ll burn up as soon as they get there!” A: “No, no, they have a solution for that: they’re going to land at night.“
The common cold (caused by a virus) is what killed off the Martians, according to Wells. BTW, I recommend Jeff Wayne’s musical version of “The War of the Worlds”. Good rock songs and narration by Richard Burton.
You might like to (re) acquaint yourself with the text. See the link in my previous post. “Virus” does not appear in the text even once and their demise is said to be from bacteria, not catching a cold. This is probably a Mandela effect situation. You heard it somewhere and now think it’s in the text. I’m sure others do too. Me too. That’s why I looked it up before posting it. :p
@ Brian in StL – Unfortunately only the first page embeds, and I could not get WordPress (or perhaps Safari) to open the complete PDF in a separate tab. I gave up and retyped the URL manually. After I did that, I found the passage that was cited so impolitely above: “… lay the Martians.…when their bodies were examined in the laboratories, it was found that they were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared…“
I winder sometimes about some of the books I enjoyed when I was in my teens, since I find so many of them unreadable now: are they simply books one reads in high school/college and then outgrow, or were they simply “of their time” and should only have existed in the years immediately before and after 1970?
I made the mistake of trying to re-read Stranger in a Strange Land last year. It would have made more sense for me to go out and buy a pair of bell bottoms.
That said though, returning to our starting point, the Westworld film still stands up. Maybe in a somewhat goofy 1973 way, but it’s still just as much fun.
@ Bill – Having read (within the past few years) both the “expanded” edition (in English) and (most of) a seriously flawed German translation, I have to agree with you that both of those effects work strongly against “Stranger…“. The book still survives OK as a (slightly dated) science fiction story for about the first half, but then it gets derailed by an amusing, but long-winded parody of TV evangelism, and crashes and burns into a heap of cinders when Heinlein steps up to his own pulpit to advocate gratuitous free sex.
However, not all of his books suffer that badly. Both “Starship Troopers” and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” hold up pretty well (despite a few major plot and/or scientific holes, but that’s why it’s called “fiction”).
I even enjoyed reading an old copy of “Space Family Stone” (for obvious reasons, the British edition could not be called “The Rolling Stones”). They spend all that time refurbishing and living in a spaceship, and there’s not even a single word about a bathroom or any sort of sanitary facility. That’s either magic, or overzealous censorship by a puritan editor.
You’re right. Both Wells and Welles had the Martians killed by microbes. I must have been conflating it with some other story.
CIDU Bill: “I w[o]nder sometimes about some of the books I enjoyed when I was in my teens, since I find so many of them unreadable now.” — Same thing with some movies and TV shows. I absolutely loved the George Reeves Superman when I was a kid. When I got to see a few episodes a couple of years ago, whey were incredibly simplistic and, well, sloppy.
On Heinlein: It was mostly in his later years that he, um, shall we say, waxed philosophical at great length. Many of his earlier novels still hold up very well, such as The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or The Door into Summer.
BoiseEd, it’s understandable. I’m pretty sure some movie (or maybe a TV show) has a line about the Martians being “killed by the common cold” (spoken with some scorn). I can almost hear it…I want to say it was probably a popular film/show. That’s why I suggested the misremembering was likely a Mandela effect.
I’ll throw in my support for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as well. It is real science fiction (not action/adventure with ray guns) that posits how conditions of moon life would lead to a different culture and society and different family structures. And the dialect in which it is written stops being an impediment after the first 10 pages. Starship Troopers is still decent as well if one doesn’t swallow the politics.
I’d say that books, movies, and music mean different things at different stages of our lives. Some of what I liked when I was younger is…not so good…when looked at from my current point of view. Like the 70s Battlestar Galactica. Unable to watch, even ironically or nostalgically. Other things connect with a different part of me now than before. Like that Ferris Bueller kid. C W A A.
I read Rick Brant and Tom Corbett as a kid. I reread and enjoyed them as an adult. But while I can still enjoy Rick Brant, I find Tom Corbett unreadable. (I wouldn’t recommend Rick Brant to anyone who hadn’t read it years ago because the “science” part of “science adventures” doesn’t hold up well today.)
I’ve been meaning for years (decades?) to re-read the Rick Brant books, but haven’t gotten around to it. My favorite (even) older juvenile sf books are the four by Carl H. Claudy, especially THE LAND OF NO SHADOW.
For me a classic example of “was blown away by it back in high school” vs.” was unable to force myself through more than twenty pages or so as an adult” is Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD.
And while I still mostly enjoyed them, recent re-readings of some Thorne Smith books (TOPPER and THE NIGHT LIFE OF THE GODS) didn’t strike me as nearly so funny this time around; my grumpy old inner non-child, instead of chortling at the naughty talk and the glorious wonderment of alcohol, kept thinking things like “he’s driving drunk and I’m supposed to be laughing along and rooting *against* the traffic cops? Hey, wait a minute…”
I remember (avidly) reading all of the “Danny Dunn” books that my elementary school library had at the time, even after I started to be able to identify holes in the science and or plots, but I haven’t had the nerve to buy one and see whether my son might like them; I’m afraid that they won’t have aged that well.
@ Brian in StL – Unfortunately only the first page embeds
With Firefox desktop, I have a scrollbar on the right side and can see the whole thing. I haven’t tried it on mobile.
Kilby: I was going to mention Danny Dunn; I specifically searched out the one where they invent invisibility under the guise of a remote controlled drone that looks like a dragon fly. I remember this story wowing me in 4th grade, just imagining how cool it would be to pilot the dragonfly. And it stuck with me and seemed to be a pretty good prediction for drones which came into being some 30 years later.
So how was the rereading? Not as bad as I’d feared, but nowhere near as good as I remembered. It is a children’s book, after all. The strong sense of integrity around science still shone through very strongly, but there was a lot more obvious hand-waving than I remembered about the actual details of the device (which seems kind of obvious in retrospect — if they knew how to do it, they would have done it!) The biggest problem my adult self had with it was how they seemed to think the whole genie could just be stuffed back in the bottle again — when the military comes a calling, they just destroy the drone, and that’s the end of it (kind of like the endings to all Michael Crichton stories…). Surprising was the strong anti-military sentiment, with Danny actively sabotaging the military representatives, which didn’t really enter my consciousness as a 4th grader in the end of the 70s (but made me nostalgic for those better days in these times of authoritarianism…)
I think the Danny Dunn books were a lot more clever than people gave/give them credit for.
Sure, it probably was conceived as a Tom Swift rip-off, but I can’t remember anything about any Tom Swift novel I read.
@ larK – I never got that far in the “Danny Dunn” series. By the time my elementary school library would have gotten around to buying the “Invisibility” book, I was probably in high school. However, the anti-military undertone is understandable: published in 1974, the U.S. military was just barely out of Vietnam, and the war was still going on.
P.S. Thanks for the solidarity about Crichton. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one.
Aside from the invisibility one, I strongly remember one where they get stranded on an desert island, and what was outstanding was instead of it breathlessly devolving into a lord of the flies scenario, they methodically work out the best things they can do to try and accelerate a rescue, and the two scientists wryly keep track of their own process by likening it to humanity’s progress on the road to civilization: secure water, shelter, food, then work on finding out where exactly the are and how to best signal for rescue (I think they write out giant letters on a beach, and then eventually salvage a radio from the plane or whatever they were on that stranded them, and they have to build a dynamo to power it, which they eventually run from a water mill they build so they don’t have to hand crank it. The philosophy behind their approach was the lesson that stuck with me — this is how to behave in emergency situations: rationally, without panic, methodically.
I also remember a time travel one where they explore meeting yourself and the implications of that — they pick up a future Joe, call him possible, and for the adventure, have two Joes. The cool bit came in a coda at the end, where Joe breathlessly comes rushing in to tell everyone he just got picked up by their time traveling past selves, only this time he was “Possible”. I didn’t like the way they handled the fact that he would have to behave exactly how the past Possible behaved otherwise he would create a paradox — they basically had Joe lose his free will for his second, Possible experience — which struck me a very convenient and not very satisfying — why should he seemingly have free will the first time, but not the second time? Did he have free will either time? What compelled him to behave the way he did the second time through, even though he knew what was going to happen next? But, it made me think, even if I thought even then they were hand-waving.
There was one about an anti-gravity beam or paint or something, and they get stuck in a vessel going up, up and away, I recall almost nothing about. I think it was one of the earlier ones, possibly without Irene.
Can I also mention I really loved the Irene character, a smart, independent, did-I-I-say-smart girl character? I think that held up even in my rereading of the Invisibility one: she was smart all on her own, wasn’t there to be the dumb girl who asks the hero questions so he can explain the science — she was an equal to Danny, and if anyone was the dumb one, it was Joe.
Kilby: I’m completely with you on the Crichton thing — I just thought it was becoming a pile-on, and I didn’t really have anything new to say, you and others had said everything there was to say — he cops out every single time, and no matter how compelling the story may seem, you are hating yourself for having wasted your time by the time you get to the end and everything is conveniently blown-up, destroyed, swept under the carpet, or otherwise complete undone/nothing ever happened/no consequences/nothing to see here folks! I am ashamed to admit that I read more than two of his books, before finally swearing never to ever bother with another, no matter how popular or compelling it seems…
I never read the Danny Dunn books. But your description of time travel reminds me of Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps. The future versions seem to have free will, but somehow always act as the past self remembers them doing.
That’s kind of the solution I would have preferred for Joe Possible — a tightly woven, self-contained past-future story arc where the illusion of free will is maintained at both ends, yet no paradox happens as he — totally rationally and justifiably — does exactly what his past self did. Even to my 4th grade self, I got the feeling that they were under a deadline or hadn’t planned the story out enough, that they put the coda on, and then went, oh, dang, if he was from the future, he would have known about plot surprise X, so why didn’t he warn about it? We don’t have time to rewrite the whole thing… I know, just make him sleepwalk through it as a ghost, yeah, that’ll work. Not.
I notice that “Time Traveler” is the 8th book. I know someone who liked the books, but only so far in the series. My guess would be #5, after which one of the cowriters died. This kind of thing may be what spoiled the series for that person.
Oh, Danny Dunn! That brings back fond memories. I particularly enjoyed one where he programmed a computer to do his homework for him. He thought he was getting away with something, and was disappointed at the end of the semester when his teacher gave him a special award for doing “extra work,” since programming a computer to do homework was substantially harder than just doing the homework. Now I want to reread them to see how well they hold up (or don’t) for me.
I liked Crichton in high school. Admittedly pulpy and stupid, but I found them enjoyable page turners. I probably couldn’t read them now, though. While I wasn’t a “certified Japan expert,” even in high school I could see how racist and factually wrong Rising Sun was.
larK, my own 4th grade self had no problem at all with Joe Possible: and really, how deep can you get with the target audience?
Weirdly, the school library didn’t have them, but the bookmobile did. I’m pretty sure that was all I ever got from the bookmobile.
larK: “There was one about an anti-gravity beam or paint or something, and they get stuck in a vessel going up, up and away, I recall almost nothing about.”
The main thing I remember about it is that the space ship was designed so that it would automatically launch as soon as someone closed the front door. Even as a kid, I thought it was an astoundingly bad design.
WW: “the space ship was designed so that it would automatically launch as soon as someone closed the front door. Even as a kid, I thought it was an astoundingly bad design.”
I still like ‘Jurassic park’: Mr. Crichton’s chaos theory=Murphy’s law makes me laugh every time.
All the others are a bit wanting: I always feel they could end better, even ‘The Andromeda strain’, which I read when I was 15.
I too was very into Danny Dunn… I’ve been keeping an eye on the appropriate shelf at my local used bookstore for some years in case one turns up, but none have.
Another one I remember that I don’t think anyone’s mentioned is the one where they build a weather control widget. It featured, among other things, a pocket-sized thunderstorm over a soup pot, and a Jekyll-and-Hyde meteorologist who was revealed at the end to be actually a pair of twins.
I didn’t remember the bit in the antigravity story about the door. The thing that bugged me about that one was the way they managed to turn around, by bouncing back off of either Jupiter or Saturn. I have no idea how the authors allowed the ship to be steerable, but even so, anyone who has ever played around with billiard balls knows that getting a perfect carom off of a spherical ball is much harder than bouncing off a rail. Getting it right on the first (and only) try would be incredibly unlikely.
P.S. In retrospect (but not wanting to mention “toilets” again), I suppose I should have been more skeptical about their food and/or oxygen supply. (They certainly didn’t have any spare CO2 filters in the non-existent lander.)
larK – Love Galaxy Quest – it is amazing how often we stop and watch when it is on TV.
Arthur – I also read both Tom Corbett and Rick Brant when I was young – but as I recall I owned one book from each series. Danny Dunn – likewise only read “and the Homework Machine”. All either gone in the Hurricane Sandy flood in my mom’s basement or the sale of household items when she had to move to assisted living last year – the former being more likely.
As to rereading books from when was young I found the opposite recently when I recently reread “Jo’s Boys” by Louisa May Alcott which I did as it troubled me that I enjoyed all of her books except that one and “Old Fashioned Girl” (including her non- children’s books which I have read). I enjoyed it this time as I was reading it from a different point of view both for the story and it gave much insight into what she thought of what happened to her life after “Little Women” was published. I also found it interesting to read as reenactor (of an an earlier period than when the story takes place) as I know if something is mentioned in the book it exists at the time it was written (1886) – such using the term “bathroom” in the house, in the period we reenact there are no special rooms for bathing and the other use of bathroom as she and we use the term were generally located outside the house in the backyard.
Even stranger to me – she used the term “bus” as a horse drawn vehicle to transport the students of the school. I had trouble imaging what one would have looked like from the description I found online. When we went with our reenactment unit (and other units) to do an unrelated event about Long Island occupied by the British during the American Revolution at the local restoration village, the village being set in the 1800s I came across an actual bus of the late 1800s and got to see what it looked like – even stranger to me ,when next our unit was there it was gone, as if it had been put there just to help me understand what it looked like. But had I not read the book again I would not have known what I was looking at other than as a curiosity.
Comics I Don't Understand 
@ Danny Boy – Insulated by an ocean, six time zones, and a cable provider that may (or may not) offer HBO (not that I care), I had absolutely no idea what Westworld might be. Just to be fair, I decided to look it up, but in the first paragraph I ran into “based on the 1973 film … written and directed by Michael Crichton…“, and I knew that I will never need nor want to understand anything about it. Long ago I promised myself that “Sphere” would be the last Crichton novel that I would ever let him disappoint me with.
Basically, Jurassic Park was Westworld With dinosaurs.
Mr. Crichton was a writer of serviceable potboilers. They were not good but they had a compelling forward motion to them. The Andromeda Strain was both a decent novel and film (maybe because they were connected to science and medicine and he was trained as an MD). The 13th Warrior (movie), based on Eaters of the Dead (novel) was surprisingly good. Those are the only two I can say are actually good, though I’ve read and seen a few more (including Westworld; both movie and book just so-so). Rising Sun, though, is a standout in terms of badness. It was pretty racist and also factually wrong about…well, just about everything he said about Japan (I say this as a certified Japan expert).
Mostly, though, I’d say his stuff should be low on anyone’s list. It’s an okay airplane read. Better than King or Grisham, anyway.
HBO. Westworld has nothing to do with Crichton…. But everything to do with J.J. Abrams. … which means Kilby made the right decision.
FWIW my first assumption for the Sally Forth universe was the movie.
….
I liked Congo. And Jurrasic Park the novel was readable. But Disclosure and Swarm and …. sheesh, SB said Rising Sun was pretty racist. Those were “pretty sexist”. The “its a hard time to be a man since any woman can and every woman will accuse you of sexual harassment especially if you don’t give them preferential treatment” type.
I remember enjoying the Westworld film in 1973, so I watched the first episode on TV. Well, at least half of it, anyhow. I enjoyed Sally Forth for a long time, then put up with it for another year or two, then gave up any hope of it being worthwhile. As for the strip here, I don’t know where to begin — maybe in P1 with a nice beer.
I’m with you on Westworld: enjoyed the film in 1973, but I think we made it all the way through the first episode.
Though only because my wife isn’t as quick to hit the OFF switch as I am.
My son went through a Crichton phase in high school (which I honestly think is he best time for one). One of them is still on the headboard of his bed, in fact.
@SingaporeBill: what authority issues those Japan Expert certificates?
None of the panels in the comic above made any sense to me.
Carl Fink, It’s called a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Studies with a Japan concentration. They are available from a number of universities. I’ll warn you, they do take about four years to get though and some say they aren’t worth the money or effort. After that, I did a graduate programme at the School of Hard Knocks’ Japan campus for three years. That was after I read the book but it further reinforced that it was not aligned with reality.
“None of the panels in the comic above made any sense to me.”
The Forths are recalling a family trip from six years ago and what we are seeing is skewed from their impressions. In the second strip, Hilary hated the trip and all she remembers is that they kept stumbling over prairee dog holes and so that is what we see; her memory to an exaggerated extent. In the first strip … well, its just a surreal discussion they are having. Hilary says that at the time she thought it’d be better with killer robots. Ted points out at fourteen she’s too young and the memory of him would think the eight year old on the trip was still too young and neither point out that the premier of Westworld wouldn’t exist until two years in the future. Sally brings up that Hilary has seed Westworld because Ted watches it too much sole cause he has a thing for the star and Ted wouldn’t to end the conversation insists the memory versions of themselves experience a distraction that happened.
None of the panels in the comic above made any sense to me.
They make more sense if you view the entire arc. I mean, it’s still a bit crazy and all, in a Forth kind of way.
Oh yeah, the star. I thought “Thandie” was a typical Sally Forth weirdness, but I looked it up and that really is the name of an English actress who was in Westworld.
The Westworld movie did have a great advertising slogan: “Where nothing can possibly go worng.” [sic]
For me, the movie,”Sphere”, has to be a serious departure to the tedious and empty for Crichton whose movie “The Andromeda Strain” and later, the book, were very enjoyable for me (Yep, CIDU Bill, in high school, 1970s).
Oh. Westworld. I was thinking National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation.
@ Kevin A & S.Bill – Except for the final conclusion(*), I enjoyed reading “The Andromeda Strain” very much, but I found the movie rather disappointing, because I had recently read the book and could recognize all the pieces the producers had left out or had changed for no apparent reason. Perhaps now (being older), I would be able to recognize the reason(s) for the changes, but I have a feel that the film would suffer more from its age: the effects would probably look really cheesy these days.
P.S. (*) – The flagrant flaw in the ending is that after hundreds of pages of gripping, well-researched technical action, the solution to the entire problem is that “all” of the infectious agent (whatever it was, both inside and outside the research facility) had suddenly and conveniently mutated to a benign form. It was as stupid (then) as claiming (now) that the corona virus would magically “go away”.
P.S. The ending of “Sphere” was effectively the same: “…then they woke up, and the bad dream was gone away, and everything was nice.“
Kilby, that ending reminds me of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” ending. The sun came up and it was too much for the “Martians”.
Which in turn reminded me of this one:
A: “I just read that the Flat Earth Society is going to be the first to launch a manned mission to the Sun!”
B: “That’s impossible: they’ll burn up as soon as they get there!”
A: “No, no, they have a solution for that: they’re going to land at night.“
The Martians were killed by bacteria. And that was H.G. Wells that did it.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36/36-h/36-h.htm
Orson Welles just dramatized it for radio.
The common cold (caused by a virus) is what killed off the Martians, according to Wells. BTW, I recommend Jeff Wayne’s musical version of “The War of the Worlds”. Good rock songs and narration by Richard Burton.
You might like to (re) acquaint yourself with the text. See the link in my previous post. “Virus” does not appear in the text even once and their demise is said to be from bacteria, not catching a cold. This is probably a Mandela effect situation. You heard it somewhere and now think it’s in the text. I’m sure others do too. Me too. That’s why I looked it up before posting it. :p
Script for the radio version:
Click to access War_of_Worlds_script.pdf
Huh. PDFs embed?
@ Brian in StL – Unfortunately only the first page embeds, and I could not get WordPress (or perhaps Safari) to open the complete PDF in a separate tab. I gave up and retyped the URL manually. After I did that, I found the passage that was cited so impolitely above: “… lay the Martians.…when their bodies were examined in the laboratories, it was found that they were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared…“
I winder sometimes about some of the books I enjoyed when I was in my teens, since I find so many of them unreadable now: are they simply books one reads in high school/college and then outgrow, or were they simply “of their time” and should only have existed in the years immediately before and after 1970?
I made the mistake of trying to re-read Stranger in a Strange Land last year. It would have made more sense for me to go out and buy a pair of bell bottoms.
That said though, returning to our starting point, the Westworld film still stands up. Maybe in a somewhat goofy 1973 way, but it’s still just as much fun.
@ Bill – Having read (within the past few years) both the “expanded” edition (in English) and (most of) a seriously flawed German translation, I have to agree with you that both of those effects work strongly against “Stranger…“. The book still survives OK as a (slightly dated) science fiction story for about the first half, but then it gets derailed by an amusing, but long-winded parody of TV evangelism, and crashes and burns into a heap of cinders when Heinlein steps up to his own pulpit to advocate gratuitous free sex.
However, not all of his books suffer that badly. Both “Starship Troopers” and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” hold up pretty well (despite a few major plot and/or scientific holes, but that’s why it’s called “fiction”).
I even enjoyed reading an old copy of “Space Family Stone” (for obvious reasons, the British edition could not be called “The Rolling Stones”). They spend all that time refurbishing and living in a spaceship, and there’s not even a single word about a bathroom or any sort of sanitary facility. That’s either magic, or overzealous censorship by a puritan editor.
You’re right. Both Wells and Welles had the Martians killed by microbes. I must have been conflating it with some other story.
CIDU Bill: “I w[o]nder sometimes about some of the books I enjoyed when I was in my teens, since I find so many of them unreadable now.” — Same thing with some movies and TV shows. I absolutely loved the George Reeves Superman when I was a kid. When I got to see a few episodes a couple of years ago, whey were incredibly simplistic and, well, sloppy.
On Heinlein: It was mostly in his later years that he, um, shall we say, waxed philosophical at great length. Many of his earlier novels still hold up very well, such as The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or The Door into Summer.
BoiseEd, it’s understandable. I’m pretty sure some movie (or maybe a TV show) has a line about the Martians being “killed by the common cold” (spoken with some scorn). I can almost hear it…I want to say it was probably a popular film/show. That’s why I suggested the misremembering was likely a Mandela effect.
I’ll throw in my support for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as well. It is real science fiction (not action/adventure with ray guns) that posits how conditions of moon life would lead to a different culture and society and different family structures. And the dialect in which it is written stops being an impediment after the first 10 pages. Starship Troopers is still decent as well if one doesn’t swallow the politics.
I’d say that books, movies, and music mean different things at different stages of our lives. Some of what I liked when I was younger is…not so good…when looked at from my current point of view. Like the 70s Battlestar Galactica. Unable to watch, even ironically or nostalgically. Other things connect with a different part of me now than before. Like that Ferris Bueller kid. C W A A.
I read Rick Brant and Tom Corbett as a kid. I reread and enjoyed them as an adult. But while I can still enjoy Rick Brant, I find Tom Corbett unreadable. (I wouldn’t recommend Rick Brant to anyone who hadn’t read it years ago because the “science” part of “science adventures” doesn’t hold up well today.)
I’ve been meaning for years (decades?) to re-read the Rick Brant books, but haven’t gotten around to it. My favorite (even) older juvenile sf books are the four by Carl H. Claudy, especially THE LAND OF NO SHADOW.
https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2005/cur0503.htm
For me a classic example of “was blown away by it back in high school” vs.” was unable to force myself through more than twenty pages or so as an adult” is Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD.
And while I still mostly enjoyed them, recent re-readings of some Thorne Smith books (TOPPER and THE NIGHT LIFE OF THE GODS) didn’t strike me as nearly so funny this time around; my grumpy old inner non-child, instead of chortling at the naughty talk and the glorious wonderment of alcohol, kept thinking things like “he’s driving drunk and I’m supposed to be laughing along and rooting *against* the traffic cops? Hey, wait a minute…”
I remember (avidly) reading all of the “Danny Dunn” books that my elementary school library had at the time, even after I started to be able to identify holes in the science and or plots, but I haven’t had the nerve to buy one and see whether my son might like them; I’m afraid that they won’t have aged that well.
@ Brian in StL – Unfortunately only the first page embeds
With Firefox desktop, I have a scrollbar on the right side and can see the whole thing. I haven’t tried it on mobile.
Kilby: I was going to mention Danny Dunn; I specifically searched out the one where they invent invisibility under the guise of a remote controlled drone that looks like a dragon fly. I remember this story wowing me in 4th grade, just imagining how cool it would be to pilot the dragonfly. And it stuck with me and seemed to be a pretty good prediction for drones which came into being some 30 years later.
So how was the rereading? Not as bad as I’d feared, but nowhere near as good as I remembered. It is a children’s book, after all. The strong sense of integrity around science still shone through very strongly, but there was a lot more obvious hand-waving than I remembered about the actual details of the device (which seems kind of obvious in retrospect — if they knew how to do it, they would have done it!) The biggest problem my adult self had with it was how they seemed to think the whole genie could just be stuffed back in the bottle again — when the military comes a calling, they just destroy the drone, and that’s the end of it (kind of like the endings to all Michael Crichton stories…). Surprising was the strong anti-military sentiment, with Danny actively sabotaging the military representatives, which didn’t really enter my consciousness as a 4th grader in the end of the 70s (but made me nostalgic for those better days in these times of authoritarianism…)
I think the Danny Dunn books were a lot more clever than people gave/give them credit for.
Sure, it probably was conceived as a Tom Swift rip-off, but I can’t remember anything about any Tom Swift novel I read.
@ larK – I never got that far in the “Danny Dunn” series. By the time my elementary school library would have gotten around to buying the “Invisibility” book, I was probably in high school. However, the anti-military undertone is understandable: published in 1974, the U.S. military was just barely out of Vietnam, and the war was still going on.
P.S. Thanks for the solidarity about Crichton. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one.
Aside from the invisibility one, I strongly remember one where they get stranded on an desert island, and what was outstanding was instead of it breathlessly devolving into a lord of the flies scenario, they methodically work out the best things they can do to try and accelerate a rescue, and the two scientists wryly keep track of their own process by likening it to humanity’s progress on the road to civilization: secure water, shelter, food, then work on finding out where exactly the are and how to best signal for rescue (I think they write out giant letters on a beach, and then eventually salvage a radio from the plane or whatever they were on that stranded them, and they have to build a dynamo to power it, which they eventually run from a water mill they build so they don’t have to hand crank it. The philosophy behind their approach was the lesson that stuck with me — this is how to behave in emergency situations: rationally, without panic, methodically.
I also remember a time travel one where they explore meeting yourself and the implications of that — they pick up a future Joe, call him possible, and for the adventure, have two Joes. The cool bit came in a coda at the end, where Joe breathlessly comes rushing in to tell everyone he just got picked up by their time traveling past selves, only this time he was “Possible”. I didn’t like the way they handled the fact that he would have to behave exactly how the past Possible behaved otherwise he would create a paradox — they basically had Joe lose his free will for his second, Possible experience — which struck me a very convenient and not very satisfying — why should he seemingly have free will the first time, but not the second time? Did he have free will either time? What compelled him to behave the way he did the second time through, even though he knew what was going to happen next? But, it made me think, even if I thought even then they were hand-waving.
There was one about an anti-gravity beam or paint or something, and they get stuck in a vessel going up, up and away, I recall almost nothing about. I think it was one of the earlier ones, possibly without Irene.
Can I also mention I really loved the Irene character, a smart, independent, did-I-I-say-smart girl character? I think that held up even in my rereading of the Invisibility one: she was smart all on her own, wasn’t there to be the dumb girl who asks the hero questions so he can explain the science — she was an equal to Danny, and if anyone was the dumb one, it was Joe.
Kilby: I’m completely with you on the Crichton thing — I just thought it was becoming a pile-on, and I didn’t really have anything new to say, you and others had said everything there was to say — he cops out every single time, and no matter how compelling the story may seem, you are hating yourself for having wasted your time by the time you get to the end and everything is conveniently blown-up, destroyed, swept under the carpet, or otherwise complete undone/nothing ever happened/no consequences/nothing to see here folks! I am ashamed to admit that I read more than two of his books, before finally swearing never to ever bother with another, no matter how popular or compelling it seems…
I never read the Danny Dunn books. But your description of time travel reminds me of Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps. The future versions seem to have free will, but somehow always act as the past self remembers them doing.
That’s kind of the solution I would have preferred for Joe Possible — a tightly woven, self-contained past-future story arc where the illusion of free will is maintained at both ends, yet no paradox happens as he — totally rationally and justifiably — does exactly what his past self did. Even to my 4th grade self, I got the feeling that they were under a deadline or hadn’t planned the story out enough, that they put the coda on, and then went, oh, dang, if he was from the future, he would have known about plot surprise X, so why didn’t he warn about it? We don’t have time to rewrite the whole thing… I know, just make him sleepwalk through it as a ghost, yeah, that’ll work. Not.
I notice that “Time Traveler” is the 8th book. I know someone who liked the books, but only so far in the series. My guess would be #5, after which one of the cowriters died. This kind of thing may be what spoiled the series for that person.
Oh, Danny Dunn! That brings back fond memories. I particularly enjoyed one where he programmed a computer to do his homework for him. He thought he was getting away with something, and was disappointed at the end of the semester when his teacher gave him a special award for doing “extra work,” since programming a computer to do homework was substantially harder than just doing the homework. Now I want to reread them to see how well they hold up (or don’t) for me.
I liked Crichton in high school. Admittedly pulpy and stupid, but I found them enjoyable page turners. I probably couldn’t read them now, though. While I wasn’t a “certified Japan expert,” even in high school I could see how racist and factually wrong Rising Sun was.
larK, my own 4th grade self had no problem at all with Joe Possible: and really, how deep can you get with the target audience?
Weirdly, the school library didn’t have them, but the bookmobile did. I’m pretty sure that was all I ever got from the bookmobile.
larK: “There was one about an anti-gravity beam or paint or something, and they get stuck in a vessel going up, up and away, I recall almost nothing about.”
The main thing I remember about it is that the space ship was designed so that it would automatically launch as soon as someone closed the front door. Even as a kid, I thought it was an astoundingly bad design.
WW: “the space ship was designed so that it would automatically launch as soon as someone closed the front door. Even as a kid, I thought it was an astoundingly bad design.”
I still like ‘Jurassic park’: Mr. Crichton’s chaos theory=Murphy’s law makes me laugh every time.
All the others are a bit wanting: I always feel they could end better, even ‘The Andromeda strain’, which I read when I was 15.
I too was very into Danny Dunn… I’ve been keeping an eye on the appropriate shelf at my local used bookstore for some years in case one turns up, but none have.
Another one I remember that I don’t think anyone’s mentioned is the one where they build a weather control widget. It featured, among other things, a pocket-sized thunderstorm over a soup pot, and a Jekyll-and-Hyde meteorologist who was revealed at the end to be actually a pair of twins.
I didn’t remember the bit in the antigravity story about the door. The thing that bugged me about that one was the way they managed to turn around, by bouncing back off of either Jupiter or Saturn. I have no idea how the authors allowed the ship to be steerable, but even so, anyone who has ever played around with billiard balls knows that getting a perfect carom off of a spherical ball is much harder than bouncing off a rail. Getting it right on the first (and only) try would be incredibly unlikely.
P.S. In retrospect (but not wanting to mention “toilets” again), I suppose I should have been more skeptical about their food and/or oxygen supply. (They certainly didn’t have any spare CO2 filters in the non-existent lander.)
larK – Love Galaxy Quest – it is amazing how often we stop and watch when it is on TV.
Arthur – I also read both Tom Corbett and Rick Brant when I was young – but as I recall I owned one book from each series. Danny Dunn – likewise only read “and the Homework Machine”. All either gone in the Hurricane Sandy flood in my mom’s basement or the sale of household items when she had to move to assisted living last year – the former being more likely.
As to rereading books from when was young I found the opposite recently when I recently reread “Jo’s Boys” by Louisa May Alcott which I did as it troubled me that I enjoyed all of her books except that one and “Old Fashioned Girl” (including her non- children’s books which I have read). I enjoyed it this time as I was reading it from a different point of view both for the story and it gave much insight into what she thought of what happened to her life after “Little Women” was published. I also found it interesting to read as reenactor (of an an earlier period than when the story takes place) as I know if something is mentioned in the book it exists at the time it was written (1886) – such using the term “bathroom” in the house, in the period we reenact there are no special rooms for bathing and the other use of bathroom as she and we use the term were generally located outside the house in the backyard.
Even stranger to me – she used the term “bus” as a horse drawn vehicle to transport the students of the school. I had trouble imaging what one would have looked like from the description I found online. When we went with our reenactment unit (and other units) to do an unrelated event about Long Island occupied by the British during the American Revolution at the local restoration village, the village being set in the 1800s I came across an actual bus of the late 1800s and got to see what it looked like – even stranger to me ,when next our unit was there it was gone, as if it had been put there just to help me understand what it looked like. But had I not read the book again I would not have known what I was looking at other than as a curiosity.