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Old 09-24-2010, 09:31 PM   #346
Steven Lyle Jordan
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And not just recent. There was the 1988 TV show based on "War of the Worlds."
I vaguely remember the show: Kind of interesting premise, very poorly executed.

There was also a show that ran for 1 season... The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne... in which he traveled in a balloon with Phineas Fogg and met many of the characters that he would (supposedly) write about when he was grown. Much of that show had a steampunky look to it.
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Old 09-24-2010, 09:56 PM   #347
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And not just recent. There was the 1988 TV show based on "War of the Worlds."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_...28TV_series%29

"According to the series, rather than being killed outright by germs at the end of the 1953 film, the aliens had all slipped into a state of suspended animation. Their bodies were stored away in toxic waste drums and shipped to various disposal sites within the United States (ten such sites are known to exist in the country), and a widespread government cover-up combined with a condition dubbed 'selective amnesia' has convinced most people that the invasion had never happened."
I recall that one. It attempted to be dark, but wound up simply muddled, as though the creators hadn't fully thought through their premise and didn't know how to execute it.

I'm fonder of a British BBC series called Tripods, based on a YA trilogy by John Christopher. Christopher's books look at what might have occurred had the Martians won and conquered Earth. Christopher's invaders aren't from Mars, but the rest neatly aligns with Wells' original.

Look for _The White Mountains_, _The Pools of Fire_, and _The City of Gold and Lead_.
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Old 09-25-2010, 04:56 AM   #348
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Look for _The White Mountains_, _The Pools of Fire_, and _The City of Gold and Lead_.
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Ooh, I have fond memories of those! In Dutch translation ('De Witte Bergen', 'De Vuurpoel' and 'De Stad van Goud en Lood') they were the first SF I ever read.

And the rest, as they say, is history
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Old 09-25-2010, 07:30 PM   #349
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Ooh, I have fond memories of those! In Dutch translation ('De Witte Bergen', 'De Vuurpoel' and 'De Stad van Goud en Lood') they were the first SF I ever read.

And the rest, as they say, is history
They're a worthy place to start. Christopher has done an assortment of good stuff, both YA and adult, and I consider him under appreciated in the US.
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Old 09-25-2010, 07:47 PM   #350
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I wish I could agree. I adore LeGuin, but that one may be my least favorite.

The problem is that Ursula's weakness may be an inability to understand villains. The bad guy in Forest was a two-dimensional cardboard cut-out, assembled from cliches. I couldn't believe in him, and hence couldn't appreciate the story.

I had similar reactions to _The Dispossessed_. When Shevek's Urras servant finally drops his carefully subservient mask and begs Shevek to "free them from the masters", I wanted to throw the book against the wall in disgust. The masters of Urras were cliches, who might have been drawn from cartoons in the 1930's Socialist journal "The Masses", with top-hatted cigar smoking robber barons grinding the poor under their heels in the service of profit. If you are inclined to see that as the way things work, it won't bother you. If you think the real world is a bit more complex than that, it falls on its face.

I was also annoyed at the authorial strings and stacking of the deck. Shevek came from Annares, a companion planet of the same star Urras orbited. It was much more marginal, and the inhabitants existed in a sort of anarcho-communist society that was made possible only by the fact that it was a marginal environment, with just barely enough to go around, and it simply wasn't possible to become significantly better off materially than anyone else. It would have vanished like a moth in a flame if set down on Urras.

But _The Dispossessed_ was a larger and richer work, with enough other things to mitigate my distaste and make it worth reading.

My favorite of LeGuin's ouvre is _The Left Hand of Darkness_.
______
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I liked 'Left Hand' too.

But I said 'Word for World' was strange. I felt the arrival of a starship with an interstellar radio on it, was rather deus ex machina. That is what ruined the story for me.

As for the bad guys, I grew up in a small town with people like that as part of the local power structure. They did seem narrow and carboard cutouts, but that simplistic hatred, with no good reason for the hatred to exist, is the 'type' of people they are. So, I rather understood why and whom they were in the story. They were like watching an old 1940s Film Noire movie full of cliches... but it was dangerous to underestimate what kind of evil they were capable of.
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Old 09-26-2010, 12:18 AM   #351
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I remember the WOTW tv show as well. They had to recreate the Martian ships as I recall. The original models for the movie were made of copper and it's believed that they were given to the boy scouts during a copper drive and were probably melted down shortly thereafter. A real shame too as they would be a piece of movie history today.

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I recall that one. It attempted to be dark, but wound up simply muddled, as though the creators hadn't fully thought through their premise and didn't know how to execute it.

I'm fonder of a British BBC series called Tripods, based on a YA trilogy by John Christopher. Christopher's books look at what might have occurred had the Martians won and conquered Earth. Christopher's invaders aren't from Mars, but the rest neatly aligns with Wells' original.

Look for _The White Mountains_, _The Pools of Fire_, and _The City of Gold and Lead_.
______
Dennis
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Old 09-26-2010, 02:34 PM   #352
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But I said 'Word for World' was strange. I felt the arrival of a starship with an interstellar radio on it, was rather deus ex machina. That is what ruined the story for me.
_The Dispossessed_ was largely about that interstellar radio, and the chap who discovered the principles by which it operated. The Ansible was less of a deus ex machina for me because I was aware it existed.

One of the things of interest about the Hainish universe that LeGuin was writing in was that FTL wasn't possible, and until the Ansible was developed, communications between the worlds was relativistic. Actual travel between world remained limited by the speed of light, but at least they could talk to each other in real time.

Memory is foggy, and Id have to reread stuff, but I recall an early novel in the sequence where a means of traveling FTL was used. The problem was that organic life wouldn't survive the journey, so you could transport things, but not people.

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As for the bad guys, I grew up in a small town with people like that as part of the local power structure. They did seem narrow and carboard cutouts, but that simplistic hatred, with no good reason for the hatred to exist, is the 'type' of people they are. So, I rather understood why and whom they were in the story. They were like watching an old 1940s Film Noire movie full of cliches... but it was dangerous to underestimate what kind of evil they were capable of.
Oh, sure. Folks like that certainly exist. The sticking point is setting. The question becomes "Would this kind of person exist in this setting and behave in this fashion?" In "World", I simply couldn't believe he would.
______
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