Word: fi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Other writers may sit white-knuckled at their desks, grinding out a few pages a day, a book every couple of years. Not Isaac Asimov. Back in 1938, the teenage author sold his first tale to Amazing Stories, a science-fiction magazine. Encouraged, he branched out from sci-fi to fields as varied as his interests: literary criticism, psychology, mathematics, mystery, poetry, humor, American history. Simenon may have written more thrillers, Chesterton more poetry and philosophy, Pulp Romance Writer Barbara Cartland more novels. But no single author has ever written more books about more subjects than Isaac Asimov...
...first Robert Altman's new film looks like a baffling slice of metaphysical sci-fi-a sort of 2001 at Marienbad. Weirdly costumed characters with names like Essex and Ambrosia wander around a frozen, nameless city mumbling about the Apocalypse. Packs of vicious dogs appear in scene after snowy scene to gnaw on abandoned human corpses. The number five turns up everywhere: people wear five-sided hats, speak of a five-sided universe and play a five-sided board game called Quintet. What is going on? Is that rascal Altman trying to bring back the new math...
...film's story, once it can be deciphered, is even more tired than its ideas. Quintet is built around a vintage sci-fi gambit that only a few years ago turned up in an execrable action movie, Roller ball. Here again, we are in the midst of a futuristic society that worships a deadly game with indecipherable rules. Quintet appears to be a shotgun marriage between backgammon and Russian roulette. The hero (Paul Newman instead of James Caan) is trying to beat the game before he becomes its bloodied victim. Yet the plot is so familiar that the audience...
...abandoned ravine, surrounded by scrap, refuse and old tires. They struggled and sacrificed their way from the bottom of the ravine to the top of the hill. They built a two-story house with a Mediterranean-style courtyard, with electricity to power a TV set, a hi-fi and an air conditioner. Mrs. Mokhtari is proud of the honest work of her sons, who helped pay for these luxuries, but financial security remains elusive. The Mokhtaris were told that they must pay $36,000 to have their house connected to the water supply line because they were outside the Tehran...
Mitchelson is no lectern pounder; even attorneys who have opposed him concede that he is unfailingly "pleasant and easygoing." Clients who visit him in his office are sometimes surprised to find him dressed in a bathrobe or riding britches, conducting an imaginary orchestra as a hi-fi system plays a favorite Verdi opera. He is also a Shakespeare buff who once spent an afternoon trading quotes from the Bard with Marlon Brando as the two worked out a custody settlement over Brando's child...