Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Still, everything is done with respect for the science-fiction genre, and the best action scenes are as confoundedly enthralling as sequences in old Saturday serials. The special effects-including a peppy but menacing space pet, and the incineration of a planet and assorted phenomena among the stars-are lovingly rendered and spectacular within the modest means available. The cast is recruited mostly from the ranks of nonprofessionals, and Co-Writer O'Bannon appears in a rather hefty supporting part. He also functioned as film editor and production designer, while Producer-Director Carpenter took time out to write...
...ever a successful novel seemed to be its own happy ending, it was Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes (1968). In a captivating blend of fiction and autobiography, with remarkable humor and pitiless self-scrutiny, Exley, a high school football player turned writer and pressagent, told how his youthful fantasies of athletic and literary glory ripened into alcoholism, two ruined marriages, three stints in state mental institutions. For winters on end, he remembered, all that kept him lurching from Sunday to Sunday was an obsession with pro football and the exploits of New York Giant Halfback Frank...
Seen without regard to its predecessor, Shardik resembles good science fiction, unsatisfactorily diluted with Victorian romanticism. The author postulates a tribe of Iron Age men called Ortelgans, in ancient times the builders and rulers of a splendid city called Bekla, but now, because of military and moral decline, a ragtag band of hunters huddling fearfully on a river island at the edge of the Beklan empire. The planet is earth, but the local geography is all of the author's making, and he has great fun with maps, invented place names and at least four different languages...
This year's winners were typical of that diversity. In fiction, the split award went to a traditional academic novel, Thomas Williams' The Hair of Harold Roux, and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, a savage morality tale that moves as fast as a whodunit and finds a nihilistic link between the Viet Nam War and the drug culture. The arts and letters award was shared by Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell, a meditation on the structure of all living matter, and Roger Shattuck's life of Marcel Proust. For the recently created category...
Also of interest: Quilts by Radka Connell, Susan Hoffman and Holly Upton at Carpenter Center, through April 27. And an exhibit of science fiction art and writing, sponsored by the New England Science Fiction Association, at the Prudential Center through April...