Word: scifi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sharp performances. The presence of such actors as Christopher Lloyd (Zenned-out on an inner voice that must sound like Daffy Duck's), Ellen Barkin (with her bruised features and street-angel smile) and Jeff Goldblum (heartthrob of the Mensa sorority) clues Buckaroo Banzai as very chic scifi. Lithgow, the movies' Mr. Versatile (transsexual jock in The World According to Garp, bumbling lover in Terms of Endearment, incendiary preacher in Footloose), here does a manic turn as Dr. Lizardo; it is as if old mad Ezra Pound were played by Klaus Kinski. And Weller-his cobalt eyes borrowed...
Attentive viewers will recognize Krull as the 68th variation on medieval scifi, where Camelot meets Middle Earth, and Errol Flynn engages in just enough Star Wars to keep Screenwriter Stanford Sherman and Director Peter Yates out of plagiarism court. Like the cycle's earlier entries, Krull offers battles, special effects and a hero and heroine with all the humanity of furniture on feet. But there are ingenuities of décor and character here. The Beast's fortress contains vaulted corridors that resemble a vulture's rib cage; his lair is a rococo igloo; walls close...
...real pertinence: What aspects of civilization are worth carrying on? One implicit answer: the ability to wring harmony from dissonance, to create a work of the imagination from disparate and unpromising materials. Example: The End of the World News, a trio made from the detritus of history and scifi...
Ursula K. Le Guin's novels, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Beginning Place, have made her the hottest name in contemporary scifi. The Compass Rose (Harper & Row; $14.95) shows her less a miler than a sprinter. The 20 stories reveal a versatile and far-ranging mind: one tale concerns two research scientists' attempt to decipher the writing of ants; another tells of an animal's efforts to understand the motives of a lab technician who puts it into a maze ("The alien's cruelty is refined, yet irrational," the animal observes. "If it intended...
...plugs his receiver into a $125 modem (a telephone computer hookup), and taps out a password on his $685 home terminal. A few seconds later Marc is into an ARPANET computer, 3,000 miles away on the M.I.T. campus. Once in, he can call up such files as "humor," "scifi lovers" and "info micro"-a collection of computer brain teasers. This free play, however, may soon stop. The Government, which has long looked on "visiting" as an annoyance, is now eliminating telephone links and devising more complicated passwords...