Word: scifi
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Move over Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Grammy. Make way for the Nevelson. The Nevelson? That is the American Book Awards, to be given for the first time this week for the past year's best offerings in 34 categories, including self-help and scifi. The prizes are broader than the venerable National Book Awards they replace, and the presentations will be made with more hoopla. Some wits have suggested that the new prize be called the Bookie. It was named instead after Sculptress Louise Nevelson, 80, who designed the plaque that goes to each winner, along with...
...past that science fiction was not taken seriously enough by mainstream critics, Le Guin now concedes that the form "still hasn't grown up completely." Some of her recent books, including The Beginning Place, Malafrena (1979) and Orsinian Tales (1976), have contained little or no conventional scifi, although she is not considering abandoning the form for good. She still feels challenged by its "total freedom of plot; there are no limits except those of imagination." That is certainly not true of science in the real world, as Le Guin was reminded last month when the Public Broadcasting Service carried...
...film thick as a cloud of ozone. The plot is not all that original either. All through the seemingly ceaseless running time - nearly 2½ hours, and considerably trimmed from the Russian version - one is put longingly in mind of Forbidden Planet. A lightheaded piece of American scifi, Forbidden Planet (1956) was a genial reworking of The Tempest in which some American astronauts were trapped on a distant planet. There a wizard, a stand-in for Prospero, conjured up an unconquerable force field of "monsters from the id." Hearing this, one of the astronauts inquired without hesitation, "What...
...happen to trip out to Central Square meanwhile, check out Survive, for some gut-dropping suspense; or to Boston, see Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, for more artsy poignancy. Then there's the Russian scifi film Solaris. A friend told me this movie has "a lot of connotations; I didn't even like it until afterwards, when I spent all night with friends making all the connections." One of those. I guess I'll have to go investigate those connotations for myself and get back...
...Asian moviemaking world whose output is prodigious by Hollywood standards but who is seldom seen in the U.S. (Shashi did play opposite Hayley Mills in Pretty Polly.) For the most part, that is just as well. No other region of the world produces such a concoction of Kung Fu, scifi, porn, soapers, chasers and period pieces with such uneven degrees of tackiness and brilliance. From India to Japan, the film studios of Asia churn out more than 1,200 pictures a year, the work of moguls like Hong Kong's Run Run Shaw (see box) and one-shot entrepreneurs...