Bibliophile dramanauts, I was thinking about having a few recommendation threads according to genre, this one is Sci-fi but then we could go into horror, fantasy, realism, math textbooks, etc.
Here’s mine, or at least the few one’s I read.
HG Wells
“War of the Worlds”
Isaac Asimov
I robot
Foundation Trilogy
Frank Herbert
Dune
Dune messiah
Andy Weir
The Martian
Edit: I forgot about Robert Henlein, in his case “Starship Troopers”
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Yeah it's a movie that at first glance I want to like, the soviet sci fi aesthetic is really cool but jfc imagine opening ur movie with a long excerpt from a book
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Self-referentially enough, Gibson actually mentioned this... Cayce (from Pattern Recognition) is talking about being unable to stay awake through Tarkovsky movies and 'going under during a seemingly endless pan' lol
(Hi ouroboros, nice to meet you.)
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Gonna have to read Pattern Recognition. I barely got through Tarkovsky's Stalker movie. Solaris would be a difficult movie to pull off without using pretty intense visual effects, stalker could be phoned in a bit more with less detriment.
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Solyaris got a do-over with George Clooney in it, I watched it once, it's okay. It transmits the basic concept, it isn't amazing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(2002_film)
Huh didn't know Soderbergh directed, Cameron produced. Would have expected more from them. Maybe I should give it another go.
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e: comparing some shots btwn tarkovsky and the 2002 remake, the 2002 film just seems generic, i wish they'd kept that 1972 space station aesthetic
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BTW if you like lolbad 70s sci-fi watch Saturn 3
It's so terrible, but the aesthetic is very A E S T H E T I C
I thought I had it actually but I must have deleted it out of spite
Frankenstein Unbound is quite good, as is Quatermass and the Pit, if we're veering off into movies.
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Def gonna watch Saturn 3, looks like it's right up my alley. Can't be any worse than space truckers or the black hole.
Also the movie Freejack is a Gibson fanfic, i swear. Even though it's supposed to be based on Sheckley, all the scenes are pulled from Count Zero and Mona Lisa. Best on screen depiction of Gibson's work to date, imo. Watch it if you haven't already
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I'll get it, yeah from the name alone I'd imagine it to be a Gibson-based work.
The Black Hole... some of the sets really manage to capture that 'wow that ship is huge' vibe. Never watched Space Truckers, from the trailer/poster I was imagining something along the lines of Spaceballs then someone told me it was 1. nothing like that at all and 2. shit so I skipped it.
I've got The Men Who Stare at Goats on at the moment which is an amusing/intriguing watch.
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Space truckers is god awful but like mainlining cheesy 90s scifi. The sets are so chintzy and everything is so bright
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Also on a very very old list of recommendations I have:
The Big Mess / Der große Verhau (1971)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065801/
and
Privilege (1967)
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/privilege-1967
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Also Pattern Recognition is very good, though it's written as one long string without any shifts in perspective. I remember reading it and finding out the next chapter was still from Cayce's perspective and literally sighing. I understand now why authors shift character perspectives, it can feel a bit exhausting.
Pattern Recognition, to me, seems like a do-over of Count Zero, some of the themes are very similar and the main protagonist is a similar-feeling character. CZ is almost certainly my favourite Gibson book so it was great reading something you could take to be a re-imagining of it.
If you read it let me know if you notice the similarities.
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Is count zero the one with the arcology defection? And the art dealer and the rich dude with cancer? I always read all 3 books back to back, count zero and mona lisa blur together.
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Yes, that's the one.
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