SF Writers on SF Films
Adopting the format of Mark Morris's Cinema Macabre, the British Science Fiction Association's Martin Lewis asked a bunch of British SF authors to write about their favourite SF film. The resulting booklet has just been distributed to members of the BSFA. Non-members can read Adam Robert's essay here. As for my selection:
For anyone like me, born just after the hinge of the last century, there’s only one candidate for best science-fiction film. Some may make quirky or contrarian choices -- Dark Star, say, or Alien3 -- and there are certainly cogent arguments to be made for films like Blade Runner or Children of Men (which I reckon to be the best sf film of this century, so far), but my personal favourite is 2001: A Space Odyssey.I'll put up my essay on the web site in due course. Meanwhile, here's Terry Gilliam's brilliant condensation of Kubrick and Clarke's masterpiece. To paraphrase Brian Aldiss, one of sf's (especially British sf's) best and most enduring themes is hubris clobbered by nemesis.
posted by Paul McAuley at 5:32 pm
1 Comments:
You know, part of the reason I first wanted to see Children of Men was because it looked a lot like the version of Fairyland that played in my head. As it turned out, it was a wonderful film in its own right, and like all good SF, more about the time it was made than about the future (the latter applies to Fairyland, too: I recently re-read it and was struck by how so much of it is fears and issues of the early 90s writ-large.).
Look forward to reading the whole essay!
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