Nostalgia For The First Space Age
Life has a very cool gallery of photographs of the packaging of space-age toys from the 1960s, from a flying saucer with 'real space noise' to a 'smoking space man' (how times have changed). There's also a friction-powered atomic rocket, possibly a solution to the problem of how to get to other planets quickly. You'd need a really big strip of carpet to charge it up, though.
Picture above is a scan of the box of one of my collection of reproduction toys - can't afford the real thing, alas...
posted by Paul McAuley at 6:17 pm
3 Comments:
That robot reminded me of Robby the Robot, a star in the classic SF-film "Forbidden Planet." I first saw it right after its release in 1956 and have never forgotten it. Last year I bought the 50th Anniversary Edition from Amazon. It is great. The old celluloid track has been uploaded onto DVD of course, but the remastered version is an aesthetic delight that is probably an improvement of the original. it is technically perfect and beautiful to view. I recommend it not only as an SF-icon but as a great piece of cinematography.
One of my favourite SF films, and favourite robots (we could all do with a faithful servant that can extrude gold on command). The iconic design that spawned a dozen or more variants in other films and in TV shows. I have two versions of Robby; if you're in London, there's a life-sized model of Robby at the Museum of Childhood, in Bow.
I am not so enthusiastic about robots that can extrude gold, at least not in SF. The nanotech hype has hatched a new SF trope: the nanogizmo that can make anything on demand, e.g. sorely needed weapons. This seems to me to be a deux ex machina that makes life a bit too easy for SF writers and overstretches my suspension of disbelief.
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