Doing my best to track the media I have been consuming other than books here.

F and I went to the cinema two weeks ago to watch Project Hail Mary. I didn’t think the book was all that great – I was Deputy Hugo Administrator that year, and I see from my records that I put it fifth on the ballot (and Hugo voters actually ranked it sixth out of six, though it had the third highest number of first preferences). It was far ahead on Goodreads/LibraryThing ownership, while the actual winner was third on average ratings and fourth on number of owners. But there was enough squee about the film that it seemed worth a Whyte father-and-son expedition to the cinema.

Yes, folks, it’s a really fun film. Andy Weir has managed to grab a few headlines by asserting that the story is not political and he doesn’t understand why anyone would want it to be. Of course both film and novel are political, even if he wants to pretend otherwise, but a lot of the things that annoyed me about the novel have been taken out of the film.

There are lots of silly things – the protagonist’s amnesia is just sufficient to carry the plot, the (complicated) science mostly happens in parentheses, millions (perhaps billions) die on Earth while the mission is happening out at Tau Ceti and we are not really invited to care. But the energy of the single chap carrying the hopes of the world on his mission is compulsive, rather like Neil Armstrong (and who was p[laying him in First Man? Oh yeah). In particular, the effects are brilliant, with Rocky the alien stealing your heart. I’m sure it will be a Hugo finalist next year (and I don’t plan to be involved).

The other thing I’ve watched since my last update is “The Long Morrow”, an episode of The Twilight Zone from 1964. This is the first step in my project of reading and watching sf set next year, ie in 2027. There’s quite a lot of it (2026 was surprisingly sparse).

“The Long Morrow” has a simple punchline. An astronaut sent on a 40-year mission in 1987 falls in love just before his launch. He decides to forego the usual suspended animation, so that he can age at the same rate as his girlfriend back home. BUT she doesn’t know that this is his plan, and puts herself in suspended animation in anticipation of his return, so at the end of his mission, in the far distant future of 2027, she is still 26 and he is 70. As science fiction, it’s very well done, a great example of Philip K. Dick’s line about wanting to move from “What if…?” to “My God! What if…”.

The last eight minutes (of 25) are set in 2027, and feature the confrontation between girlfriend and astronaut. Mariette Harley really glows as the girl. The script does its best to focus on Robert Lansing as the astronaut, but Harley steals it.

Unfortunately all we see of 2027 is a corridor in the space control centre, so we can’t deduce much about Rod Serling’s predictions for what next year will look like. This story apparently inspired the opening episode of Season 7 of The Gilmore Girls, which has the same title, but I have little information about that.

Much more 2027 to come.

This is the earliest film set in 2025 that I have been able to identify (the initial scene has a radio announcer announcing that it is 10 May 2025). It actually made rather an interesting pair with Stephen King’s The Running Man – it starts with our hero as a player in a survivalist game show in what we are told are the ruins of New York. Violent reality TV is a surprisingly frequent theme in sf set in 2025; there’s another one coming up. The second half of the film then switches to Mad Max mode as our hero leads his gang across the desert (that flat desert which, as we all know, is located in the vicinity of New York). This very very graphic trailer will give you an idea.

It’s a silly and violent film, which you can skip in good conscience. The script barely makes sense and jumps from place to place without explanation. Al Cliver as the protagonist is pretty wooden. Laura Gemser, playing the leader of the mutants who he rescues, is much better known as the title character of the eleven Black Emmanuelle films, most of which were also directed by Joe D’Amato. Here she mostly keeps her clothes on, and effortlessly dominates any scene she is in.

The music is good, by Carlo Maria Cordio who went on to score Terminator 2: Judgement Day six years later. There’s also a very memorably unpleasant blue mutant. But this is not going to be more than a footnote in my roundup of sf set next year.

Set in 2025:
Television: The Outer Limits: The Duplicate Man (1964)
Film: Endgame (Bronx lotta finale) (1983); Future Hunters (1986); Futuresport (1998); Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision (2003)
Novels: 334 (1972); Titan (1979); The Running Man (1982); The Lake at the End of the World (1988); Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals (1998); A Friend of the Earth (2000); The Peshawar Lancers (2002)
Comics: The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap (1986); Superman & Batman: Generations III #2: Doomsday Minus One (2003)