Forbidden Planet
loomed frustratingly large in
Alastair Reynolds
’s imagination—“Ever since it was shown on BBC2 in the mid-seventies,” he says, “as part of a run of classic science fiction movies. I think they also showed
This Island Earth
in the same Wednesday evening slot. I say ‘frustratingly’ because I remember only seeing the film up to about the point when Robbie arrives to meet the crew—then we had to go out somewhere. I was quite impressed by what I’d seen up until then—I thought the flying saucer space cruiser was seriously cool—and also more than a little scared. It must have been a good ten years before I saw the film all the way through, and I’ve never looked back since. The influence of it—for better or worse—runs through almost everything I’ve written, and in my wildest fantasies I get to design, script, and direct the all-conquering remake. I still see the future in glorious Eastman color.
“One of my favorite bands, Pavement, once recorded a song entitled ‘Krell Vid User.’ ” Need we say more?!
Al is the author of four novels set in the
Revelation Space
universe, plus two stand-alone books,
Century Rain
and
Pushing Ice
. A collection of stories from the RS universe is due in 2006, and he is now at work on another novel, as yet untitled, which will be a return to that universe. Al has been a full-time writer since 2004, and he and his wife live in the Netherlands.
A child of the seventies,
Chris Roberson
reckons he must have seen
Forbidden Planet
half a dozen times before he was eighteen. “The movie always seemed to me like the product of another world, a glimpse into some alternate history that almost, but didn’t quite, happen. The men of United Planets Cruiser C- 57D, with guns and swagger, looked like they belonged more on the deck of a WWII PT boat than walking under the green skies of Altair IV, which might have contributed to the movie’s sense of verisimilitude, even in such a fantastic setting.
“I was haunted by the electric silhouette of the creature from Morbius’s id, trying to claw its way through the protective field, which still seems as real to me as any high-tech CGI phantasm from a contemporary blockbuster. I still hold by my theory that the creature that attacks the crew, time and again, is the product of Altaira’s id, and not Morbius’s, and there’s nothing anyone can say that will convince me otherwise.”
Chris’s short fiction can be found in the anthologies
Live Without a Net, The Many Faces of Van Helsing, Tales of the Shadowmen, Vols. 1 and 2,
and
FutureShocks
, and also in the pages of
Asimov’s Postscripts,
and
Subterranean Magazine
. His novels include
Here, There & Everywhere, The Voyage of Night Shining White
, and
Paragaea: A Planetary Romance
, and he is the editor of the anthology
Adventure Vol. 1
. Roberson has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and, again, twice a finalist for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form (winning in 2004 with his story “O One”).
“I’ve loved that marvelous, slightly clunky, oddly affecting motion picture ever since I first saw it,” says
Adam Roberts
of
Forbidden Planet
, “and my story was written in a sort of dialog with the movie. What I took from the movie (apart, obviously, from the idea of, like, a
planet
that was, well,
forbidden
) was: one, the idea of basing SF on a classic text (in my case not
The Tempest
as in the film, but, in perhaps a rather oblique way, the Island of the Lotophagoi from Homer’s
Odyssey
); and two, the sense you get from the film of the forbidden planet itself as just lovely looking—not an actual slagheap or slate-mine somewhere like in
Doctor Who
, and not a real stretch of the Mojave a short drive away from the studio’s back-lot, like a thousand Los Angeles SF B-movies; but those gorgeously painted backdrops, those wonderfully staged sets.
“The thing about those old-style painted special effects is that they always look that little bit cleaner and nicer than modern-day photorealistic CGI. They’re already halfway to being painterly art, in the same way that the melancholy of Edward Hopper’s paintings looks much more beguiling than any photograph from the same era. It has close affinity to the cover art of Edmund ‘Emsh’ Alexander or Frank Kelly Freas or Chesley Bonestell, those superb artists that produced cover artwork for
Astounding
and
Galaxy
and all the rest in the 1940s and 1950s. There’s something so wonderfully clean, fresh and attractive about those images, especially when you compare them to some of the digital art (to pluck an example from the air:
Attack of the Clones
) that has been directly inspired by them.
“To make that comparison is to realize how cluttered and offputting the latter mostly is, and to rekindle your yearning for the former. So my idea in this story was to try to hark back to that aesthetic. If it seems counterintuitive that I’ve written a John Campbell-ish story in the idiom of Don DeLillo, then I can only say that it makes a weird kind of sense to me. After all, part of the appeal of the film is the way it buries an oblique postmodernity (‘monsters from the Id!’) inside the livery of a full-blown action-adventure science-fiction narrative.”
Adam is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He lives west of the capital with his wife and daughter. Adam’s latest novel is
Gradisil
(2006) and his next will be
Land of the Headless
.