With the Royals as World Series champions and the Kansas State Wildcats football team playing like crap, it’s officially the ’80’s again and I’m looking for head bands and skinny ties and pushing up the sleeves of my sport coat.
I also decided to go even more retro and go back and watch two made for television science fiction dramas from 1980 that have stuck with me and influenced my writing for better and for worse. One is still pretty good, the other, well, has its moments.
The first was the PBS production of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. I mostly remember the grey people, the aliens that looked like turtles and the cone of blue light. I also remember not being able to hear and/or understand what the alien in the cone of blue light was saying. It sounded like “Jor Jor breathymumblyhightechybreathybreathymumblytechyhightechy lathe of heaven”.
I didn’t understand what was said, even though it seemed kind of important, but the drama wasn’t shown much in the 80’s. Then, for various reasons, PBS stopped showing it in 1988 and since then it has remained one of their most requested dramas.
When I watched it again I was underwhelmed by most of the acting. The lead actors, Bruce Davison and Kevin Conway are good but Margaret Avery has been a lot better. I was also surprised at how much I didn’t remember. I remember the aliens being more prominent than they were. I didn’t remember a volcano being involved.
The biggest thing I remembered/didn’t remember involved a novel I wrote. In it, two of the characters are instructed to “Ask about Antwerp” and at one point the protagonist merely says “Antwerp” in place of asking about it. That turns out to have been “acquired” from the Lathe of Heaven.
The other drama was the mini-series adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. This one has not held up well. The special effects are terrible and the science is dodgy as it has people walking around breathing Mars’ thin atmosphere. Also, based on the old Martian Canal theory, there’s apparently drinkable water all over Mars. Mars, of course, looks absolutely nothing like Malta. (At least that’s what the government wants you think it’s like…) With the exception of Bernie Casey, who steals the show as an astronaut who goes native very quickly, the acting is atrocious. Rock Hudson phones it in and Darren McGavin is the character Darren McGavin always plays.
Although I read the book a million years ago, I’d forgotten about some of the Martian empathy tricks and the three blue lights. I also forgot Bernadette Peters. I do remember writing a piece of fan fiction, maybe for class, maybe for no reason whatsoever, based on the scene where the guy stumbles across the two android women and decides to live with them. (Me being in my horror phase, it ends badly and rather grossly after a malfunction and a kiss.) I therefore take credit for inventing fan fic. (Please email me for the place to send royalty checks.)
The biggest annoyance I had with the Martian Chronicles is the sentiment that the fault is not in ourselves but in our stuff and if we just get rid of our stuff we’ll all be excellent to each other and somehow not the humans who invented the stuff in the first place (a conclusion also reached, rather annoyingly, by the most recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica).
The other interesting part is that both dramas are now set in the past. The Lathe of Heaven is set in 2002 and in The Martian Chronicles humans land on Mars in 1999, only to be killed by a jealous Martian husband.