Phil Friel – Page 12

UFO – The Last Four Episodes

Gerry Anderson\’s UFO has always been one of my favourite telefantasy series. This past week, I\’ve been indulging myself with a marathon session, watching all twenty-six episodes, spread over two box sets and eight DVDs.

Tonight, I\’m sitting here with a couple of old friends, watching the final DVD, which contains the last four episodes of the series – Reflections in the Water, Timelash, Mindbender and The Long Sleep. These four episodes, the last three in particular, are among my favourites of the entire series.

Towards the end, UFO went down an increasingly psychedelic path, with more complex and interesting scripts, which I preferred to the earlier more linear and simplistic stories. Given how the series was developing, I\’ve always thought that it was such a great pity that UFO didn\’t get the green light for another season.

We\’re almost at the end of The Long Sleep, and the end of the series itself. I\’ve always thought that this one had a particularly sad ending, with the rather gruesome death of the girl and the obvious emotional impact that this had on Straker, who had become very fond of her.

But, then, UFO never did have happy endings anyway, in contrast to almost every other contemporary television series. And that\’s possibly one of the things I liked most about it…

BEACHHEADS IN SPACE edited by August Derleth

TITLE: BEACHHEADS IN SPACE
EDITED BY: August Derleth
CATEGORY: Anthology
SUB-CATEGORY: Short Fiction
FORMAT: Hardback, 224 pages
PUBLISHER: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1954 (Originally published in the US in 1952 by Pellegrini & Cudahy).

That\’s the various general details, here\’s a listing of the contents:

\”Beachhead\” by Clifford D. Simak (1951)
\”The Years Draw Nigh\” by Lester del Rey (1951)
\”Metamorphosite\” by Eric Frank Russell (1946)
\”Breeds There a Man…?\” by Isaac Asimov (1951)
\”And the Walls Came Tumbling Down\” by John Wyndham (1951)
\”The Blinding Shadows\” by Donald Wandrei (1934)
\”The Metamorphosis of Earth\” by Clark Ashton Smith (1951)

This is an interesting old anthology, edited by another of my favourite SF anthologists, August Derleth. The theme of this anthology, according to the book\’s jacket blurb, is \”invasion from another world, or counter-attack from Earth against the planets\”.

I haven\’t read this one in many years, maybe twenty-five years or more, but I remember that it was a favourite of mine way back in the day, and it still has a special place on my bookshelves. Obviously my memories of the individual stories are vague after all this time, and I don\’t remember all of them clearly, and a couple of them not at all. But the ones that I do recall really liking are Clifford D. Simak\’s very clever short story \”Beachhead\” (AKA \”You\’ll Never Go Home Again!\”, first published in Fantastic Adventures, July 1951), Eric Frank Russell\’s excellent novella \”Metamorphosite\”, (from Astounding, December 1946), and Clark Ashton Smith\’s scary and unusual alien invasion SF/Horror novelette \”The Metamorphosis of Earth\” (Weird Tales, September 1951).

I also remember liking Lester del Rey\’s \”The Years Draw Nigh\” and Isaac Asimov\’s \”Breeds There a Man…?\”, although for some reason I remember a lot less about them than I do about the Russell, Simak and Smith stories. I don\’t recall anything at all about the Wyndham and Wandrei stories. I\’m surprised about not remembering the Wyndham story, as I\’m usually a big fan of his writing.

But as good as my recollections are of the Simak and Smith stories, the stand-out story for me in this anthology has always been Eric Frank Russell\’s classic \”Metamorphosite\”, which I recall having a huge impact on me back when I was a young guy in my twenties. I don\’t think this story is in any of my other anthologies (and I have zillions of the darned things!), so I reckon it hasn\’t been reprinted very often. It\’s far, far too many years since I last read it, and indeed this entire anthology, so it\’s long overdue for a re-read. I\’ve already started on the Simak story, and, so far, it\’s at least as good as I remember it, if not better. If the rest of the stories hold up as well as this one is doing, I\’m going to really enjoy reading this anthology again.

Please take note that this is the 1954 UK edition, which is different from the original 1952 US hardcover edition, published by Pellegrini & Cudahy. Apparently all editions aside from the original hardcover edition have been \”butchered\” in some way, missing stories, etc. This UK edition is missing the Introduction and seven of the stories from the US edition. Also note that John Wyndham has two stories in the original US edition, one under his usual John Wyndham pseudonym, and the other as John Benyon.

Here is the full Contents Listing of the original 1952 US edition:

Introduction by August Derleth
\”The Star\” by David H. Keller, M.D.
\”The Man from Outside\” by Jack Williamson
\”Beachhead\” by Clifford D. Simak
\”The Years Draw Nigh\” by Lester del Rey
\”Metamorphosite\” by Eric Frank Russell
\”The Ordeal of Professor Klein\” by L. Sprague de Camp
\”Repetition\” by A. E. van Vogt
\”Breeds There a Man…?\” by Isaac Asimov
\”Meteor\” by John Beynon
\”And the Walls Came Tumbling Down\” by John Wyndham
\”Blinding Shadows\” by Donald Wandrei
\”The Metamorphosis of Earth\” by Clark Ashton Smith
\”The Ambassadors from Venus\” by Kendell F. Crossen
\”To People a New World\” by Nelson S. Bond

For lovers of old-style, classic SF short fiction, this anthology would be right up their alley. If you can actually find it, that is. As it\’s such an old book, it\’s obviously long out of print, and you\’ll have to hunt through used book stores to find this anthology. But it\’ll be well worth the trouble it takes to find it, as are any other anthologies edited by August Derleth.

After all these years, I think I\’ll actually make a major effort to get off my butt and track down the longer original US hardcover edition, which I didn\’t even realize was different/longer until I recently read the Wikipedia entry on the anthology.

Highly recommended, particularly the original US hardcover edition.

Sci-Fi on Television (Part 2)

[I]f the 1970s were the golden years of telefantasy for me, the 1980s were a bit of a disappointment, with many of my favourite series going into decline or disappearing off the air altogether, and very few decent new sci-fi series stepping up to take their place.

My favourite TV series, Doctor Who, after the glory decade of the 1970s with Pertwee and Baker in the role, was now on the slide. After Tom Baker left in 1981, the series began to go into decline, and following Peter Davison\’s departure in 1984, Doctor Who rapidly degenerated into a pathetic parody of its former self, sliding towards its final demise in 1989. As a hardcore Doctor Who fan, I was NOT a happy bunny from 1981 onwards.

The early 1980s also saw a few of my other favourite telefantasy series wrap up – Sapphire and Steel, Blake\’s 7, The Incredible Hulk, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and Battlestar Galactica/Galactica 1980. With the exception of V and the remake of The Twilight Zone, the period from 1982-1987 was pretty crap, filled with bland, silly, formulaic US series such as Knight Rider, Airwolf, Automan and The Greatest American Hero. It wasn\’t until 1987, and the first appearance of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that the Eighties started getting interesting for me again, at least as far as telefantasy is concerned. With both Quantum Leap and Alien Nation appearing in 1989, at least the end of the decade had three decent sci-fi series that I liked on the air at the same time.

As the 1980s moved into the 1990s, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Star Trek: Voyager were pretty dominant in the US telefantasy world, each with an impressive seven-year run (Quantum Leap was the only other decent sci-fi series on the air at that time). TNG and DS9 were favourites of mine, but once DS9 ended, my love of new Star Trek started to wane drastically, as Voyager was the only Trek left on the air, and I didn\’t rate it highly at all.

I\’d been a hardcore Star Trek fan since the original series, and Voyager was the first Trek that I actually really disliked, to such an extent that I never even bothered following it on a weekly basis. I thought the scripts were really lame, excessively based around and padded out with treknobabble nonsense, and most of the characters were less likeable and less well defined than those in earlier Trek series. There were very few truly stand-out episodes in the entire seven-year run, and the only real redeeming features were the holodoc\’s sarcasm and 7 of 9, who was absolute heaven on the eyes.

Aside from Quantum Leap, the only real competition Trek had in the early 1990s was when both Babylon 5 (my favourite 1990s sci-fi series) and the X-Files burst upon the world in 1993. This was a complete game-changer, as the X-Files, in particular, rocketed to the top of the popularity charts. Star Trek (of ANY kind) was now no longer top dog among telefantasy shows. And by the mid-to-late 1990s, it was no longer even in second or third place, as the three really big telefantasy successes of that era, in terms of popularity, were the X-Files, Stargate SG1 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I really like both the X-Files and Stargate, although I\’d agree with the common criticism that they both might\’ve gone on a bit too long and run out of steam in their last few seasons. I watched the X-Files religiously when it was on TV, but for some totally unfathomable reason, and despite the fact that it became a big favourite with me when I watched it on DVD a few years later, Stargate SG1 never registered with me at all back in the day. I have absolutely no recollection of ever seeing it on TV back in the Nineties.

Buffy (and its spin-off Angel) never really did much for me although it was extremely popular. I did watch the occasional episode whenever it was on, and I thought it was okay, but I\’m not really a big vampire or zombie fan, more of a time travel, space adventure kinda guy. Two other very popular series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and its spin-off series Xena: Warrior Princess also weren\’t what you\’d call huge favourites of mine, as I\’m also not big into fantasy either. I thought they were both ridiculously silly and formulaic, and I could take them or leave them, only watching the odd episode when nothing else was on.

The second half of the Nineties also gave us the new version of The Outer Limits, which ran for seven years. I quite liked this one, although some episodes were better than others. But in my opinion it was, overall, never as good as the original classic 1960s series, and I was really surprised that it actually made it to seven seasons.

On the downside, there were a few Nineties telefantasy series that I liked which unfortunately never got a fair crack of the whip, and ended well before their time. The ones that I recall (there were quite a few others, but these were favourites of mine) were Babylon 5: Crusade, which was cancelled after only thirteen episodes, Dark Skies, Space: Above and Beyond and American Gothic, all of which got axed at the end of their first season, and Chris Carter\’s Millennium, which also suffered a premature end, although it, at least, made it to three seasons. Even Babylon 5 itself, although it did make it to the end of the fifth and final season, had its last two seasons totally messed up by network interference and cancellations.

Unfortunately, telefantasy series are very expensive to produce, compared to mainstream TV programming. During the 1990s, US and UK television networks seem to become much more inclined to quickly cancel even relatively successful series, if viewing figures weren\’t good right from the outset, or so much as dipped slightly. For every Buffy, Stargate or X-Files, there were many other potentially classic telefantasy series that were cut short or never even got off the ground, while crap US and UK sitcoms, soaps and reality TV shows seemed to breed like rabbits.

To Be Continued…

Andersonic Issue 17 Is Out Now

$\"Andersonic$

[S]everal posts back, I mentioned that Issue 3 of the excellent Doctor Who fanzine Plaything of Sutekh had hit the stands. And now, what seems like barely five minutes later, Richard Farrell and His Merry Crew have also unleashed Andersonic #17 upon the unsuspecting world. I haven\’t even had time to finish reading Plaything of Sutekh #3 yet!

In case you don\’t know, Andersonic is our favourite fanzine dealing with all the various Gerry Anderson shows, both live and puppets (and let\’s not forget the excellent CGI animated New Captain Scarlet series). And it\’s also a real A5 printed zine, not an electronic publication, which is a huge plus in my book.

So what\’s in the new issue? Well, I\’ll just repeat here what it says on the website:

Sylvia Anderson interview – a new interview with Sylvia in which she discusses her work on the APF/Century 21 series and her creation & casting of such well-loved characters as Lady Penelope, Parker, the Angels and Ed Straker.

Alan Shubrook interview – Alan talks of his time working at Century 21 on series from Thunderbirds up to UFO. He discusses his methods, materials used and his favourite miniatures created for the series, as well as sharing behind the scenes anecdotes. The interview is illustrated with Alan\’s own photographs taken at the studio.

Space 1999/ Siren Planet – a look at the original script written by Art Wallace which was later rewritten to become the series\’ second episode \’Matter of Life and Death\’.

Thunderbirds/ Desperate Intruder – two writers take opposing views on a mid-season outing where Brains finds himself up to his neck in it.

UFO/ The Long Sleep – we curl up with a tube of Smarties and take a look at one of UFO\’s weirder episodes. Take a trip with us back to that ruined farmhouse…

Home Taping: 1999 – Mark Rosney recalls the days before VHS

Strip Story – we look at an individual comic strip to see what makes it tick. This issue – Countdown\’s UFO story \’The Final Climb\’ drawn by Jon Davis

…plus DVD reviews and other stuff. Internal art by Steve Kyte, cover image by Martin Bower.

I\’ve just ordered my copy, so lots and lots of good stuff to look forward to. I love it all, particularly anything to do with UFO, Space:1999 and Countdown comic. 🙂

At only £2.65 (that\’s British Pounds Sterling), inclusive of postage (within the UK, that is, check the website for postage elsewhere), it\’s not even the price of a pint of beer. So why don\’t you all scoot over to the Andersonic website and order a copy.

Sunday TV Viewing

I\’m just having a nice, quiet Sunday afternoon here, chillin\’, sitting at my computer and watching some TV. Sunday is always good for sci-fi films on UK television, and today has been no exception.

I\’ve just spent the past few hours watching the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman\’s Stardust (2007). I\’ve got the novel and the graphic novel, but have only ever managed to catch bits \’n\’ pieces of the film before. Well, I caught it all today, and it wasn\’t bad. Not bad at all. Quite humorous in parts, and less mainstream fantasy than the likes of Lord of the Rings, which suits me fine.

The two leads, Claire Danes and Charlie Cox, as love interests Yvaine and Tristan, were pretty good, as was Mark Strong as the nasty bad guy Prince Septimus. But the best of the lot were Michelle Pfeiffer as the evil witch Lamia, and Robert de Niro as the hilariously camp Captain Shakespeare. He was brilliant, and absolutely stole the show for me.

At the moment, I\’m watching The Incredible Hulk (2008) on ITV2, whilst right now, over on Channel 5, is the very weird Zathura (2005), by the same guys who brought us Jumanji (1995). And that will be followed when it finishes by The Fifth Element (1997). Non-stop sci-fi film goodness, on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Choices, choices. It\’s a pity that there aren\’t several of me, so that I could watch them all at the same time in different rooms. 🙂

Some New Books

Here are some new books that I\’ve recently picked up from Ebay UK, Amazon UK, and from my regular supplier of comics and books in the US, genial Jack Curtin:

THE GREAT SF STORIES 19 edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg (paperback)
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF TIME TRAVEL SF edited by Mike Ashley (trade paperback)
HAWKMOON: THE HISTORY OF THE RUNESTAFF by Michael Moorcock (trade paperback)
INSIDE THE TARDIS – THE WORLDS OF DOCTOR WHO by James Chapman (trade paperback)
GREAT TALES OF SCIENCE FICTION edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg (hardback)
THE YEAR\’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY 2013 edited by Rich Horton (trade paperback)
AFTER THE END: RECENT APOCALYPSES edited by Paula Guran (trade paperback)
WORLDS OF EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS edited by Mike Resnick and Robert T. Garcia (trade paperback)
MODERN GREATS OF SCIENCE FICTION – NINE NOVELLAS OF DISTINCTION edited by Jonathan Strahan (trade paperback)
RAGS & BONES: NEW TWISTS ON TIMELESS TALES edited by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt (hardback)
THE SECRET HISTORY OF MARVEL COMICS by Blake Bell and Dr. Michael J. Vassallo (oversized hardback)

That\’s quite a nice haul, if I do say so myself. Interestingly, these are almost all fiction, mostly anthologies of short fiction. Out of the eleven books, nine are fiction, and eight of those are anthologies. The other (the Moorcock) is an omnibus of four novels.

Only two of the books are non-fiction, which is pretty unusual, given my buying habits in recent years, which has swung sharply towards more non-fiction. Maybe next time it\’ll be mostly non-fiction.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on this, just to see whether it is a blip, or the start of a new trend swinging back towards buying more fiction.

Classic Tunes: \”Separate Ways\” by Journey

I\’m sitting back at the moment, relaxing, and listening to one of the greatest arena rock albums of all time, the classic 1983 six-times platinum masterpiece, FRONTIERS, by US band Journey, which came out on the Columbia Records label.

This is one of my all-time favourite rock albums, and is, in my opinion, Journey\’s strongest album, surpassing even their previous album, the 1981 classic nine-times platinum ESCAPE.

There isn\’t a single bad song on FRONTIERS (even the \”weaker\” songs are good), but one of the best is the song that is currently playing, the first track on the album, \”Separate Ways\”. This is a truly powerful rock song, pounding drums, driving keyboards and guitars, and above it all, Steve Perry\’s gorgeous, soaring vocals. Sheer bliss!

This is an excellent, strong intro to a fantastic rock album. It\’s also gratifying to know that it ISN\’T all downhill from here, and that the rest of the album is just as good.

FEDERATION by H. Beam Piper

TITLE: FEDERATION
AUTHOR: H. Beam Piper
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Collection
FORMAT: Paperback
PUBLISHER: Ace Books, New York, 1981, ISBN: 0-441-23189-6-295)

Contents:

Preface, by Jerry Pournelle
Introduction, by John F. Carr
Omnilingual
Naudsonce
Oomphel in the Sky
Graveyard of Dreams
When in the Course-

The book starts with the brief Preface by Jerry Pournelle, a short but fitting tribute to Piper and his writing. This is followed by the lengthy twenty-page Introduction by John Carr, which is a much more detailed and even more fascinating essay on the life and writings of Piper.

The five stories themselves are from H. Beam Piper\’s acclaimed TerroHuman Future History cycle, one of the most complex and detailed future histories in science fiction literature. This collection, Federation, is made up of stories from the earlier stages of that Future History, and a later collection, Empire, completes the stories from the later part of the cycle.

There are certainly some very good stories in this collection, but the stand-out for me is definitely Omnilingual, which I first read a long time ago, way back in my teens. Along with He Walked Around the Horses (which isn\’t in this collection, and isn\’t part of the Future History), this has always been one of my favourite pieces of SF short fiction, and I regard both Omnilingual and He Walked Around the Horses as his two best short stories.

As far as I\’m concerned, the collection is worth buying just for Omnilingual alone. But the other four stories are nothing to turn your nose up at either. This is H. Beam Piper we\’re talking about here, and he simply did not write bad SF stories.

Very good collection.

Doctor Who: 50 Years in Space & Time (Part 7)

Here\’s the next part of my look back at the Best of the Bunch from Doctor Who\’s 50th Anniversary:

The November DVD release of The Tenth Planet
The November 50th Anniversary edition of Doctor Who Magazine

3. The Tenth Planet

In third place, it\’s the November DVD release of The Tenth Planet. I\’ve been waiting to see this one for a long, long time, and it didn\’t disappoint. I\’d never actually been lucky enough to own the VHS video release, and had only seen the few surviving clips on the Lost in Time DVD box set. So, finally being able to watch the whole story after all these years, featuring the very first appearance of the Cybermen, was really exciting.

The missing Episode 4 is expertly recreated here in animated form by the same people who did such sterling work animating the missing episodes on the recent Reign of Terror, The Ice Warriors and The Invasion DVD releases. And the excellent Telesnaps reconstruction of Episode 4 which had featured on the VHS video release is also here, in among the plentiful features on this top-notch and long-awaited double-DVD release.

4. Doctor Who Magazine 50th Anniversary Edition

In fourth place, it\’s the November 50th Anniversary edition of Doctor Who Magazine, the biggest and one of the best ever editions of the magazine. There was so much good stuff in this one, simply choc a bloc with 50th Anniversary goodness, that it\’s difficult to know where to start. But if I had my arm twisted up my back and was forced to choose, my two favourites would have to be Ghosts in the Machine, a behind the scenes feature on the excellent An Adventure in Space and Time, and An Unearthly Beginning, which features never-before-seen drafts of An Unearthly Child. Great stuff!

To Be Continued…

Sci-Fi on Television (Part 1)

I\’m a big fan of sci-fi on television, which I almost always refer to by its \”proper\” name, telefantasy. The 1950s-1990s were, in my opinion, the Golden Age of telefantasy, and the first real telefantasy started about a decade or so before my birth (in December 1960), when Captain Video and His Video Rangers first appeared on US television in 1949, followed closely in the early 1950s by the likes of Space Patrol, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet and Rocky Jones: Space Ranger.

UK telefantasy was slightly slower to get off the mark, and it was mostly with one-offs like the 1949 adaptation of H. G. Wells\’s The Time Machine and the prestigious 1954 adaptation of George Orwell\’s 1984. The first ongoing, serialized sci-fi productions of any note were the three Quatermass serials which aired in 1953, 1955 and 1958. These were the first real stars of pre-Doctor Who UK telefantasy, and, in my opinion, the classic 1958 six-part serial Quatermass and the Pit remains, to this day, one of the greatest examples of telefantasy ever produced.

But those were all produced and televised well before I was born, and it\’s only really been in more recent years that I\’ve discovered and begun looking back at some of the much older telefantasy series, which aired in the years between the first appearance of Captain Video and His Video Rangers in 1949 and the very first episode of Doctor Who, in November 1963. It would be the mid-1960s before I started to show the first glimmers of interest in any kind of sci-fi on contemporary television.

I\’ve been an avid viewer of sci-fi television of all kinds ever since the time that Doctor Who first began to register in my very young and impressionable mind around 1966-1967. But it was when Jon Pertwee first fell out of the Tardis at the beginning of Spearhead from Space, in January 1970, that marked the moment where I can definitely say that I made the leap from merely enjoying Doctor Who, to becoming an obsessive, life-long fan.

I also became a huge fan of the original Star Trek, which first appeared on UK television channel BBC1 in July 1969, and also the new live-action Gerry Anderson series UFO, which first aired on ITV in 1970. I\’d previously watched, and enjoyed, the various Anderson puppet shows such as Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds and Stingray, but I preferred the live shows, and UFO was where I first became a real Anderson fan.

By December 1970 (when I\’d reached my tenth birthday), with Pertwee almost a year into his tenure on Doctor Who, Star Trek at the height of its popularity on BBC1, and UFO featuring prominently on ITV, I was now old enough to really start understanding and appreciating television sci-fi in general. These were the first three telefantasy series that I really got into, and it\’s no big surprise that these series have always remained right at the very top of my list of favourites.

As I moved into the 1970s, things really started to heat up. I began to get heavily into other UK telefantasy series such as Timeslip, The Tomorrow People, Space: 1999, Blake\’s 7 and Sapphire and Steel. I was also hooked on then-current 1970s US telefantasy such as the animated Star Trek, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica. And, of course, UK television was also awash with re-runs of the various Irwin Allen series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel and Lost in Space, plus re-runs of other classic US \”cult\” TV sci-fi series such as The Invaders, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

Take all these great telefantasy series, and the fact that the early 1970s marked the time that I was moving into my teens, and it was a great time for a young fan of sci-fi television like myself.

To Be Continued…