Paul has worked as a researcher in biology in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and for six years was a lecturer in botany at St. Andrews University before becoming a full-time writer. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and his sixth, Fairyland, won the Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Awards. His latest novel is Mind’s Eye. He lives in North London.
“ ‘Kyle Meets the River’ was a tricky write,” says Ian McDonald. “The Forbidden Planets theme was a rich compost, and I wanted to try to plant a seed from my future India concept, but it didn’t really take until I remembered J.G. Ballard’s comment about Earth being an alien planet. Then the very same day, I read a newspaper article about the high-security gated enclaves for reconstruction workers in Iraq. There are forbidden worlds all around us, at every footstep, it seems.
“Looking back on the original movie now, what strikes me—apart from Leslie Nielson—is that, unusually for a fifties American film, there isn’t a villain. There’s no ridiculous, infantile Darth Vader . . . just monsters from the Id all the way down. And you don’t beat those with a fluorescent tube and Joseph Campbell cod-mythologizing.”
Ian lives just outside Belfast in Northern Ireland and has day jobs in television program development. His most recent novel was River of Gods, BSFA award winner and Hugo and Clarke Award nominee. “It’s set in India on the centenary of its independence,” Ian explains, “and ‘Kyle Meets the River’ draws on the same background.” Continuing this trend of trying to get the tax department to pay for his foreign holidays, Ian’s latest project is Brasyl, unsurprisingly set in present, mid-21st- and 18th-century Brazil.
Michael Moorcock last saw Forbidden Planet in French. “It rather improved on the somewhat wooden acting of the majority of the cast,” he says, while accepting that the movie remains an elegant piece of science fiction.
“The moral, applied to the obsessions of the day, remains a perfectly good one in the liberal humanist tradition,” Mike adds. “In fact, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a remake, perhaps with a better cast and less hokey comic relief. But no doubt, if there were, it would be twice the length, contain unnecessarily gruesome special effects and a far more lugubrious message. So perhaps the only improvement is to watch it in the French version.”
Mike’s most recently published novel, The Vengeance of Rome, concluded the Pyat quartet, a sequence of novels also comprising Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage, and Jerusalem Endures, about international events that came to permit the Nazi Holocaust.
Mike lives in France and Texas and is currently working on a memoir of Mervyn and Maeve Peake and a text accompanying Peake’s Sunday Book illustrations, which will be first published in Paris.
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.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Passion Ploy
Lehr, Rex
Dust
Tiger, Burning - Alastair Reynolds
The Singularity Needs Women!
Dreamers’ Lake
Eventide
What We Still Talk About
Kyle Meets the River
Forbearing Planet
This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine
Me•topia
Forbidden Planet
Author and Story Notes
Forbidden Planets Page 30
