Re: (Nebula) Nebula Finalists 1981

On 07/06/2024 21:35, Cryptoengineer wrote:

On 6/6/2024 4:34 PM, Robert Carnegie wrote:

On 29/04/2024 22:18, Chris Buckley wrote:

On 2024-04-29, James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:

This week's Which Nebula Finalists Have You Read features 1981. I remember
it as a good year for SF but it's obvious I'd stopped following magazines
as voraciously as I did in the 1970s.
>
(Also, was never an F&SF fan for some reason)
>
Which 1981 Nebula Finalist Novels Have You Read?
>
Timescape by Gregory Benford
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl
Mockingbird by Walter Tevis
The Orphan by Robert Stallman
The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge
>
All but the Tevis.

>
A good year.  The Wolfe is one of my absolute top Favorites, and the Vinge and
Benford are Favorites.  The Pohl is good (sequel to _Gateway_, a Favorite.)
>
I would have said I read the Tevis, but this was a time when I bought
anything I read, and the only Tevis I have on my bookshelves is the
much earlier _The Man Who Fell to Earth_ (a much better movie than book IMO.)

>
_The Man Who Fell to Earth_, BBC radio recently
put on a one hour adaptation - as of June 6th
it says, "4 days left to listen" meaning here.
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001z63w>
It may come back.

Thanks! Listened and saved. I haven't read the book, but did see
the David Bowie film. From the closeness of this to the film, I
suspect they are both pretty faithful adaptions.
 One thing that stands out is how many of the inventions that
Tevis predicts in his 1963 book have come to pass.

The radio play seemed to include the iPod and
I thought that was possibly not in the book.
And there was some kind of Polaroid camera;
there actually was a color Polaroid camera
and film appearing in 1963, but I think I
remember from later that it involved waiting
and then peeling your printed picture out of
a bundle of chemical placental packaging.
The "inventions" seemed to exist just for the
alien "Man" to raise funds for his rocket project.
I'm uncertain when it's set; the Cold War is on,
the story takes place over years, and at one point,
the "Man" says that his dying planet believes that
humans will destroy themselves in, I think he said
five years, unless they intervene.  The inventions
do also get "borrowed" for U.S. "defence" somehow -
mentioned in the radio version - which presumably
doesn't help with the "end of civilisation" business.