Juri Nummelin (jurnum@utu.fi)
Tue, 24 Aug 1999 13:57:29 +0300 (EET DST)
On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Etienne Borgers wrote:
> - HB in SF novels can be rather easily found, as
some
> SF was dedicated to action/adventure kind of
stories,
> mixing also crimes etc, and a lot of writers
were
> doing genre-crossing back in the 50's and
60's
Could we think of Doc Savage and the like as hardboiled
SF/fantasy?
> - I personally pretend it's more difficult
to
> designate Noir in SF *novels*, because
speculative
> and pessimistic SF was often more
"existentialist"
> than Noir only. (On the contrary of some SF
films
> where references to film Noir are
obvious)
>
> I also consider 'I am a Legend' by the great
Matheson
> not only a masterpiece of American SF, but
definitely
> a novel of Noir inspiration. But Matheson
was
> crossing genres, as you know.
In the great anthology "American Pulp" (edited by Gorman,
Greenberg and Pronzini) there is a great noir masterpiece by
Matheson, "The Frigid Flame". I haven't read anything so
poetic in this genre (Ray Bradbury aside, but Matheson didn't
have his artfulness, which is boring at times).
> The film based on it: Omega Man, is
totally
> different, kept only some Noir traits.
> But still OK (but not great) ...if you ignore
the
> novel.
Filmographies claim that George Romero's "Night of the Living
Dead" was loosely based on "I Am Legend". I haven't read the
book or seen "Omega Man", do they really relate?
> There are other examples of SF being "films
Noir",
> but not that many, as SF lost his grip as a
cinema
> genre at the end of the 70's and during the 80's,
and
> Star War did only some good to a short revival
of
> space opera kind of movies.
In the fifties there were a couple of film noirs that told
about the nuclear disasters: "Kiss Me Deadly", "The City of
Fear" and "Panic in the Streets". Could they be classified as
SF? What about "The Forbidden Planet"? And there is a great
noir element in Jack Arnold's films, such as
"It Came from Outer Space".
> The Terminator (part 1),
There is the famous scene in the bar that Schwarzenegger
destroys: he is seen in the foreground and the neon lights go
blinking: "TECH NOIR".
As for "Dark City", the beginning and the atmosphere are
great, but the ending is weak hullabaloo and at times
preposterous. I don't think it as film noir, it resembles
more the German expressionistic movies from the twenties. And
so does Tim Burton's "Batman Returns".
> On the literary side, I think it's rather
limited,
> when compared to the number of SF novels that
were
> produced.
In my youth I used to play with a thought that I'd write a
series of a PI in outer space, in some long-forgotten part on
the universe (the name of my PI was ridiculous: Anton Krupa),
where there was nothing else to do than kill each other or
stuff like that. I never got aroung to it, but this should be
easy thing to do. There would a greater variety of jobs for a
PI in space.
Juri jurnum@utu.fi
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Tue 24 Aug 1999 - 06:58:02 EDT