james_davis_nicoll | Entries tagged with 2000x

The Thing Happens part 1
The Thing Happens part 2

In an England effectively run by seductive Negresses and cunning Orientals, functionaries near the top of the government struggle to deal with the revelation that a very small fraction of the population lives many times longer than the average person.

You know, I honestly cannot recall the last time I read or heard something that included the sentence "If the white race is to be saved, our destiny is apparent."

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4420167.html

The Pillar of Fire

Alone in a dreadful world of rationalists, the last dead man on Earth rises to create more of his kind.

I think I read this in a massive tome of Bradbury stories I was sent ten years ago. Has the usual features of a Bradbury from horrified rejection of modernity to an expectation that book burning was going to come back in a big way.

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4419317.html

The Marching Morons

Yeah, this one: a man of our time helps the geniuses of tomorrow murder their dumber, far more numerous relatives.

Ellison seems to think this story was in some way daring.

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4409687.html

Hunting Season

A political dissident from the highest caste of an authoritarian society is sentenced to be transported to the past, where he will be hunted down for sport by his fellow elite. The inherent flaws in a system that cannot admit the State ever makes mistakes or falls short of its goals works for him.

Frank M. Robinson is justly famous and generally not known for happy endings, so I was half-expecting for this to go in a different direction than it did.

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4406779.html

Mad Planet Part 1
Mad Planet Part 2

In a distant future when rising CO2 levels have returned the Earth to an age of giant insects, a barely intelligent human struggles to reinvent cunning and tool use as he attempts to survive getting lost in his hellish world.

Read the original story here. I think there's a version where the Mad Planet is an alien world that has been terraformed. On the whole the play is faithful to the original (which even in its day got criticized for the endless battles with the giant bugs) but there's an odd passing comment assuring the listener that the extra C02 is *not* anthropogenic.

You don't get giant bugs from high CO2, I don't think. The Carboniferous has oxygen levels of 35% iirc, which would compensate for the deficient breathing apparatus of the arthropods. Be interesting to toss around what an Earth descended from ours that had wandered into a high-greenhouse, high O2 situation would be like 30,000 years on; nothing like Leiber imagines, I expect.

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4404292.html

Hurricane Trio

Intervention by kindly aliens transforms a would-be philanderer and his door-mat wife into a more confident would-be philanderer and an angelic door-mat, allowing them to become polyamorists.

Yeah, didn't really work for me.

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4403372.html

Anthony & Cleopatra All For Love parts 1
Anthony & Cleopatra All For Love parts 2

I think this is an abridged version of Shakespeare's play (which I am not familiar with) which has been science-fictionized by John Dryden. Skiffenizing seems to have been accomplished by replacing "Rome" with "Terra" and "Egypt" with "Venus" and similar replacements.

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4398342.html

A Curious Fragment

Centuries after the fall of the Overman regime (and the presumed freeing of all the enslaved workers of the Earth), an Overman-era recording comes to light. In it, a story-teller relates the tale of how slaves at a particularly awful factory struggled to have the legal rights the ruling classes claimed slaves had acknowledged by their owner. The victory can only be temporary: even if one owner has an epiphany, his heir may be a monster. Therefore the only reasonable course of action to rise up against the owners.

The cast included Erik Bauersfeld and Stefan Rudnicki.

The storyteller makes a point of undermining the status of the local industrial oligarchs by revealing the Vanderwaters were once slaves themselves; their founder won aristocratic status for his children through a life-long campaign of betraying his fellow slaves.

In general 2000x has excellent acting and production values. This particular episode had a decent story to go with them.

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4397185.html

Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow (based on a story by Kurt Vonnegut) & The Only Bird in Her Name (based on a story by Terry Dowling)

Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow

Thanks to the invention of an anti-aging drug, the world is overcrowded and at least for the family in this story, ruled by the cruel whims of the deathless elders. With no other way to clear the boards, people's thoughts turn to murder and other underhanded tricks.

Interesting that the population crush is caused not by the more common birth rates GONE MAD! but the elimination of death (or at least, a significant deferment of death for most people). It's less interesting that the population that has the population of Earth living like the inhabitants of a Soviet-era tenement is just twelve billion people: it's one part SF authors have no sense of scale and one part this particular family is determined to stay in their family apartment in New York despite the fact if they all do this, their living conditions become nearly intolerable.

The Only Bird in Her Name

A journalist monitors the final hunt of a "forgetty", a shape-shifter that can steal memories. She and the guy trying to keep the hunters from killing an intelligent being hit it off, only one reason why her neutrality in the matter is open to question.

The story itself was fine but a lot of the background details needed more explanation.

The technical quality of this episode and the acting is very good.

Huh.

Just stumbled over this. Can anyone else download the episodes?

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4394697.html

R.U.R.

This is the famous play from which we get the word "robot" (although the robots in this are actually androids). A brilliant man works out how to create artificial life (or rather, how to exploit a replicating chemistry unlike ours that he stumbled over to create analogs of existing lifeforms), his son works out how to apply that to the problem of how to produce cheap labour and we go on from there. There's a female lead who is vaguely concerned about the exploitation of the robots but she is quickly bribed with the chance to marry a man she just met and does not do much for the next decade. Probably for the best because what she does do is arguably highly counter-productive.

The robots rebel, of course, and the humans prove utterly incapable of producing a useful reaction to this. Instead, they spend the time as the robot hordes gather speculating why the robots rebelled just now and if they could have prevented it.

It actually goes on for a surprisingly long time after the fall of the humans and the ending is, to use a technical phrase, a complete ass-pull. I kept expecting it to be over and then it wasn't. I found the script uneven (although again, great technical qualities and the actors were good) but there were some good lines and I don't regret having listened to it.