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Post by dem bones on Mar 16, 2009 15:18:45 GMT
Isaac Asimov - Fantastic Voyage (Corgi, 1966) A novel by Isaac Asimov based on a screenplay by Harry Kleiner * Adaptation by David Duncan * Based on a story by Otto Klement & Jay Lewis Bixby The Most Amazing Story You Will Ever Read As Four Men And One Woman Journey Into The Living Body Of A Man!Blurb: A bold journey into a new dimension of entertainment and excitement!
Four men and one woman reduced to a microscopic fraction of their original size, boarding a miniature atomic sub and being injected into a dying man's carotid artery. Fighting their way past giant antibodies, passing through the heart itself, entering the inner ear where even the slightest sound would destroy them, battling relentlessly into the cranium. Their objective ... to reach a blood clot and destroy it with the piercing rays of a laser gun. At stake ... the fate of the entire world. Fantastic Voyage, 1966: Rachel Welch and somebody else share a tense moment. Already have Gary K. Wolf's Killerbowl, three issues of Beyond magazine and a couple of crumpled copies of Fantastic on the go (threads to follow later in week, i hope), and, as if things haven't taken enough of a turn for the Vault of Sci-Fi, now a novelisation by Isaac Bloody Asimov! But even the remote possibility that this could live up to the terrific, ridiculously imaginative film was just too much of a temptation to resist! If the film is anything to go by, then the blurb - enthusiastic as it is - can only hint at the inspired madness of this cold war classic as four American scientists (including double agent the Ples at his most conniving and treacherous) and their unfeasibly glamorous assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch) are shrunk to the size of microdots, poured into futuristic white jumpsuits and injected into the bloodstream of Soviet defector Prof. Jan Benes aboard a miniature atomic submarine (slightly larger microdot). Why? The Professor's life hangs in the balance following an assassination attempt by inscrutable, cold-hearted KGB hit-men, and the Americans need to learn his top secret information to perfect micro-science for the benefit of mankind! Can they reach his cranium and vapourise his brain-clot with their ray gun before the temporary shrinking serum wears off, and they and The Proteus are returned to normal size? And, even if they can accomplish their mission impossible, how are they going to get back out?
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Mar 16, 2009 15:25:51 GMT
Read this recently. Looks a bit like sf to me Dem It's a fairly standard soap opera with tiny people running around and all that cold war, James Bond malarkey. Asimov does a sterling if wooden job and the science is utterly implausible. The book probably fares better than the film except that the ancient special effects lend the film an archaic charm.It's far easier to believe that people have shrunk to the size of microbes when you don't actually see it happening.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 16, 2009 16:50:06 GMT
Looks a bit like sf to me Dem Oh God, I'm on the turn! It will be all gnomes and dragons and "send him to the Dung Pits of Glyve!" and bloody Tolkien next! Speaking of whom, anyone else attempted to read this laugh a millennium pile of old goblins? I really try to find something positive to say about every book i read 'cause they're all mostly entertaining after their own fashion, but in this instance it's no easy job. Douglas C. Kenney & Henry N. Beard - Bored Of The Rings (Signet, 1969) Michael K. Frith From the back cover: 'Never have I laughed so hard at any other book. The Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings is unquestionably a comic masterpiece as well as a brilliant parody of JRR Tolkien's famous The Lord of the Rings trilogy. A gem of irreverence ... filled with an incredible menagerie of mad characters including lustful Elf-maidens and a roller-skating dragon. A side-splitting swipe at the Eternal Quest and the castles, wizards and other folderol of 'ancient' lore ... a Catch-22 for lovers of the days of yore.' - Book Note, Harvard Daily News
A Statement from the authors about this Lampoon edition.
This paperback edition, and no other, has been published solely for the purpose of making a few bucks. Those who approve of courtesy to a certain author will not touch this gobbler with a ten-foot battle-lance. Managed twenty eight pages before telling Bored Of The Rings what it could do with itself, but that Terry Sharpe of paperback critics, Alwyn at Trash Fiction (i.e., "he goes through Hell so you won't have to") is made of stronger stuff and endured the entire desperately unrewarding 160 pages. See what it did to him at: Trash Fiction: Bored of the Rings Anyway, back to Fantastic Voyage, and i've just been tipped off that Asimov insisted on ironing out some of the plot inconsistencies and bad science from the screenplay, so, if there's any truth to it, thanks for that, Mr. Taking-It-All-Too-Seriously. Also, he's given all eighteen chapters single-word headings ('Plane', 'Car', 'Lung', 'Ear', etc.. I'm only on page 3 and Cora has yet to receive a mention, so best get a few chapters under my belt before resuming transmission.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Mar 16, 2009 18:41:54 GMT
Blurrred of the wrongs: If I remember the blurb was good about the elves in tights but the entertainment stopped there.
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Post by franklinmarsh on Mar 17, 2009 9:33:42 GMT
What have you been drinking, Dem? ? Bloody SF?!?!?!?! Bored Of The Rings is terrific - but it does help if you know a bit about (zzzzz) LOTR. Funnier than the Bond parody Alligator (which was more a parody of Fleming's writing style than out and out humour) and much better than Doon. Ahem. Fantastic Voyage. Seen the film. Donald Pleasence must get an award for most unusual film death, surely?
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oatcakeredux
Crab On The Rampage
I STILL know where the yellow went.
Posts: 41
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Post by oatcakeredux on Dec 28, 2012 1:48:20 GMT
According to Asimov, when his young daughter saw the film, she immediately inquired of the ending: "But Daddy, won't the submarine now just expand and kill that man from the inside?" As Asimov pointed out to her, she was an intelligent child, and not a Hollywood scriptwriter...sure enough, it was one of the major loopholes that he at least took care to address!
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