Silent running

Saturday night I finally got around to watching Silent Running. I can certainly forgive anyone who thought that movie was an inspiration for Unity, because it certainly would have been if Rendezvous with Rama hadn't. I highly, highly recommend watching it. (I also find it interesting that both things came out the same year.)

Also, read Rama, while we're at it. Although you shouldn't bother with the sequels "coauthored with" (i.e. almost entirely written by) Gentry Lee. They start out okay but get pretty terrible pretty quickly (with thinly-veiled SOCIAL COMMENTARY and an overly-literal deus ex machina) and use cheap cliffhanger tactics to keep you reading them even though they are not at all worth the effort, and it upsets me that some part of my memory is now involuntarily devoted to them.

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06/01/2009 05:21 am 
Whoa, music by Peter Schickele? This is an aspect of his career that I was previously unaware of.

I was curious about the Rama sequels since the game draws on them, but every time I flipped through them I got the feeling I shouldn't bother.
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06/01/2009 07:18 am 
I never got very far in the game. I could tell pretty quickly that it was going to be a frustratingly stupid experience.

And yeah, apparently Schickele did several movie soundtracks before he got his real fame as PDQ Bach. Although frankly, if they were to remaster Silent Running, I'd hope the soundtrack would be one of the things they changed. The incidental music is pretty good but the "montage sequences" need to not have Joan Baez warbling/screeching about the flowers or whatever.
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06/01/2009 09:55 am 
I should clarify, I never actually played the game; I just watched a bunch of gameplay videos on Youtube.

One odd thing about Rendezvous With Rama is there seems to be no mention of what the inner surface outside of the "towns" really looks like. It could all be bare metal except for the sea and the odd stuff on the other side, without contradicting the text, as far as I can tell.
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06/01/2009 10:36 am 
As I recall, it was some sort of vague metallic/plastic material which was specifically left to the reader's imagination under the auspices of "sufficiently advanced technology." It's been a while since I read it, though, but at least in my imagination it was this gleamy nondescript white stuff.
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