Word: fi
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...soul shriveled. "Gentle reader," he writes, "the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description." Which Burroughs of course describes, in language both raw and heroically ironic. The novel is a detective story in which the private eye is desperate to forget, not learn, life's mysteries; or maybe sci-fi set in the lunar wastes of an addict's mind; or else it's a spy story, in which the secret agent is bug powder...
Maybe the college professors think Shakespeare produced only 37 plays, but this off-Broadway lark is the Bard's long-lost science-fiction rock musical. Small of scale and free of spirit, it features the obligatory mad monster, fair maiden, evil scientist and heroic space pilot. Sci-fi junkies will recognize the plot from the 1956 MGM flick Forbidden Planet, which the more literary-minded in turn saw as an amalgam of Shakespeare's The Tempest and dime-store Freud. (The killer demons were escapees from the id of a man who, like most sci-fi antiheroes, tried to play...
...York shows provide classic entertainment. Prom Queens is a way-too-familiar pastiche of '50s high school intrigue and sci-fi frissons; it plays like Little Shop of Grease. Hasselfree's The Edge of the Knife, with a soap-opera setting, gets most of its humor from the audience; participants are asked to guess the murderer's identity and motive. A bit higher up the food chain, Forever Plaid uses the singers' plangent harmonics to camouflage a thin book. And you need a doctorate in Broadway shows and lore to get all the jokes in the new edition of Forbidden...
Like one of King's long-winded novels, Golden Years takes its sweet time unfolding. But the result is unusually dense and evocative TV drama. At times the show recalls another TV excursion into paranoid sci-fi: The Prisoner. That short-lived cult hit came and went during the summer...
...that the picture will be a hit -- not because it is so smart about many small things but because it is so shameless in promoting its one big thing. Like the other sigh-fi movies, Regarding Henry says any mortal catastrophe offers an opportunity to erase the chalkboard mess we have made of our lives. We can make amends and have great sex too. By serving up comfy antidotes to illness and death, these movies provide a seductively meretricious form of release: New Age religion on the cheap. How like Hollywood to insist that the slogging drama of most people...