Rating “Cyberfilms” (Part 3)

On to part 3 of the Cyberfilms feature! This part adds two reviews that I left out from the last post, because that article was getting too long for my liking. If you haven’t done so already, I suggest reading part 1 and part 2 of the series first! You will get an introduction to the book and insight on the stories that have already been reviewed. As with the other posts, you should be aware that this article might contain spoilers for the featured stories! (Some pretty big ones for the The Forbidden review.)

Air Raid (John Varley)
1977
Score: A

Air Raid was adapted into the movie Millennium by the author. The movie was directed by Michael Anderson, and starred Kris Kristofferson, Cheryl Ladd and Daniel J. Travanti.

Ah, John Varley. I’m a big fan of his Gaea cycle, and was captivated by this short short story (12 pages) as well.

Air Raid is one of those ‘clever’ titles. The story isn’t about an air strike – there’s no approaching fighter planes, no howling sirens, no people scrambling for cover. No, Air Raid is about a group of human time travelers from the future, who come back to our time to steal the travelers of airplanes that are doomed to fatally crash. Does that make sense?

It doesn’t really have to, because part of the fun reading this story is figuring out what the hell is going on. Varley dumps the reader into a universe in which the protagonist wakes up on an alarm, plugs in his leg, changes the oil in his human veins, straps into his command chair, and surgically alters his entire appearance to that of a female flight attendant from 1979 while reading the mission briefing. A short while later, the future crew has traveled back in time, dispatched of the regular flight attendants, sent them back through the time portal, and is in the process of infiltrating the 1979 flight.

Turns out that the far future is about as dystopian and destroyed as it gets. Humanity has reached a dead end: sterile, used up, and only keeping itself alive through medical rejuvenation processes that would do Brazil and Death Becomes Her proud. In order to guarantee the survival of the race, the remaining human survivors have devised a method of traveling back in time and abducting healthy humans from the 20th century, which are sent to repopulate new planets and thus keep the human line alive. The only problem being the inevitable time paradox that such abductions create: the space-time continuum is fickle, and will simply not tolerate any changes in the past that would alter history. That’s why this future group is raiding airplanes that fatally crashed in the past. Only by getting everybody out of the plane before it goes down, and by replacing all of the abductees with carefully modeled counterfeit bodies, does the continuum stay intact. As far as the past is concerned, events transpired exactly the same way as they would have. Everybody on the plane has died and is accounted for. But the future humans have taken another step towards guaranteeing the survival of the race.

This story just works for me. The beginning is a bit disorienting, but once all the pieces fall into place and the “Aha!” effect starts kicking in, it’s a great experience. I love the elegance with which Varley solves the time travel paradox that has given nightmares to generations of science fiction writers. And his writing is right up my alley. Clear and concise, but still evocative.

As for the movie – I don’t know. Varley adapted this story himself, but it’s very clear from reading the IMDB synopsis that he had to make major changes to the movie’s structure and point of view to make it work in cinematic fashion. Which is okay – I’m not sure if anybody could identify with the story’s main character, if his (her?) physical appearance stayed intact and his/her actions were faithfully recreated. He doesn’t win any bonus points for subtlety or charm in the first 2/3 of the story!
Which leaves the potential for a fun little conspiracy story set in contemporary times, I guess. Given a big enough budget, and a cast of contemporary main characters, that might have worked out okay. I can’t be sure until I watch the movie, though (which only has a 5.4 rating on IMDB).

The Forbidden (Clive Barker)
1985
Score: A-

This story was adapted into the movie Candyman, written and directed by Bernard Rose, and starring Virginia Madsen and Tony Todd.

Clive Barker is nothing if not eloquent. Reading The Forbidden, I was left wondering if Barker had accidentally swallowed a dictionary as a child, given the number of “big” and uncommon words he manages to squeeze into every sentence of his story. Most of the time, that style of writing weaves an incredibly dense atmosphere. Other times, it comes off as pretentious.

After reading The Forbidden and Herbert West: Reanimator, I had a literary epiphany. I was able to connect the two: Barker clearly channels H.P. Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic horror in this story. The universe is fundamentally alien and many dangerous entities are lurking in the dark corners of the world – but only those who seek them out, who display an unusual amount of curiosity, come in contact with these creatures. The protagonists usually pay for their curiosity with the loss of their sanity – or life.

Helen Buchanan is such a person. Initially attracted to Spector Street, a failed social experiment/housing complex, by its prolific collection of graffiti (which he hopes to document for a research paper), Helen is entranced by a particularly compelling portrait of a fiendish face that was painted in a dark, abandoned apartment of the complex. Helen is quickly drawn deep into Spector Street’s mysteries as she starts interviewing the inhabitants of the housing complex, discovering a murder mystery that surrounds the place. Several people have been killed or mutilated in gruesome ways, but nobody seems to be particularly interested in solving these heinous crimes. So Helen digs deeper. All hints that she discovers lead to the Candyman, of course – even though Helen doesn’t necessarily know it. But it is her investigation that actually summons the Candyman: “You weren’t content with the stories, with what they wrote on the walls” he says during their initial meeting. “So I was obliged to come.” Talk about a way to establish character motivation!
In best Lovecroftian tradition, Helen’s pays the price for her compulsive curiosity. At several points in the story, she has the chance to let go of Spector Street and to run away. But she doesn’t, and loses her life for it.

This is a great story, and I’m deeply impressed by Clive Barker’s writing. If only there wasn’t the nagging feeling of pretentiousness! It’s an entirely subjective feeling, and it’s probably just me. But hey, it’s there. Of course I have never watched Candyman, which has become somewhat of a cult classic. So I’m finding it hard to express an opinion on the story’s screen worthiness. I do know that the differences between story and movie seem to be many, but I also get the feeling that the spirit of the short story might have been retained in the movie. I’ll have to watch at some point. Until then, the feelings I expressed about Sandkings apply here, as well: what makes this story work is how character-centric it is. That focus on the character and her compulsion need to be retained for the movie to stay true to its origin (I can imagine a movie with a cast of two). If not…well, I guess Candyman is commonly regarded as a slasher classic – but funnily enough, The Forbidden is very reserved in this regard, without any prolonged graphic depictions of violence.

Rating “Cyberfilms” will return after the weekend. We have “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Enemy Mine” lined up!