Rating “Cyberfilms” (Part 5)

Welcome to the final installment of Rating “Cyberfilms”! This has been a lot of fun, but it’s also turned out to be much more work that I initially expected. Mostly because the reviews kept getting increasingly longer, I guess I can’t just write a couple of paragraphs on a story. We’re finishing the series today with George R. R. Martin’s Nightflyers and H. P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator. To learn more about the series and to see previous reviews, read parts 1, 2, 3 and 4!

Nightflyers (George R. R. Martin)
1980
Score: A+

Robert Jaffe adopted this story into the movie of the same name. It was directed by Robert Collector and starred Catherine Mary Stewart, Michael Praed and John Standing.

She put an arm around him, stroked him, coaxed him. “The esperon will give you range,” she said. “Feel it, feel yourself grow stronger. Can you feel it? Everything’s getting clear, isn’t it? “Her voice was a reassuring drone. “Remember the danger now, remember, go find it. Look beyond the wall, tell us about it. Tell us about Royd. Was he telling the truth? Tell us. You’re good, we all know that, you can tell us.” The phrases were almost an incantation.

He shrugged off her support and sat upright by himself. “I can feel it,” he said. His eyes were suddenly clearer. “Something – my head hurts – I’m afraid!”

“Don’t be afraid,” the psipsych said. “The esperon won’t make your head hurt, it just makes you better. Nothing to fear.” She stroked his brow. “Tell us what you see.”

The telepath looked at Royd’s [holograph] with terrified little-boy eyes, and his tongue flicked across his lower lip. “He’s -”

Then his skull exploded.

George R. R. Martin’s Nightflyers kept me up way past my bedtime. “Cyberfilms” had died on me a bit when I got to this, the last story of the book (I had skipped ahead to Herbert West: Reaminator early on). The previous two entries hadn’t been all that great, and I went into Nightflyers with a “just one more story and I’m done!” attitude. And this turned out to be the best story in the book! So much that I read its 62 pages in one go.

Nightflyers takes place in a very distant future – space travel has gone hyperspace, humanity has spread across the galaxy and made contact with several alien races. But mysteries still remain, and one of them is the Volcryn. The Volcryn are a myth – nobody has ever seen them, nobody knows what they are, nobody is sure whether they even exist. But all intelligent races make references to them in their scripture, and evidence points to an entity that, for eons, has been traveling from the center of the universe towards its outer reaches – at sub light speeds and for no apparent reason! The possibility of this galactic trek is exciting philosophers and scientists alike.

Karoly d’Branin is one of these scientists. Intent on proving the Volcryn’s existence, and maybe even making contact, he has assembled a team of cyberneticists, xenobiologists, linguists and telepaths to intercept the Volcryn before they leave the galaxy. To do so, the team has chartered a small spaceship: the Nightflyer, commandeered by Captain Royd Eris. And this is where the real mystery begins: all of the ship’s functions are automated; the captain’s quarters are hermetically sealed off from the rest of the ship; and Royd, who never leaves his quarters and only attends group functions as a holographic projection, might not be what he claims to be. To make matters even more interesting, Royd has compete surveillance of the entire ship, and he enjoys watching the passengers without their knowledge. When the team’s telepath senses a dangerous alien presence onboard the ship, suspicions naturally focus on the mysterious Royd. Especially when everybody who tries to home in on Royd’s identity starts experiencing untimely deaths.

Who is Royd? What are the Volcryn? As the Nightflyer and its dwindling group of passengers head towards the outer reaches of the galaxy, they also head towards a final showdown that will unravel these mysteries.

I need to add author George R. R. Martin to my reading list. This is his second story in “Cyberfilms” (the first one being Sandkings), and it equally captured my imagination. Martin’s story is part Sphere, part Well of Souls, part Alien - and couple of other elements that shall remain unnamed as to not give away the story. The result is exactly to my taste: the suspense and immediacy of a confined space that is turning into a death trap, similar to what Michael Crichton did in Sphere; the secrets and uncertainty surrounding captain Royd Eris (similar to Jack Chalker’s character ‘Nathan Brazil’); and the hint of a larger universe that is complete yet mysterious. As I was reading the story I was constantly revising my theories about the various mysteries that surround the Nightflyer’s journey, and while the final resolution isn’t quite as satisfying and I hoped for (Martin fails to conclusively connect two major story elements), it’s the journey alone that makes this reading experience so worthwhile, not the destination.

It seems that the movie adaptation of this story turned out to be a big turd. I can see how that could happen – Nightflyers is a genre story for a small (dominantly male) demographic, and if not executed in a careful and meticulous way, many of the things that read compellingly might appear laughable when committed to the screen. Many of Crichton’s stories have met the same fate – the movie adaptation of Sphere hardly captured the book’s atmosphere either.

So for Nightflyers, I’ll be content with just having read the story. It works great when the reader’s imagination is allowed to run wild with the material. A movie version might trivialize the adventure, and that would certainly leave a dent in the experience that George R. R. Martin created for me.

Herbert West: Reanimator (H. P. Lovecraft)
1922
Score: B-

This story turned into the movie Re-Animator, written by Dennis Paoli, William Norris & Stuart Gordon, directed by Stuart Gordon, and starring Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Abbot and David Gale.

H. P. Lovecraft. Next to Edgar Allen Poe, no other writer has influenced so many generations of horror writers. And just like Lovecraft has inspired a legion of authors, his stories have inspired countless movies, of which Re-Animator is probably the most famous. I’ve never seen the movie, but certainly know of the movie. Including it’s famous scene involving Barbara Crampton and David Gale. Apparently it’s one of Peter Jackson’s favorite horror movies, he talks about it a fair bit in The Frighteners production diaries. I don’t find that hard to believe. Jackson’s sensibilities (as seen in his early horror movies) seem very close to what I do know about Re-Animator.

But from what I gather, the film is only marginally related to H. P. Lovecraft’s original story. So let’s forget about the movie (which I will have to watch at some point, though), and let’s talk about the 1922 story instead!

Herbert West: Reanimator is told by a nameless narrator, a fellow doctor who was companion to (and willing helper of) Herbert West through 17 years of gruesome reanimation experiments. Herbert West is a brilliant young doctor who, during his student years, formed the theory that life is solely mechanistic and can be revived. In other words, concepts like the passing of a soul don’t exist, any body part can be brought back to life after death – it will function exactly like it did before its death. If the entire body is reanimated, the person will come back without a lapse in memory and function exactly as he did before death. West’s big challenge is finding bodies that are fresh enough to be reanimated without negative side effects. Any decay of the body’s tissue will result in…well, less than perfect reanimation results. A large part of the story concerns itselves with the efforts of West and his nameless companion to gain access to fresh specimens for their experiments, without raising the suspicion of the local populace. The remainder details the results of the actual experiments.

Herbert West: Reanimator is split into six parts, each of which reintroduces the characters and previous events as if each episode had been written individually (which they had been, as I have now come to find out). We follow Herbert West’s exploits for almost two decades years, at the end of which stands his disappearance. For a complete synopsis of each episode, check out the Wikipedia page for this story.

For all his notoriety, this was my first exposure to Lovecraft’s writing. And I can certainly see what the fuss is all about! Lovecraft’s prose is obviously from a past age, and the writing dates itself. But it doesn’t appear outdated! Lovecraft’s writing feels stylishly old-fashioned, weaving a very deep atmosphere. With that said, any story written 90 years ago will feel somewhat antiquated today, and if I don’t give the story a higher rating it’s mostly for the lack of truly gripping content. Lovecraft story is unusual (if not so say “visionary”) for its time and contains several evocative situations, but the actual events that he describes are decidedly tame by today’s standard. Especially when you compare it go gore fests like Re-Animator. Lovecraft’s story contain’s undead arms that need to be put down with shotguns and detached talking heads. But it doesn’t further these ideas in ways that the movie did

After reading Herbert West: Reanimator, I bought the entire collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s work, and I’m slowly making my way through the stories. Sometimes it’s slow going, but it’s educational beyond belief! Lovecraft’s body of work is oozing vision.

And with that, “Cyberfilms” is over. Reading this book turned out to be a good idea. Some of the stories were a blast to read, some were more on the educational side. By in hindsight, it was an enlightening experience. My work here is done, now it’s your time to start reading! You might even want to start with the story I just reviewed, much of Lovecraft’s work is in the public domain now and freely available on the internet. This page has a complete reprint of Herbert West: Reanimator. Let me know if you liked it!