World Famous Comics: The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies 1 (Rough Guide Reference)
The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies 1 (Rough Guide Reference)
By: John Scalzi Publisher: Rough Guides Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Rough Guides Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 325 Publication Date: October 17, 2005
Product Description: The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies is a comprehensive guide to the ''final frontier'' of film. It explores our fascination with space exploration, time travel, fantastical worlds and alternative futures. This guide explains how everything from the philosophy of Plato to classic Victorian tales and cult comic books have helped to create one of cinema''s most engaging genres. Discover the classics from Mexico, Russia and Japan, not forgetting the Anime science fiction tradition, along with everything else you need to know from Metropolis to Star Wars, via Blade Runner, 2001 and Alien. The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies is your essential guide to a galaxy of film unbounded by time or space.
Scalzi takes a pretty even-handed look at the movies, giving a literature background to start with, an introduction to films, and then listing his 50 important selections.
He also takes a look at tv, music, and important figures or characters from the various productions. He even mentions novelisations which he thinks are good (ET, and Buckaroo Banzai) and the Abyss, which I don't remember reading if I did, but I agree with the first two, and am still looking for a copy of Buckaroo.
Also a section on non-English films.
If you are quite familiar with all this already, you don't need this book, as you will have seen all of them and know most of it, barring the odd Mexican wrestler movie perhaps. Even so, it would be a useful reference, and certainly excellent as an introduction to those that are new.
It is also an annoying odd square shape to some degree.
Worth owning, but get his other books first. I really like John Scalzi's work.
If you haven't read Old Man's War, you are missing a treat.
This is not a bad guide, and Mr. Scalzi's humor and wit come shining through. The edition I recieved is full of typos that seem pretty glaring, and I found them extremely distracting.
I enjoyed this book very much overall, but don't make this your frist Scalzi purchase. Get Old Man's War first!
Pretty good source, but not as good as it might have been I picked this one up because (1) I'm a fan of Scalzi's fiction and (2) I'm a fan of science fiction films from way back. It turns out to be a very useful combination of obscure information, literary and cinematic theory, film history, and pure, unadulterated fandom. (I knew I was in the right book when the author paused at the very beginning to explain the difference, to fans, between "SF" and "sci-fi.") He selects fifty films from the past century as his "Canon" and discusses them in detail, pointing out the many interconnections and derivations, and tossing off scores of highly quotable lines; of _Buckaroo Banzai_ (one of my own favorites), he comments, "Don't be ashamed to laugh at this movie; just be aware of what that laugh says about you." But he also provides a "warp-speed" history of the science fiction cinema, which allows him to give brief mention of many other films, both good and bad (and very, very bad). Likewise, there's an idiosyncratic chapter on the "faces of sci-fi film," crossover films, the pseudoscience that backs them, and the state of SF film-making in various countries. There's a great deal of good stuff here and I began making a list at the very beginning of films I hadn't seen that I wanted to (not many of those) and those I'd seen in the past and now wanted to see again (lots and lots of those). It's a shame, then, that the copyediting was so poorly done; it's difficult to find three pages in a row without a horrendous typo, misspelling, or apparent missing word. (And, no, you don't capitalize every single word in an italicized title.)
Fun, light reading This was a generally fun book. It is not designed to be read cover to cover, but picked at. It's lighthearted and I think it is pretty fair to the movies it covers. It also notes which movies (like Blade Runner) were very influential on those that followed. If you're a big science fiction fan, you probably won't learn too much that's new, but you'll learn some, and you'll have fun.
Decent if imperfect reference book To someone unfamiliar with the genre, science fiction movies can appear to be a collection of awful movies that rely on little more than cheesy special effects. To some extent, it's true: to paraphrase Sturgeon's Law (he was a sci-fi writer), 90% of science fiction is garbage, but 90% of everything is garbage. There are plenty of lousy science fiction movies out there, but there are also some real gems.
The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies is a decent, though not perfect, reference book about these movies. It starts with a brief history of science fiction literature and then gives a history of sci-fi at the cinema, from the early silent days through the serials of the 1930s to the "golden age" of the 1950s to the darker works of the 1970s to the special effects driven movies of modern times. Essentially, however, the history of sci-fi films can be divided into two periods: Before Star Wars and After Star Wars.
The Guide also provides what the author, John Scalzi considers to be the key 50 movies. As he admits up front, you may disagree with his choices as I certainly did, but many of his choices are solid ones: choices such as Blade Runner, Star Wars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey have to rate on the list of anyone familiar with the genre.
There are also sections on the faces of science fiction, the locations of science fiction and science fiction movies produced around the world, as well as a couple other sections. While not comprehensive, the book doesn't really neglect anything truly significant either. For a reference book, however, we do get a lot of opinion, and for a book that seems to be well put together, there are lots of typographical errors. This is not a great book, but it is good enough (maybe a low four stars) and for an introduction to these movies, it is more than adequate.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
