• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

"Other" Science Fiction

kafka47

kafka47

SOC-14 5K
Marquis
Now, I know the CofI is a pretty diverse place but clearly it is people from the USA and the UK who dominate these discussions. Nowhere is this more evident in the cultural references that we use to describe the Official Traveller Universe, we usually describe it in terms of books/movies released in either country or have authors that hail from those parts.

Have others come across other literary or movies from not the USA or Great Britain that inspire their campaigns.

I use in my Traveller Universe:

Alexander Beliaev
Kir Bulychev
Nalo Hopkinson
Jiří Kulhánek
Kimmo Lehtonen
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

several Manga authors notable Makoto Yukimura's Planetes

How about the rest of you?
 
Interesting stuff.

Despite arguably the first sf author being French, and the next few greats English, SF is the American literary artform.

SF has been defined, in both text, sequential art, and moving picture by US artistes in the 20's & 30's. Here's where the tropes developed that we still see everywhere today. So even if British sf is going along great guns, it still is indelibly linked to the US stuff. Same with the Japanese stuff, whether manga, anime, or movie, though with it's own obviously idiosyncratic style.

And that's all the mainstream knows.

I want to find out about French sf. I know there's loads of comics, and there's loads of films, but at least here in the UK it's almost impossible to get any info about it. General anti-French prejudice in the media I guess.

As for eastern European stuff, that's another intriguing source. I've read Yevgany Zamyatin, and some Stanislav Lem, but the other stuff you mention is new to me. Thankyou.

What I'd really like to see is a Bollywood sci-fi blockbuster - they should remake the SW prequels as musicals. :)
 
kafka47 said:
How about the rest of you?
Click to expand...

I was surprised by the Crusher Joe Movie + OVAs. While they do go overboard, I like some of the ideas in there, namely there's a large corp that can do amazing things.

If you remove some of the goofy-ness, I could see some ideas, like the Crushers founding their mega-corp on Ancient-discoveries (or lost 2i technology) that enables them to terraform worlds, or alter them in significant ways -- without it all happening overnight or throughout the Imperium (meaning every sector).

On a more natural scale, the Crushers still perform basic tasks common to every Traveller setting, so belting, freight transport and mercenary work can still occur while they're building a ringworld or something equally fantastic (over the course of several centuries).

If the Firefly setting can have rampant & successful terraforming...just an idea.

I'll have to ply thru this thread some more...
http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php?t=1023&page=1
 
Other than a few Brit authors & Jules Verne, I never got into much European SF. I have added some from Japanese Manga in my more recent games over the last 15 years. One of the few European SF films that inspired me for my game was Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires which I saw when I was young.
 
Actually quite a bit of SciFi written here in Germany. Just not what you would consider "big literature"

+ We have "Perry Rhodan" and it's Spin-Off "Atlan", likely the two longest running Sci-Fi "Pulps" with 2400 numbers (50-70 pages A5 each) published since 1961 for the former alone. They are in the 5th reprint (6th in E-Book), has been re-printed in 300+ pages compilations and even had a (lousy) film made in 1967. Atlan made 850 numbers and is currently in reprint

+ Short-lived pulp Ren Dark that has been reprinted in bookform in the 2000s and has new storys in book form written

+ Clark Dalton and K.H.Scheer (two Perry Rhodan Authors) have each written quite a few 100-120pages paperbacks in the 60th/70th

+ K.H.Scheer has written the 50 paperbacks (around 120pages each) of the ZbV SciFi Series in the 70s/80s. Theme is humans recovering alien artifacts/stations on the moon and using them, causing a lot of problems. Would make a nice SciFi RPG

+ Raumpatrollie aka Orion with about 150 pulps, seven one hour TV shows (With high quality german actors of their time, more TNG than TOS from the actors) and some new books (120pages paperbacks) published in the 80s

+ Hans Dominik wrote a number of fantastic/SciFi novels(16) and short stories in the 1920s/30s

+ Metropolis is a german movie

+ Thomas Ziegler and his SciFi "Flaming Bess" combined a tough action heroine, and oddball cast of support characters and some humor in the late 1980s

+ Enemy Mine, Moon 44 and StarGate(Movie) are made by german directors

+ LexX was a Canadian-German Co-Production (sadly)

And so on. Quite a bit of German SciFi just never leaves the german market due to language problems. Well, guess that will have to wait until we conquer the world in a few millenias ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top