Logan's Run

by William F. Nolan

Peek.

Peek is kind of fitting since this is a society of voyuers and peepers in the book! Ha!

Peek.

This is an insidious dystopia in which children are forced to pay for the mistakes and shortcuts taken by long-dead generations of adults (who, let’s face it, should have known better). The true enemies are not the Sandmen who hunt runners, but past generations—the

Sounds like our society in the U.S.!

The DNA of this story is ingrained in our own society. Should we depend so much on our technology for entertainment, for information, for communication? How much should we expose our children to technology? Have we adults forgotten how to be alone? Are we being isolated? Blinded?

Deep Sleep men

The man looked at his palm. The flower bloomed red, then black, then red. “Did you ever wonder if the Thinker makes mistakes, the same as people do? Because it doesn’t seem like I’ve turned twenty-one.

I find two thing interesting in this from book to movie. One is the age difference of 21 (book) to 30 (movie.) Also I found the way the film starts with a new life. Logan 5 and Francis 7 are looking in on a nursery at Logan 6 and celebrating the birth of a new Sandman or what Logan 5 hopes will be a new Sandman. The book starts on a public transportation vehicle with a man on last day professing his loyalty to the system and how Noble Sandmen are and his appreciation for the sleep houses. He flip flops a little as he laments his coming end, but ultimately he accepts it.

I was in Japan, and it was the first time I’d visited Fujiyama. Wonderful mountain! Inspiring! Ever see it?”

“Don’t get me wrong, citizen. I’m no coward. I’m not going to run. I have my pride. The system is right, I know that. World can only support so much life. Got to be a way to keep the population down….I’ve been loyal and I won’t change now.”

A Sleepshop isn’t so bad, is it? We toured one when I was twelve, me and a friend of mine. In Paris. Clean and nice. It isn’t so bad.”

Sleep shop, makes me think of Welcome to the Monkeyhouse by Vonnegut with the suicide houses.

Logan thought of the Sleepshops with their gaily painted interiors, the attendants in soft pastel robes, the electronically augmented angel choirs, the skin spray of Hallucinogen,

If there are enough runners there won’t be enough homers. There won’t be enough DS men. It is written that the life span of man is three score years and ten, seventy years! Don’t settle for twenty-one. Run! Reject sleep!

A familiar 300-foot figure took solid form; he smiled warmly down at the crowd. The tri-dimensional newsman was dressed in Lifeleather trimfits. His giant eyes were clear and guileless.

Blade runner or other Cyberpunk holographic images of people larger than life.

Logan had tried several and found that LF produced the happiest effects—Lysergic Foam, an extension of the old LSD formula developed more than a century and a half ago.

You never find the people that you go to meet in dreams….

Glass all around them. Glass walls and ceilings and floors. The bed, glass fiber. The chairs and tables, glass. The building was one vast transparent globe, shot periodically with colored lights.

Each room was equipped to illumine itself at irregular intervals, but it was impossible to determine just when a room would flare into brightness. Caught in the act of lovemaking, a couple would suddenly find themselves tangled in a wash of silver, or gold, or red, yellow or green. Other couples, around, above and below, would be able to watch them from glass floors, walls, ceilings. Then the light would die—to spring on in another chamber.

This I feel was captured pretty well in the movie with the use of lights in the pleasure house that Logan and his partner run through.

Logan and Karenya were frozen in silver, arms and legs twined. They were conscious of the eyes around them in the dome, watching hungrily.

Voyueristic society. Kinky!

Francis never looked ripped. No lifts or glasshouses for him. Not before a job anyway. Francis was cool and clearheaded and sure of himself. Why couldn’t he be like that?

Francis was much less of a straight laced square in the movie. He did the drugs and indulged in the women like Logan.

Actually there were few DS men who possessed the skill and drive of this friendless, loveless man with the mantis-thin body and the black eyes of a hunting cat. Precise, deadly, ruthless. Only the Thinker knew how many runners Francis had Gunned.

The film captured the sadist nature of Francis pretty well though when him and Logan were chasing the first runner.

Already the sense of power was building in him as he held the Gun, weighing it in his hand, letting the light slide along the chased-silver barrel. Weapons shaped like these had kept the peace in towns named Abilene and Dodge and Fargo. Called “sixguns” then, their chambers held lead bullets. Now, centuries later, their cargo was far deadlier.

I like the comparison to old west guns and the sherrifs who carried them.

The room clicked and flashed, metallically coding, decoding, indexing, weighing, processing, filing, tracking—rendering its impersonal machine data to the DS operatives who moved before its faceted wall of insect lights.

The movie did a pretty good job creating this computer with lights and clicks. It had a very sci-fi feel for the age in which it was written and filmed.

Enough of this, Logan warned himself. Let’s get on with the job. Fill up with coldness and hate. Build the image of a jackal, a warped coward running from justice. Weak, spineless, selfish. Living beyond his time. Chase, capture and kill.

Seems like, in the book, Logan is much less sadistic and finds less excitement in killing runners. He has to work himself into the mindset to be cold and a killer.

That brief hesitation cost him the shot. Doyle was in the lift, headed down.

Logan flipped the chamber to tangler and fired the charge. Doyle flung the girl forward into it. The blast of silver threads enveloped her, clouding over her upper body in a tight webbing. Already Doyle was running again.

They didn't have the different rounds in the movie, probably would have been to difficult to do. But Roman candle rounds so much easier!

Cathedral: a festering sore in the side of Greater Los Angeles, an area of rubble and dust and burned-out buildings, a place of shadow and pollution, of stealth and sudden death. Cubscout territory.

Cathedral was run down and certainly looked like it was bombed out. The cubscouts were kids, but didn't have the muscle drugs. Also Los Angeles. I get that the pod cars have quite a reach in the book, but we don't really get that in the movie. Is the domed city in L.A. in the movie also? How did they get to D.C.? I could see them getting there in the book, but not with how the domed city was in the movie. We didn't really get a sense that there were other domed cities like in Alaska and such. And in the book, they head to Molly in the Pacific. Wrong coast for D.C.!

“They’re on Muscle.” The small figures moved in a continual blur of motion, daring and flitting like earthbound dragonflies.

A word. The runner was repeating a word. Logan leaned closer to catch the broken whisper: “Sanctuary.”

Saying sanctuary was replaced by the ankh in the movie and through the symbol sanctuary came through from the computer.

On the way back to headquarters, riding beside Francis in the shuttle, Logan kept his right fist closed against his side. He didn’t want to see the flower in his palm. It was blinking.

Logan's flower started blinking after killing the runner. There was no covert computer led mission or Logan going undercover and losing 4 years.

When Logan walked into his living unit young Abe Lincoln was there, splitting logs in the center of the room. Logan automatically punched a wall stud and the president was sucked, hissing, back into the Tri-Dim.

What the? Abe Lincoln was in his living room! Hahahaha!!

But what if Sanctuary were a reality? A place where runners were safe from the Gun. What if he, Logan 3, could find it and destroy it in the last twenty-four hours of his life?

Destroying Sanctuary was Logans idea to leave a legacy, to be remembered as a hero to his society.

The party in unit 2582 was getting into full stride when Logan arrived. The door was opened by a mouse-faced man in orange trims. He was quite intoxicated.

Logan knew the game was illegal, and he didn’t want the police stopping him. If he got picked up without the Gun he would not be able to prove his identity. They’d have to check him out. If he had the Gun, and revealed himself, the girl would close the door on Sanctuary. Either way, he couldn’t afford to be stopped.

They're a bunch of peeping Tom's! Lol. New way to have a porn industry I guess. Voyuerism!

“In Arcade. Look for The New You. That’s his place.”

Lilith is different, she is more like a spy in the way she operates. With truthtell syrum in the scotch. Also, she's the one who directs him to the doctor at the New You. Also there is no Lilith in the movie. Only Jessica.

Signs screamed and moaned in smoky colors: RE-LIVE THAT FIRST EMBRACE! (A gaudy Tri-Dim on a ribbed platform depicting two nude youngsters in a torrid tangle.) RE-LIVE THOSE PRECIOUS MOMENTS! (A wild-eyed boy riding a flamed devilstick through a mock sky.) RE-LIVE! RE-LIVE! RE-LIVE!

Nostalgia and youth.

The waiting room was the color of ashes. The scattered pieces of furniture were faded, worn. Even the air in the room seemed used. An ancient chrome-plated desk hunched in one corner, and behind it sat a young woman in soiled whites. Her face was pale and predatory. She regarded Logan suspiciously. “You want Doc?”

This goes much different than the movie for sure. The aesthetics of the place are different, but check to make sure. I remember the place being much more clean and new than run down and soiled and grey. Also where is Jessica?

Ballard knows who to give them to.” Ballard! Logan’s mind leaped. The world’s oldest man. A story to frighten children with. A legend. A subject for folk chants. Was there actually such a man—the force behind Sanctuary?

Ballard? Was that the doc's name in the movie?

“I like dark hair,” said Holly, leaning close to him. The blue spark danced in the depths of her eyes. “Have him give you dark hair.”

This line was in the movie.

He came out from behind the console, stood over Logan. The slight bulge of the Gun was visible in Logan’s waist. Doc pulled open his shirt, baring the weapon. “Lock the door, Holly.” “What is it?” she asked, moving forward. Doc shoved her back. “Gun!” he said. “We got a Sandman.”

The New You sequence is very different. No phone call from a resistance. Metal detected on the slab is what blows his cover with Doc.

“What will it do to him?” asked Holly. The blue light gleamed in her eyes. “Anything. It’s on its own.” The Table hummed to life. “I want to watch,” said Holly, flushing. Doc chuckled.

Holly and Doc are sadistic! Holly gets too much excitement from the idea of the machine fucking Logan up.

Something iced out of the gray half-darkness, knocking the Gun from his grasp. A glacier numbness chilled his arm from hand to elbow. Popsickle! Logan spun into a fighting crouch to face the dim white figure coming at him with the refrigerated police billy held at waist level. Doc, in for the kill.

This happened in the operating room thing in the movie with the ice wand or popsikle!

She blinked dreamily at Logan. “It’s me—Jessica,” she said; her fingers tentatively explored the new planes of her face.

Here's Jessica! Very different meeting from the movie. Met through the circuit TV thing in the film, here he meets her in Doc's hidden room. She got a New You as well and Logan lies to her and says he's Doyle.

“Doyle…you don’t look like my brother anymore.

Jessica is also Doyle's sister!

The maze. A million miles of tunnel, a veining of expressways serving the continents, interlinking Chicago with New York, Detroit with New Alaska, London with Lower Australia—a multitude of black-steel beetles burrowing the subterranean depths at fantastic speeds.

“Destination?” asked the car. Jessica said, “Sanctuary.” The mazecar surged into fluid motion. —

Much easier than the movie! Ha! Destination? Sanctuary. Okey dokey! Zoom!

“I’m Mary-Mary 2.” Logan stepped from the shadow. “What are you doing here?” “Oh, he told me to meet you.” “Who did?” The little girl’s eyes saucered. “Why, the old, old man, of course.”

Wow. The old man and the Cubs? Is this right? The old man sent Mary 2 to meet them? Very different!

“Ballard!”

“You can catch things to eat.” She opened the frayed cloth bag at her feet and proudly held out an old-fashioned rat trap. Jessica paled.

A machine can never love you…only people can love people.”

Logan looked at Billy. “I feel sorry for you, boy.” Confusion. The pack watched their leader. “For me? Better feel sorry for yourself, Runner!” “No—for you, Billy. How old are you?” Billy’s eyes slitted. He didn’t reply. “Twelve? Thirteen? Now me, I’m as old as you can get.” Logan slowly exposed his blinking timeflower. “And you—your days are running out. How long can you last, Billy?” One minute gone. “Two years? A year? Six months?” he pointed to the blue flower glowing in Billy’s palm. “What happens when you go to red?”

This line was in the movie more or less when they were in Cathedral and had let the runner go in the movie.

The mazecar slotted into Molly. The seats unlocked.