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He had taken on the shape and coloration and mental attitudes of a runner, and it was impossible for him to know where the dividing line really was.
He's becoming his persona. Living the job or becoming a runner in fact and not out of wanting to just destroy.
A charcoal flower was lost in folded flesh. The steglauncher did not waver.
So Whale was a runner as well? He has a black flower in his palm. Why did he stay in Molly? Is Molly Sanctuary? Or is Whale the book's Box?
“A man kills to save himself.”
Whale is a hypocrite, he understands the sandmen all too well in this statement. He's sacrificing Logan to protect his way of life in a similar way that Logan kills runners to preserve his society. Even Jessica takes issues with Whale's actions. Is Whale Box is this instance?
In the sweating dark, Logan felt despair. His last hope was gone. He was dead and he knew it. Now he felt as a runner feels, feared as a runner fears.
Logan is forced to face his own mortality outside of his blinking flower. He is forced to feel the fear and terror of a runner. Yay for developing empathy!
Then abruptly the hatch opened. The water receded. Jess was there. “Quick,” she said. “There’s not much time.”
Jess couldn't allow herself to let Logan be killed. Even though she has contempt for him as a sandman, she still sees life as precious and that mayve Logan can redeem himself.
Hell: named after the ancient religious concept of eternal punishment. Over a thousand miles of dead glare-ice wilderness between Baffin Bay and the Bering Sea.
“When you come to Hell they throw away the keys.”
A prison? Is this guy what inspired the ice cave with Box in the film?
They were in the escape-proof prison city at the North Pole.
The circle of eyes shifted hungrily to the dead body, already frost-dusted.
Cannibal warden?
“Box? Who’s he?” “Box ain’t a he. He’s a what.”
There's the mention of Box! The prison at the North Pole wasn't in the movie. I wonder if Box will have people and animals Frozen in ice.
“He got chewed up in a belt jump after a torture jig with a ten-year-old. The gears scattered him some. He was half dead then, but the system don’t let go that easy. They sewed him back together, and what they couldn’t find they made.
Box lived in a white world. He moved in storms of dusted ice and loneliness. He did not tire; he was never cold; a part of him never slept. His world was porcelain and pale marble, alabaster and bone ivory. He made castles of bergs and palaces of glacier cliffs. He cloud-wandered the frozen immensities. And was content.
He opened his eyes to a frieze of crystal beasts dancing in a blue fire. He blinked. The frieze wavered, became solid. Extending to the limit of his vision was a capering host of otters conjured from diamond ice. And more. Logan sat up to an incredible tableau. There, a fish of sequined rainbow scales caught in a zircon wave. There, a tusked walrus with mirror-ice eyes, his body veined with blacks and purples. There, a flight of crystal birds in a crystal sky.
This feels a lot like the setting in the film. I like the book description and it lends itself well in how it was adapted for screen.
manmetal.
Hahaha!
“If we pose, do we get food?” asked Logan. “I have no food.” “Then why should we do it?” “Why? Do you know how long this temple will last? Not twenty-one years, or twenty-one thousand years—but twenty-one thousand thousand years! And you’ll be a part of it, the crown jewel in my collection. Ages will roll. Milleniums. And you’ll be here—the two of you—eternally frozen in a lovers’ embrace.”
Box freezes animals like in the movie, but Jess and Logan would be his first humans unlike the movie with the humans frozen in one of the ice palace walls.
The Thinker! It tied in; being half machine, Box was, in a very real sense, part of the great machine brain.
He felt the sweet warmth of her, the nearness of her. Breasts pressing him, legs touching him, arms holding him. He felt a slow surge of passion, but more than passion: a rapture, a tenderness and a wild, sweet sadness he’d never known.
Warmth in the extreme cold. A pose that makes Logan feel more than just a lust. He discovered passion in a way previously unknown to him.
His metal hand began to buzz. He brought it forward to shiver the ice into blue patterns. He worked furiously, with incredible speed. In a shower of tinkling shards and ice splinters, the two figures began to emerge from the block. Magically, forming, shaping…
He's truly sculpting them instead of freezing them into statues! I thought he would freeze them!
With each passing second, as more of the ice melted, the end of the block lightened, tipping the remainder. Already the mass was inching over in a continuous grinding crunch, pulled by the slow force of gravity. When enough of it had turned to water the huge block would tip into the slideway and begin its ponderous rush toward Jess. It would bear down with all of its tonnage, like a giant sledge, and the vulnerable body of the girl would be caught between the ice faces as they smashed together.
Hooded jewel eyes. Razored talons. A cruel hook of steel beak. Assassins. The mech eagles struck. A bloodrag of fur lay on the forest floor.
Wtf?! A mech predatory bird ripped the dawn to shreds?! Brutal!
A copper command in skullcase metal: Kill! They dived.
The final realization of the computer age. A direct extension of the electronic brains at Columbia and Cal Tech in the 1960s, it was a massive breakthrough in solid-state technology. Computer was linked with computer in ever-widening complexity.
In the solenoid night the Watchman waited, motionless except for the faint gear-flicker behind the glass plate which was its face. A half-ton of destruction; armor plate bristling with weaponry. Waiting.
Logan did not move. He knew of the gypsies. Their first leader had been a full-blooded Apache named Jimmy Walks-Like-a-Wolf who went berserk in the aftermath of the Little War. Gathering a crew of psychotics about him, he had conceived the gypsy death pact, the ritual vow of self-destruction. No pleasure gypsy lived long enough to see his flower go black; each was sworn to die on red as a gesture of ultimate defiance against the system. They feared neither Sleep nor Sandman. They were a law unto themselves.
There's a lot of peeps and locations in this book that were nowhere in the movie.
These were not the devilsticks he’d ridden as a boy; these were fast and deadly, and the thrust from their rear-mounted chromaly jato housings could char a man down in the snap of a finger.
So are these like speeder bikes?
They led him to Rutago’s machine. The devilstick gleamed richly, from its hand-scrolled leather saddle studded with diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and fire rubies, to the inlay of pearls set into the long stick-body of the swift pleasure craft.
The saloon was lavishly furnished. Velvet couches. Ivory chairs. Green baize tables. Ornate lamps of shell pearl. Tapestries and bead hangings. The long mahogany bar was polished to a high gloss. Behind the bar hung a garish oil painting of a coyly smiling nude.
The abandoned landscapes of the film sure are propagated with life in the book! Pleasure Gypsies on speeder bikes in Deadwood. A real wild west kind of feel with that dynamic.
One of the males said sweetly, “Rutago he a Ribbonrider, but also he a loverman. After he, the rest of we. Runnergirl a lucky one.”
Definitely rapey.
In the boudoir the girls awaited him. They were all golden nude and reclined at the foot of the bed on which lay Graygirl. She was somber and colorless and lovely. She took Logan’s hand as he walked over to her, gazed up into his eyes, and smiled a sleek cat’s smile. “Wild me, Sandfella,” she said to him in a husky voice.
This is definitely a male fantasy story. Lots of kink and Logan being sexed up while Jess has to go with rapey jewel dude.
The hovercraft flamed into motion.
Finally we get a firm identifier of what these devilsticks are!
Ambrose E. Burnside was a robot, an android, built to the exact specifications of the famed Civil War officer.
Even in the dystopian, Logan's Run future there are civil war reenactments. Robots!
“Duty,” a loudspeaker blared above the din. “That’s what you’ll see here today, citizens. Loyalty. Courage. The willingness to die for one’s country in order to preserve it. The Civil War was fought by seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, men willing to die for their cause. They did not question their duty or flinch from the face of death.
This is definitely a good contrast to blind loyalty or toxic patriotism. Do not question society or authority.
And remember, there were no runners at Fredericksburg!”
Logan waited, and when the snake was free of its lair, he killed it with a bootheel. Using his beltclasp, he scored the ridged skin along the back of the jaw and across the top of the broad flat head.
He was six, and it was a play period, and Rob was scampering across the asphalt ahead of him. “I’m a Sandman,” cried Logan. “Here I come after ya. I see ya, Rob! You’re hiding, but I see ya. I’m gonna shoot ya now!” Logan raised the wooden Gun. Rob was behind one of the teeter-swings, pretending to be a runner. “Bam!” yelled Logan. “Homer! AAAAAzzzzz-pow!” Rob didn’t fall. “Missed me!” he shouted. “Did not.” “Did too.” “Did not. A homer never misses anybody. Ya can’t get away from a homer.”
Logan did always want to be a DS man. It's like children playing army and not really understanding the horrors of what they were glorifying and in many ways Logan has still been that boy as a DS man.
He was twenty and on the hunt. The girl had been clever, crossing the river to shake him, but now she was trapped, her back to a high board fence. Logan walked toward her. She clawed at the boards, breaking her nails on the rough wood, then fell, huddling at the base of the fence. He raised the Gun, fired, and the homer sang in. Logan stood there; feeling the sick emptiness flush through him. Why had she made him do this? Why hadn’t she accepted Sleep? Why had she run?
This was the runner in the beginning of the book?
“There were real issues to fight for then,” the officer went on. “Liberty, freedom, justice. Now things have changed. Now everything comes to us on a platter. Man’s got nothing left to fight for.”
The first engagement in the Little War took place at Fifteenth and K street in front of the Sheraton Bar and Grill in the heart of Washington.
a huge demonstration to protest the Thirty-ninth Amendment to the Constitution. Like other prohibitions before it, this Compulsory Birth Control Act was impossible to enforce, and youth had taken the stand that it was a direct infringement of their rights.
By morning, half of Washington was in flames. Senators and congressmen were dragged in terror from their homes and hanged like criminals from trees and lampposts. The police and National Guard units were swept away in the first major wave of rioting.
A crowd pleaser, with the talent to make the commonplace sound novel and the preposterous seem reasonable.
One thing the young were sure of; they would never again place their fate in the hands of an older generation.
Jessica shuddered. “Ugly,” she said. “There’s no place that’s safe. Anywhere we go there’ll be things waiting to kill us.”
“Tell him,” urged Jess. “Convince him. Tell Ballard that you’re a runner, just as I am.” “But I’m not,” said Logan flatly. “I guess I never was. Ballard was right in trying to kill me.”
“I don’t need to hear any more,” said Logan. He stepped to the edge of the steps, cupped his lips and shouted, “Francis!” The cry echoed off into the jungle to be smothered by heat and darkness. Logan called again. “Francis, this way! Here!” He waited. Francis did not appear. Ballard turned to Jess. “He’s a DS man. It’s his life. It’s what he was trained for.”
Logan pulled the trigger. His hand was stone; the trigger finger would not move. He tried to fire, could feel muscles lock in conflict in the hand. His face went gray; the hand would not obey him. He saw Jessica’s face and only Jessica’s face. It was a white oval against the dark building, her eyes filled with pain and accusation. Logan slumped back against the wall, slid down it loosely. He was making sounds. But not words. The Gun dangled limply in his hand.
Logan tried to weave a logical fabric from threads of confused thought. Cape Steinbeck, the space storage center at the tip of the Keys. A dead section. Like Cathedral. Like Molly. Like Washington. All stages on the Sanctuary line. Steinbeck, where the rockets and the missiles were mothballed when space flight was abandoned. Yet they were using a rocket—which meant that Sanctuary must be in space.
Space Sanctuary!!
Dying young is a waste and a shame and a perversion. The young don’t build. They use. The wonders of Man were achieved by the mature, the wise, who lived in this world before we did. There was an Old Lincoln after the young one….
Francis was Ballard! “I couldn’t tell you back in Washington,” the tall man said. “I didn’t trust you then. Even when you failed to use the Gun I didn’t trust you. Now I do.” The logic was suddenly there for Logan. Ballard would need to disguise himself among the young in order to move about in the world. Every few years he’d need a new face, a new disguise. And what better disguise than that of a Sandman?
I love that Francis was Ballard the whole time! Yay!
“And—Sanctuary?” Ballard was helping Logan toward the rocket. “Argos,” he said. “The abandoned space station near Mars. It’s a small colony now, still crude, cold, hard to live on. But it’s ours, Logan. Yours now. The jump for Argos is Darkside—on the Moon.”
