Which visual sticks out from some of your favorites?

[Michael]

I was thinking about the visuals I got when I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. They weren't quite as vivid as what Ridley Scott did with the Blade Runner. But the visual I dot reading Dune when Paul and his mother are crossing the sand and the worm is coming was way better than what they did in the movie. Kinda odd how that works. Some of the most vivid visuals aren't even action scenes. When Elijah Baley first sees the frozen robot in The Robots of Dawn, it's so creepy, that I have the visual in my head from years ago when I read the book. What's weird is that, sometimes the longest descriptions, the ones the author goes out of his way to expound upon, aren't the ones that stick. I wonder how that works in the brain.

[Jim]

I read Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin way back when it first came out in the early 80's. A year or so ago, I re-read it thinking that it was for the first time, but I quickly realized I had read it before. I didn't remember the story, but his description of the steamboat in some backwater of the Mississippi had stuck with me for all that time. It was so good it had ruined several horror novels in similar settings. I couldn't remember the rest of the book, but that had stuck with me for 30 years.

[Corrina]

The Trump cards of Amber sticks in my brain, as it was not only a great description of Corwin's family but it was a big reveal in the mystery surrounding Corwin's memory loss.

[V.W.]

Funny what sticks to your brain. I read "The Wailing Asteroid" decades ago, but the image of trees with leaves like ribbons waving in the breeze while an eerie flute-like tune plays in the back ground remains, as does the huge endless hall filled with large pairs of linked gravity distorting globes.

[[deleted user]]

As I thought about this, I realize that most of the images that stick in my mind are those with strong emotional content (either melodramatic or very moody), and strangely independent of the amount of description the author provided of the physical surrounding.

I immediately thought of a couple of scenes from "The Lord of the Rings", but the recent movie trilogy has muddled those images for me. (One of the problems when a book you like becomes a movie, the director's vision doesn't always match your own previously established image. Suddenly characters don't look like like you envisioned them, and after nine hours of movie, Peter Jackson wins out.)

One haunting scene, which I mentioned several months ago during our discussion of Connie Willis's "The Doomsday Book" was of Kivrin slumped exhausted against one of the grave markers in the church cemetery after breaking a shovel trying to dig a grave in the frozen ground for the village priest (just after having previously failed to ring the church bell the required number of times to accompany his death, because of broken ribs.) That's one of the images of sci-fi literature that's burned into my brain.

[Michael]

Hmm, yeah, you're right, the emotional content might be more important than the description. I started reading The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher this weekend, and it's not his descriptions of the weird physical phenomena he's describing that's giving me the most lasting visual, it's a radio speaker because that's what the main character is looking at when the creepy voice starts talking to him. That eerie feeling I get brands the visual into my mind somehow.

As far as the LOTR, my visual of the hobbits hiding with the ring wraith on the black horse sniffing for them, blows Jackson's depiction out of the water. But, yeah, his vision wins out for pretty much everything else. In fact, I remember not being able to visualize a balrog when I read the book.

[[deleted user]]

I have a couple of scenes from Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels wedged in my head:

The titular Tombs of Atuan, completely dark, isn't exactly a "visual" setting, but the various passageways, in which Ged gets stuck and which the priestess Tenar has been trained to navigate my memory since her childhood, is an enduring "image" for me. No sight at all and nearly silent.

This remains unpolluted by the SyFy miniseries, which transformed Atuan's abode of the ancient Nameless Ones into a wedding cake of a thousand candles.


Also, the Oak Farm on Gont where the widow Tenar lives with her late-adopted ward, Theru, and the goats, from Tehanu. This pastoral scene has escaped pollution by the horrid Goro Miyazaki mashup animated movie.

[[deleted user]]

Sometimes it's more like an environment that a specific moment that fixes in my memory, a book where the author's description has been so relentless in establishing the world that it lingers long after I finished reading.

The rain in Greg Benford's Timescape, for example. In his future portion of the story (it involves communication between times), the atmosphere has become so laden with toxic material that the rain itself is toxic (as in medium-term health risk, not instantly fatal.) It doesn't rain very often here where I live in the desert, but every time it does, I still think back to that book (though I'd quite forgotten most of the plot, and the book isn't actually among my favorites.)

[Michael]

I haven't read Foundation Trilogy in a long time, but the steel tubes in the railway station whe Seldon first arrives on Trantor are still really vivid. It's odd, I would never have selected Asimov as one of the writers that induces memorable visuals. I would've thought it would be Clarke and Vonnegut and Gibson, guys like that. Though, the Johnny Mnemonic opening scene is a good one that stuck in my head until Keanu knocked it out.

[E.D.]

I "see" the comet's eye view as it begins it's run to Earth from Lucifer's Hammer. Vast and cold. Quiet. Awe inspiring. Death incarnate.

Then I think of Keannu Reeves and can't wait for The Hammer to fall on his beanhead. :}

[Michael]

E.D. wrote: "I "see" the comet's eye view as it begins it's run to Earth from Lucifer's Hammer. Vast and cold. Quiet. Awe inspiring. Death incarnate.

Then I think of Keannu Reeves and can't wait for The Hammer..."

lol! Why do they keep casting him for sci-fi flicks? I know he kinda acts like an alien, but he has ruined some good flicks. It's weird, sometimes he pulls it off well like in the Matrix and Chain Reaction, and then he goes and lays a steaming pile of poo in The Day the Earth Stood Still and Johnny Mnemonic.