Status Updates From S Is for Space

Parting thought on “Pillar of Fire”: although the future world of 2349 envisioned by Bradbury totally sucks in terms of censorship and stifling of imagination and creativity…at least booze and tobacco are still legal, thank Gawd! Otherwise it would truly be Hell on Earth!

—p. 60: “and you sucked and blew, sucked and blew.” No double entendres whatsoever!

—p. 54: “He would go to the Martian tombs…Theirs was an ancient culture, much different from that of Earth, patterned on the Egyptian, if what the librarian had said was true. And the Egyptian—what a crucible of dark superstition and midnight terror that culture had been. Mars it *was*, then. Beautiful Mars!” [original emphasis]

—p. 52: “They were dead and *knew* they were dead!” [origin emphasis]

—Sgt. Joker in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”: “The dead know only one thing: It is better to be alive.”

—p. 52: “They were dead and *knew* they were seas!” [original emphasis]

—Sgt. Joker (Matthew Modine) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”: “The dead know only one thing: It is better to be alive.”

—p. 48: “He must kill and kill and kill and kill and kill…He must kill and then kill and then kill again.” Catchy and memorable!

—p. 40: “‘’By the way, do you have any of Lovecraft?’
‘Is that a sex book?’
Lantry exploded with laughter. ‘No, no, it’s a man.’”

“this monster, this cleansing fire.” Kinda like Purgatory, you mean?

—p. 32: “He found a small pocket knife in the man’s coat; not much of a knife, but enough if you knew how to handle it properly. He knew how.”

Hmm, like a Leatherman, perhaps?

—p. 32: “Lantry struck the man in the face. The man fell. Lantry bent quietly down and hit the man a killing blow across the neck with the side of his hand.”

For some reason, I found that passage hilarious as a preteen kid.

—p. 31; “‘Right. We had nearly a million people in the last three years visiting. A good revenue. But—a government order is an order.’”

The power to tax is the power to destroy.

—p. 28: “His lips spelled out the year:
‘2349.’
An odd number. Like a school sum. They used to say a man couldn’t encompass any number over a hundred. After that it was all so damned abstract there was no use counting.”

pp. 13-14: “‘Smith’s the answer to the problem, “What happens next for man, where do we go from here?” We’re faced with the blank wall of the universe and the fatality of living in that universe, and man as he is today is not prepared to go against the universe…Why, we’re just insects, all of us, fighting on a pinhead planet.’”

Methinks Bill O’Reilly would appreciate the use of the word “pinhead,” heh heh.

“Komm in meinen Keller” hat in mir einen Durst nach obskurem Horror á la Lovecraft geweckt. Warum hab ich so lange gewartet, diese Kurzgeschichtensammlung zu lesen??

das ist jetzt genau das, was ich brauche — seltsame sci-fi kurzgeschichten 🥹