I never thought about Dailymotion until quite recently, when it started turning up British TV that wasn't available on YouTube. I have no idea how long this will last, but while it does it's handy.
Can you remember any of the particular changes, because I was curious myself, but without much brain to read and the book not being all that easily/cheaply available, I couldn't find out.
The major ones I remember are the timeline, the romance, X-117, and the details of the ending. The teleplay starts with the creation of the bunker society and progresses relatively directly through blink-and-miss-it World War III to the total and final devastation of Earth; the novel opens in medias res and unfolds much more gradually, with a wider cast of characters and subplots that explore different aspects of life on Level 7 and other levels—carefully scrubbed by Roshwald of all identifying national characteristics, so as to universalize the story, while Priestley's script sets it casually but firmly in the UK. I don't blame him for that any more than I fault him for compressing the action; he had an hour and Roshwald had an entire book. But it gives the teleplay a sense of newness and urgency from the start, whereas much of the novel's mood is tedium and unease until something goes wrong. As far as I remember the romance, X-127 in the novel has a relationship with a staff psychologist rather than a teacher like R-747 and it is much more a marriage of convenience or resignation than a love affair of any kind. X-117 is still a push-button officer and a misfit on Level 7, still with the conversion disorder of the hand that doesn't want to push buttons but minus the lobotomy, although he does undergo some coercive combination of drugs and brainwashing that returns him to work looking haggard and pale and haunted but apparently capable of doing his job; he's on duty with X-127 when the order to push all the buttons comes through. He does three-quarters of his job and breaks down at the fourth and final button. He's dragged away from his station and a replacement officer launches the last, worst bombs. Goodbye, surface world. X-117 has several hysterical scenes in hospital afterward and finally—shocking X-127—hangs himself. Against all scientific expectations, fallout begins to filter down through the upper levels. Levels 1 through 6 die from radiation sickness creeping downward; Level 7 holds out until an accident with the nuclear reactor that provides their power irradiates them all just as surely as if they'd been up top when the bombs fell. X-127 appreciates the irony. Soon he's the last human left alive on Earth, writing the last shaky page of his diary as the recorded music plays out its twelve-day repeating cycle. As in the teleplay, the war started by computer glitch. The novel is bleaker, I think, but also pulpier, with weird streaks of black humor and a much higher-keyed narrator than Keith Buckley's X-127. Also splatterier in the biological sense, since its radiation sickness is the realistic kind rather than Priestley's blindness and paralysis. One minute X-127 is jotting ethnographic notes on his post-war subterranean society and the next minute everyone around him is vomiting and dead. That may be part of the reason it categorized itself as "batshit" in my memory. It's much more emotionally jagged. I don't know if you would enjoy reading it. It may be sufficient to imagine the extra mad scenes David Collings didn't get the chance to play. I'm not sure I'd enjoy re-reading it, although having dredged it up out of my memory I probably will.
(WIth his UFO ep, definitely: aliens turned him into a human bomb and exploded him twenty minutes in.)
I'M NOT EVEN SURPRISED.
Anything like a con is all-consuming! I'll look forward to it whenever you're able.
I am home from Readercon! Now I want to sleep for a week!
no subject
I never thought about Dailymotion until quite recently, when it started turning up British TV that wasn't available on YouTube. I have no idea how long this will last, but while it does it's handy.
Can you remember any of the particular changes, because I was curious myself, but without much brain to read and the book not being all that easily/cheaply available, I couldn't find out.
The major ones I remember are the timeline, the romance, X-117, and the details of the ending. The teleplay starts with the creation of the bunker society and progresses relatively directly through blink-and-miss-it World War III to the total and final devastation of Earth; the novel opens in medias res and unfolds much more gradually, with a wider cast of characters and subplots that explore different aspects of life on Level 7 and other levels—carefully scrubbed by Roshwald of all identifying national characteristics, so as to universalize the story, while Priestley's script sets it casually but firmly in the UK. I don't blame him for that any more than I fault him for compressing the action; he had an hour and Roshwald had an entire book. But it gives the teleplay a sense of newness and urgency from the start, whereas much of the novel's mood is tedium and unease until something goes wrong. As far as I remember the romance, X-127 in the novel has a relationship with a staff psychologist rather than a teacher like R-747 and it is much more a marriage of convenience or resignation than a love affair of any kind. X-117 is still a push-button officer and a misfit on Level 7, still with the conversion disorder of the hand that doesn't want to push buttons but minus the lobotomy, although he does undergo some coercive combination of drugs and brainwashing that returns him to work looking haggard and pale and haunted but apparently capable of doing his job; he's on duty with X-127 when the order to push all the buttons comes through. He does three-quarters of his job and breaks down at the fourth and final button. He's dragged away from his station and a replacement officer launches the last, worst bombs. Goodbye, surface world. X-117 has several hysterical scenes in hospital afterward and finally—shocking X-127—hangs himself. Against all scientific expectations, fallout begins to filter down through the upper levels. Levels 1 through 6 die from radiation sickness creeping downward; Level 7 holds out until an accident with the nuclear reactor that provides their power irradiates them all just as surely as if they'd been up top when the bombs fell. X-127 appreciates the irony. Soon he's the last human left alive on Earth, writing the last shaky page of his diary as the recorded music plays out its twelve-day repeating cycle. As in the teleplay, the war started by computer glitch. The novel is bleaker, I think, but also pulpier, with weird streaks of black humor and a much higher-keyed narrator than Keith Buckley's X-127. Also splatterier in the biological sense, since its radiation sickness is the realistic kind rather than Priestley's blindness and paralysis. One minute X-127 is jotting ethnographic notes on his post-war subterranean society and the next minute everyone around him is vomiting and dead. That may be part of the reason it categorized itself as "batshit" in my memory. It's much more emotionally jagged. I don't know if you would enjoy reading it. It may be sufficient to imagine the extra mad scenes David Collings didn't get the chance to play. I'm not sure I'd enjoy re-reading it, although having dredged it up out of my memory I probably will.
(WIth his UFO ep, definitely: aliens turned him into a human bomb and exploded him twenty minutes in.)
I'M NOT EVEN SURPRISED.
Anything like a con is all-consuming! I'll look forward to it whenever you're able.
I am home from Readercon! Now I want to sleep for a week!