Wednesday, September 30, 2009

mostly free books

I took all my receipts from the past few years to Gardner's used books out on Mingo today. If you bring in $100 worth of receipts of past purchases from Gardner's, you get $15 worth of free books. They added them up for me and I had close to $125 in receipts which was worth $19.26 in books. Here's what I got:
  1. The Wind From Nowhere by J.G. Ballard
  2. Shadows With Eyes: Six Tales of Crawling Horror by Fritz Leiber
  3. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
  4. Vurt by Jeff Noon
  5. Hunter/Victim by Robert Sheckley
  6. Red Dwarf: Infinty Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor

These choices actually exceeded my free credit amount by $1.07. Still a pretty good selection for only $20.33 total. I still have no idea which one I want to read first.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

movie adaptations

The 10th Victim (Italian: La decima vittima) is an Italian cult science fiction film directed by Elio Petri in 1965. It is based on Robert Sheckley's 1953 short story "Seventh Victim". Sheckley later published a novelization of the film in 1966.

Freejack is a 1992 science fiction film directed by Geoff Murphy. It stars Emilio Estevez, Mick Jagger, Rene Russo, Jonathan Banks, and Anthony Hopkins. Upon its release in the United States, the film received harsh reviews. The story was adapted from a 1959 novel titled Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley. Aside from the most basic elements, however — the journey of a modern man into a future where everything is for sale, and the presence of a "spiritual switchboard" in which souls are suspended — the cyberpunk plot bears little resemblance either in tone or content to Sheckley's story.

The above description was copied and pasted from the Wikipedia entry for Freejack.