Have Space Suit Will Travel is not Robert A. Heinlein’s best novel (by my reckoning that’s The Door into Summer), but it is one of his best novels that doesn’t rely on experimental sex and the flaunting of nudity taboos. Heinlein was a sci-fi master, but he was also an orgy guy.
So it makes sense that someone might be interested in picking it up and turning it into a movie, since it’s one of the few that can be made without an R-rating. Variety says Harry Kloor is developing a feature film based on Space Suit Will Travel. How serious this project is remains unclear. He’s doing it through his own production company, Jupiter 9 Prods, and he’s mostly known as a TV writer who did a lot of really awful stuff like Earth: Final Conflict, and not as a Hollywood mega-producer.
Actually as a Heinlein fan he doesn’t exactly seem like the guy you’d want touching the master’s better books. This one’s so simple though, if he gets money, it’s kind of hard to imagine anyone screwing it up. It’s the story of a teenager who wins a broken-down space suit in a contest, and ends up on an adventure which leads to man’s first alien contact.
Science fiction hasn’t always been the nerdy endeavor of slick computer effects, transforming robots, and wise-cracking space ship captains. Just a couple of decades ago it had grit, it had style, it had tits. That’s the sci-fi I grew up loving, a world of imagination where men made out with apes, where alien lizards tortured women in the nude, and where green skin meant three tits and non-stop horniness.
Sex seeped into science fiction early. In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs published the first in his John Carter of Mars series, featuring a powerful, sculpted alien princess with a disdain for the trappings of clothes. In the 30s sex and nudity in sci-fi continued and by 1960 it was soaked in it. All through the 60s, 70s, and 80s sci-fi paperbacks came emblazoned with men holding guns next to scantily clad, occasionally naked, pin-up girls. Outer space was a place where astronauts got laid and women cast off the sexually repressed mores of society to take control both of their lives and their libido. Writers like Robert A. Heinlein used their powers to write not just about new gadgets, but about a hopeful cultural shift which freed mankind from all of our hang-ups pushing us into a place where we all finally grew up and felt free to get busy. Once upon a time science fiction foretold not only a time where man mastered technological achievements beyond imagination, but also finally broke free of the cultural shackles of shame to build perfect societies of toned bodies and absent nudity taboos.
That carried over into sci-fi on television and on film too. In the 60s, every week Star Trek’s costume designers competed against themselves to come up with even more deceptively skimpy outfits to show off the female bodies of their guest stars while script writers worked on new reasons for Captain Kirk to rip off his shirt. Around the same time, Barbarella pranced on screen, teasing us with bikinis and laser guns. The late 70s and early 80s brought us movies like Total Recall and Alien, in which Sigourney Weaver, even in the midst of fighting acid-spitting assholes from space, finds time to strip down and show off her barely there underwear. In the 80s it seemed like we were really going somewhere, a place where maybe geeks might even start getting laid. Nerds subscribed to lusty sci-fi publications like Heavy Metal, full of depictions of female skin which were, even more fantastic than the stories they put them in. read this entry »
Sony has announced the arrival date for their Direct to DVD Starship Troopers sequel. Expect Starship Troopers 3: Marauder on store shelves July 29th. That’ll put it up against another major science fiction release: Stargate Continuum.
For this second DTV sequel Casper Van Dien returns as Johnny Rico. The plot, presumably, revolves around futuristic soldiers fighting alien bugs. I wonder if it bothers them to be called bugs?
What Starship Troopers really needs though isn’t Casper Van Dien. They need to invest in bringing back Neil Patrick Harris. If NPH can make Harold & Kumar good, just imagine what he could do returning to the world of Starship Troopers. What would NPH do? Make anything he’s in awesome. Also he’d kill bugs with his crazy mind bullets.
