Wordful Wednesdays: Logan’s Run
Many of the books I read are a result of my hearing of a forthcoming film adaptation. Logan's Run, perhaps one of the worst sci-fi movies of all time, is being remade from the original source materials. It can hardly be worse than the original adaptation. The original is basically the finest in 1970's sci-fi cheese, in the same group with such luminaries as Soylent Green and The Omega Man (which I haven't seen but the tales of its cheesiness are the stuff of legend). Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Planet of the Apes are sometimes lumped into this group, although I think they're both excellent films. Logan, though, is quite lame. But this isn't really a movie review.
The book, by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, is brief and fast-paced, not pausing unduly long on details. Perhaps it could've paused at least duly to give us some idea of the state of the world, however. The problem, really, is that I had the setting of the film in mind, and it was a bit different from the book.
Both the film and book are basically dystopian, but the film relies more on the overused post-Atomic-war style, where people are confined in domed cities and afraid to leave them. The book makes mention of a past war where nukes were used---sparingly---and people aren't confined in any way. Except by an age-limit, of course.
The main plot point of both the novel and the book is that there is a hard cap on longevity. In other words, you can only get so old before you're put down. (In the novel, the cap is at twenty-one. The film went with thirty.) Once you've reached the specified age, you either submit to Deep Sleep (death) or you become a Runner and get hunted down and killed by the Sandmen (a special police force). All people have a Lifeclock embedded in their palms which changes color to indicate age. When it begins to blink red and black, you're at Lastday. When it goes solid black, your time is up.
The titular character, Logan 3 (Logan 5 in the film), a Sandman nearing his Lastday, finds a clue he thinks will lead him to the mythical (or perhaps not) Sanctuary, where Runners can escape to in order to avoid Sleep. For the remainder of the book, Logan searches for Sanctuary with an unclear motive. Is he hoping to find Sanctuary in order to escape, or does he want to destroy Sanctuary like the Agents in The Matrix want to destroy Zion? The latter motive, Logan feels, might somehow justify his short existence.
He connects with another Runner, named Jess, and they flee the city in what amounts to a tour of the broken-down sections of the current society, including Hell (an Arctic prison not done well in the film), the Crazy Horse Monument, and Washington, D.C. All this time, they're pursued by a veteran Sandman named Francis.
I won't reveal the ending, except to say that it makes a great deal more sense than the film's end did. At ~140 pages, it's an extremely fast read that probably could've used a few more details. There were occasional flashbacks filling in some details, but I actually wanted a few more of them. But far be it from me to complain about uncluttered prose.
Oh yes, there was one more thing I thought was really cool in the novel: the chapters were numbered in descending order. So you proceed through the book like a ticking Lifeclock.
