DEAD GEEK WALKING 21

Great Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Who Never Wrote Sequels or Trilogies

Sometimes it seems like science fiction, and especially fantasy, are genres that lend themselves exclusively to trilogies and long-running series. But some of the greatest writers in speculative fiction have only written standalone novels, not series or trilogies.

Here are some of the greatest writers in the genre who never wrote sequels to their work. Note: This is by no means going to be an exhaustive list. Especially given how many Golden Age authors only wrote standalone books, we could be here all day if we tried to list every author who wrote nothing but standalones. Feel free to list your own favorites in the comments. Also, note that we're not including authors who wrote multiple books in the same universe.

Top image: Cover art for Philip K. Dick's The Crack in Space by Chris Moore

Full size

Alfred Bester
The author of The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination only wrote half a dozen or so novels, and most of them were serialized in magazines prior to being published in book form. And as far as we're aware, he never returned to any of his corporate-dominated, dystopian, space-faring or telepath-dominated futures for more than one book.

Full size

Bruce Sterling
He's the great iconoclast of science fiction, so it's not surprising that Sterling has resisted the temptation to revisit his worlds — lots of people expected a sequel to Schismatrix, for example. (Although Schismatrix, itself, was a follow-up to a collection of short stories,Crystal Express, so that's an edge case.) In the afterword to The Difference Engine, he and collaborator William Gibson write, "We didn't lift a finger to make a steampunk scene happen; we never wrote a sequel, nor will we."

Full size

H.G. Wells
With novels like The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, Wells invented much of the bedrock of science fiction — and even though he was astonishingly prolific well into the 20th century, Wells never felt the need to revisit his old characters or stories. He never wrote a follow-up to The Time Machine or the story of a second Martian invasion. Science fiction's great originator kept putting out originals, throughout his life.

George Orwell
Arguably speculative most famous political novelist, Orwell mostly wrote semi-autobiographical novels, and only turned to speculative fiction at the very end of his career. And we're probably all better off that he never got around to writing Nineteen Eighty Five before he died in 1950.

Full size

Philip K. Dick
One of the most acclaimed — and prolific — science fiction authors of all time, Dick returned to certain themes of alienation, surveillance and madness over and over again. But he never returned to the same characters or setting for more than one book — although Dick did work on a sequel to his acclaimed novel The Man in the High Castle, and a few chapters were included in the 1995 book The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick.Cover art by Sparth.

Maureen F. McHugh
She's only published four novels and a number of short stories to date, but she's one of the most acclaimed authors out there. She's the master of creating unusual settings, like China Mountain Zhang's China-dominated 22nd century, or Half the Day is Night's submerged city of Julia. But as far as we know, she's never returned to one of those settings for a second look.

Max Barry
One of our favorite newer writers, Barry often writes about the same preoccupations, including corporatocracy and out-of-control technology. But thus far, his four novels haven't intersected in any meaningful fashion, and he's come up with fresh dystopias to drive us to distraction.

Full size

Theodore Sturgeon
The man who gave us Sturgeon's Law was far from prolific, but all of his novels (and his many short stories) remain a horrifying look into supreme weirdness. His books includeMore Than Human, a disturbing look at post-humanity, and The Dreaming Jewelsand The Cosmic Rape, which include truly alien life forms coming to Earth. Sturgeon's books each remain one of a kind, which helped him achieve a much better success rate than his eponymous law would indicate.

Clifford D. Simak
Speaking of weird alien life forms... this is the man who gave us the weird bowling balls that come down and start buying up our planet, in They Walked Like Men. Simak wrote a ton of weird novels from the late 1940s through the early 1980s, but we're pretty sure he never went back to the same well twice. Instead, he deepened his themes of robot consciousness, time travel, and strange explorations.

Full size

Karel Capek
Best known for giving us the word "robot" inRossum's Universal Robots, this Czech playwright and satirist also wrote The War With The Newts, which we celebrated recently. Like Orwell, he used science fiction to illuminate the troubling issues of his time, and he predicted weapons of mass destruction as well as our hyper-consumerist society. But he never wrote more than one work about the same imaginary future.

J.G. Ballard
This bastion of the New Wave wrote a slew of hard-to-categorize novels, including Crashand The Concrete Island. But apart from one collection of linked short stories, he never wrote twice about the same setting or characters. (Thanks for the suggestion, Tim!)

Full size

Ben Elton
The writer of The Young Ones andBlackadder wrote a whole bunch of satirical novels in the 1990s, most of which were science fiction, and we've praised his work before. In each novel, Elton takes on another off-kilter thought experiment, plays with it, and then tosses it aside to find another odd premise.

Fredric Brown
The prolific author of mysteries and mainstream fiction also wrote five well-received science fiction novels, includingMartians Go Home — but he never wrote a shared-universe series or a sequel to any of his books.

Additional reporting by Marykate Jasper and Gordon M. Jackson.

Contact Charlie Jane Anders:

BORN TO BE WILD

REELSEX 42

Reel Sex: The Allure of New York

New York City is covered in romantic qualities. Be them personal experiences romping through the city in the middle of the night with a cute boy you met on the elevator, absorbing yourself in a different culture around every corner, or because you just straight up watch too many films without having ever visited one of the five boroughs. New York is a city of dreams, schemers, and downtrodden, but each person who experiences the island knows the pull and excitement of this crazy-making place.

Otherwise, there wouldn’t be films and shows where Manhattan is featured as prominently as any actor or actress on screen. The fantasy of New York is more than just Times Square and Central Park, it’s feeling like you belong there. Film fills that gaping hole in the hearts of those who cannot live in the city, but who want to explore the possibility. You (rightfully so) can’t have sex in the back of a cab, but that’s okay because Sex and the City has you covered. You can also feel like you’re canoodling on a park bench at 1 AM while watchingAbout Last Night. It’s quite possible most people have some sort of big city public sex item on their Fuck-It List, and most of those ideas come from the films we’ve watched.

Sex and the NYC Elite

Woody Allen has made his career exploring the neurosis of the Manhattan Man, be them from a pending mid-life crisis, an inability to relate to or satisfy women, or just regretting the decisions the MM has made up to the time line of the film. Allen’s Manhattan Man needs to be handled with kid gloves, but doesn’t want to know everyone around him is either ignoring or coddling him. He represents an entire group of rich men on either side of Central Park who just feel dissatisfied with their current situation. So, of course, sex with these men (and the mouthy women they tend to take up with) leaves a little more than to be desired.

Allen’s 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters doesn’t feature a lot of bedroom scenes, but the entire film is about fidelity, wife swapping, and self-recognition through penetration. Rich people have such problems, and one of those problems, according to Allen, is realizing one morning that they are either going to have sex with the same person forever or never have sex with that person again. Hannah (Mia Farrow) is contently married to Elliot (Michael Caine), who it turns out doesn’t feel as content as his wife. Elliot takes up with Hannah’s sister Lee (Barbara Hershey), who it turns out feels just as disappointed with her current relationship as Elliot feels with Hannah. He needs to feel cherished and adored by someone, as his wife puts so much of her focus on her other sister Holly (Diane West), who’s poor decisions and failing career keep Hannah occupied from confronting or even noticing the affair going on behind her back.

While the film closes with the end of the Elliot and Lee’s affair and the three sisters happy in their current or new relationships, the suggestion that sex is fluid resonates today. Allen makes films for his audience who recognize the landmarks and the people within, but for someone outside of NYC, these characters are also the highest of fantasy.  New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers alike salivate over these people who have money, success, and nice apartments, but also have deep problems. Some of us may want to cheat on our wife with her sexy, enticing sister, but at the end of the day happiness comes through recognizing stability is better than chaos.

Suburban Yuppie Sex

But, for those who don’t recognize the good thing they have right in front of them and continue down that dark path of infidelity and delicious kinky sex, forgiveness and safety isn’t always waiting at the end. Just ask Connie Sumner (Diane Lane) whose tryst with artist Paul (Olivier Martinez) caused her husband Ed (Richard Gere) to infatuate so heavily on his wife’s infidelity that he killed Paul and tried to hide the body. Adrian Lyne’s 2002 homage to 1990s sexual thrillers, Unfaithful, was marketed as one of the sexiest and intense thrillers to date (that should have given it away how tame it would actually be), exploring the ramifications of a woman’s affair and her husband’s consequential break down.

I’m not going to lie, I wanted this film to be a lot spicier than it actually was, but it did succeed at presenting NYC as a den of delight. Connie travels into the city for her sexy time, leaving her adoring husband behind to tend to their child, and engages in a life-changing affair. From her first passionate alleyway kissing, to fucking in a bathroom stall (gross and awkward), to sex on the wet floor of his art studio, Connie explores every facet of her sexual desires. NYC is her sexual Mecca, where she discovers more about herself and enters, tamely, into a secret world of disrepute. She is punished for her sexual awakening not with her own death, but with the death of her lover and the imprisonment of her husband. New York gaveth and New York tooketh away.

Passion for One Night

Finally, New York presents more than just a place for rich people affairs, sexual journeys, and mayhem, it is also a place where young people search out the loves of their lives. New York, I Love You tells ten short stories about such wandering souls, and their constant struggle to find love in a city of so many other lost souls. Some of them succeed, some of them fail, and two of them in particular try to change their normal non-committal ways. In the vignette “Allen Hughes” Lydia (Drea de Matteo) and Gus (Bradley Cooper) meet at a bar. Shot through a variety of flashbacks and jump cuts, the couple share an intense cab ride home where internally they promise themselves to “call the next day” or “let him actually sleep over this time” or “try not to fall in love in the morning.” Back at the apartment, their sex scene is rife with chemistry and tingle-enducing pleasure for both the romantics watching and the two engaging in orgasms.

This couple belongs together for that time, but is there a possibility that they can find more with each other once the sun comes up? Ultimately this couple ignores the warnings of the NYC Elite and the Suburban yuppies, who found love in the city but lost it along the way, and chose to go down a path of more than just sex and the City

JUNKFOOD CINEMA 11

unkfood Cinema: Black Belt Jones

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; scientifically proven. This is the weekly internet column with a permanent case of the munchies. Every Friday I serve up a jive cinematic turkey which I then proceed to slap all up and down with snark. But I temper that by showering it with sweet, sweet affection because I am in fact a lover of bad movies. Wow, is it hot in here or is it just…wholly inappropriate. To complete this weird little combo plate, I will then pair the film with a themed snack food item that will judo kick you in the intestines the way the movie backhands your brain.

It is February again and, apart from marmots predicting the weather and an onslaught of inedible candy hearts in the forecast, that can only mean one thing: Blaxploitation History Month! As should be readily apparent to everyone at this point, I am something of a fan of various types of ‘sploitations, but my favorite of the lot has to be the incredibly entertaining, if often more-than-mildly offensive blaxploitation. We can argue the merits/problems with this subgenre all day, but the fact is that it produced several certified badass films and propelled to stardom many performers who otherwise may not have had an opportunity to shine. As such, the month of February will be devoted to showcasing four more of my favorite blaxploitation films.

Today’s snack: Black Belt Jones

What Makes it Bad?

Black Belt Jones is another of the blaxploitation martial arts films starring Jim Kelly of Enter the Dragon fame. Here again, demonstrating his immeasurable range, Kelly plays a street-wise martial arts expert who takes none too kindly to being pushed around. Black Belt Jones has many of the comfortably familiar tropes of blaxploitation. The villain is, of course, the Italian mafia who in this case are trying to buy up an entire city block and have but one holdout, the local dojo. So essentially Jim Kelly is called into save the rec center…with his fists. This, like any given film in history, could have benefited from more break-dancing. The other strange, but familiar, trope is the random fits of rapping. It’s one thing if the character rapping is an aspiring young hip-hop artist displaying his burgeoning talents. It’s quite another when it’s an oafish, impossibly elderly gangster rhyming “coins” with references to his “loins.” It isn’t often that someone can lend serious credibility to the rap skills of Dolemite.

The romance is Black Belt Jones, true to most blaxploitation, is hilariously terrible. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen my share of bad love scenes in this genre and I’ve even seen a few that have lacked romance. But the scene wherein Black Belt Jones finally gets with his lady friend really does flirt shamelessly with rape. She does the coy, “come and get me” ploy but it quickly devolves into “if I want that, I can take it” which suggests an association between sex and violence that only frat boys and L.A. Lakers starting point guards truly appreciate. But hey, at least he refuses to let her put her panties on before they run from the bad guys; “no time” indeed…pervert. Also, why must their love play involve smashing a hippie’s guitar? You don’t see me smashing Al Gore’s energy-saving light bulbs every time I get lucky, do you?

Black Belt Jones, due to its straddling of the lesser known Brucesploitation subgenre, actually goes so far as to invent genre conventions of it own. The first would be the way it satisfies itself that audience members who aren’t themselves proficient in martial arts will accept any physical action as martial arts as long as it is paired with shouting. The establishing shot of the dojo features a sensei screaming and apparently trying to figure out how his arms work. It would be the height of absurdity but then he grabs a nearby student and says, “take over.” At which point the student does the exact same shouting and flailing with a similar ignorance of anything resembling martial arts. It seems ripped straight from a spoof but is played with absolute sincerity. And as much as I like Scatman Crothers, his casting as the grand high sensei of the dojo is…questionable. Somehow I don’t think having Hong Kong Phooey on your resume qualifies you to play Mr. Miyagi; sort of in the same way that voicing Fred Flintstone doesn’t make you a paleontologist.

Why I Love It!

I kick myself that I subjected myself to Black Samurai before Black Belt Jones. Black Samurai, which I covered for last year’s Blaxploiation History Month, makes Black Belt Jones look like The Godfather. The story is more interesting, the dialogue is 150,000 times stronger, and even the fight sequences are better. Jim Kelly and Gloria Hendry bring their A-game and knock a whole slew of suckas on their asses. Kelly’s technical skill and his raucous, punctuating shouts remind one of Bruce Lee with an afro. The scene where Black Belt Jones takes down an entire gang by turning on and off the lights is not only fantastic, but also serves as an adequate warning against ever playing flashlight tag with Jim Kelly. I also defy you not to be aroused by Jim Kelly’s bubble fight, oh yes. And how can you not love  Hendry walking into a pool hall full of gangsters, calling them all “sick faggots,” and proceeding to beat them all half to death? Awesome!

The absurdity in Black Belt Jones is overwhelmingly endearing. I love the fact that Jones has a whole army of female gymnasts at his disposal. Well, when I say gymnasts, I mean that they know how to jump on a trampoline. It’s the kind of talent that can only come from years of…living in the midwest and having a backyard. Also, there is a funeral scene in this film that will go down as one of the greatest of all time. Let’s just say that when my time comes, probably from choking to death on the world’s largest fried Snickers bar, you can save the tears and kind words. All I want is a karate student, wearing his ceremonial gi, to do an entire kata routine in front of my open casket before bowing and walking away. It’s as if they’re burying Ralph Macchio. Instead of just his career.

I love the siege on the mafia hideout near the end of the film. It’s just plain bold all the way around. Thinking that spraying a fire extinguisher on an alarm bell will somehow keep it from sounding? Bold! Wearing a stocking cap over your formidable afro which makes you look like kung-fu Eraserhead? Bold! Insisting on wearing all black despite the fact you are executing a raid in the middle of the afternoon? Super bold!

Junkfood Pairing: McDonald’s

One of the most outlandishly, inexplicably awful moments in this film, or any other, comes just after Black Belt Jones successfully plays his two enemies off one another. He informs the mob that the local crime lord is paying him off with his own money, hangs up the phone, and steps out of the phone booth to greet his adoring cohorts. At which point he shouts, “hey hey let’s go to McDonald’s” unleashing a cacophony of cheering. At no point in the film does any character mention McDonald’s nor is this moment followed by a scene in which we actually see these characters eating at McDonald’s so it doesn’t even qualify as product placement. It was as if they tossed out the script and told Jim Kelly to say the first thing that popped into his brain. In honor of this evidence of the first case of fast food turrets syndrome, stuff a McNugget or two into your face.

CRITERION 77

As I argued in my introduction to our coverage of the BBS box set, this major Criterion release both celebrates New Hollywood and complicates the master narrative informing the way in which the era is typically remembered. Alongside classics of the era like Easy Rider, Five Easy Piecesand The Last Picture Show, the set also includes films that were received badly or misunderstood in their time like Head and The King of Marvin Gardens which can now be reassessed with the benefit of hindsight. But perhaps the most interesting juxtaposition to the canonized works of New Hollywood here is the presence of the absolutely obscure, the completely forgotten, the movies that up until now were lost in time and memory.

This set marks the first time Jack Nicholson’s Drive, He Said (1970) and Henry Jaglom’s A Safe Place (1971) have been released in any home video format. These films are, in a sense, correlated with New Hollywood because of their themes, narratives, characters, and their temporal and economic contexts, but unlike the three heavy-hitters in this set, watching them now is, by comparison, to see a film with a forty-year-old blank slate – a unique and rare experience when one contrasts watching these films to, say, Easy Rider, a movie inseparable from an ongoing and reiterated forty-year-long conversation about what it meant then and means today.

Separately, these are interesting films on their own, but together, Drive, He Said and A Safe Place point to the fact that there’s still a great deal of New Hollywood history yet to be written, and fresh gems to be found.

Drive, He Said

One important aspect of the “BBS Story” itself is the regular company of talent that the production company employed who constantly shifted creative roles. Drive, He Said is Nicholson’s directorial debut, which co-stars Jaglom, and A Safe Place is Jaglom’s directorial debut, and co-stars Nicholson. The New Hollywood era is often thought of as the age of the self-conscious American auteur, the time where films were by and large deliberately manifested visions of the individual artist rather than the collective efforts inherent to the studio system. Individually, the BBS oeuvre doubtlessly consists of the work of artists, and the company enjoyed an unprecedented amount of studio-funded creative freedom in contrast to the constrictive former studio system, but when viewed together these films can hardly be argued as works of individual artists, but instead evidence the virtues of a collaborative creative community.

This aspect of the set becomes especially apparent in Nicholson’s film. If there is a face to the BBS production company, that face is Nicholson’s. With the exception of The Last Picture Show, Nicholson held an important creative role in each of the films in the set, both on and off-screen. The only one of the Nicholson-involved films in which his iconic visage is nowhere to be found is his first time stepping into the director’s chair to compose a story about a college basketball player’s firsthand experience of sexual liberation (in his affair with his professor’s wife), rebellion against controlling forces (in his rejection of the hegemonic oppression of the ‘team’), and exposure to militant student activism (the increasingly insane antics of his roommate).

It’s interesting that of all the subjects one could tackle during this socially and politically tumultuous and revolutionary era, the guy who wrote Roger Corman’s The Trip and co-starred in Easy Rider made a movie about the countercultural experience of a jock. Today, with his dense legacy, Nicholson is a force of nature whose personality seems almost literally larger than life, as if he can’t just be one human. He is the ultimate movie star, the individual who not only stands out from the crowd, but makes the crowd altogether invisible. And while Nicholson certainly had a star presence in the late 60s and early 70s that led him to his current persona, Drive, He Said represents a time when he was interested in being part of every aspect of the creative experience, and the film’s newfound availability allows for a reassessment of the supposed singularity of the movie star, and even an alternate Nicholson that could have been (it’s significant that, by contrast, Nicholson was also in front of the camera for his other two directing efforts, Goin’ South (1978) and The Two Jakes (1990)).

Drive, He Said is an admittedly weak film, and hasn’t aged well, but as a film about individuals struggling against the collective (the jock against his team, the lone counterrevolutionary against his perceived oppression), it speaks volumes to the paradigm-shifting roles of creative individuals in innovate communities at this time in Hollywood, and likewise the contradiction of the star or auteur amongst the collective which arguably brought an end to the era.

A Safe Place

Speaking of larger-than-life personalities, the presence of Orson Welles alludes many implications to the ways in which A Safe Place can be reevaluated as a Criterion ‘discovery.’ The film seems to speak directly to the Criterion Collection itself, as the elliptical editing approach to a story of a broken relationship resembles Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing (1980), and Welles’s ethereal, is-he-real-or-not magician character in this film more than slightly resembles his embodiment of the charlatan who would “narrate” Welles’s final completed film a brief year later in F for Fake (1972).

Welles’s generational disparity from the characters filling out this complex NYC love triangle between a free-spirited woman (Tuesday Weld, beautifully heartbreaking here as the only BBS female protagonist) who dates a charming square (Philip Proctor), but can’t seem to pull herself away from a flaky, dangerous former lover (Nicholson), is all-too-apparent. Welles’s psychedelic, possibly omnipotent magician could only exist outside this narrative of the counterculture in Gotham. He’s the cinematic bad boy of the previous generation working with the cinematic bad boys of the hippie age. Like members of the BBS community, Welles enjoyed every aspect of creative film production, but his career rose-and-fell tragically in part because of his insistent personality.

But Welles, as he demonstrated in nearly all his films as director and as he would later say bluntly in F for Fake, considered himself a cinematic magician, a manipulator who forces your perspective simultaneously for your own amusement as well as his benefit. The experience of magic is collective, but it’s dependant on the will of the individual. And this aspect of Welles’s own personality concisely sums up the drama that motivates A Safe Place. The film’s central couple experiences turmoil because of their disparate perspectives on the potential for magic and the power of the inexplicable in everyday life, which at the time merged countercultural sensibilities and New Age philosophy as depicted here.

When Weld asks for Proctor’s pseudo-astrological “number,” all he can think of is to tell her how to call his phone, and when Weld and her fellow hippie friends attempt to reach the spirits of beyond with an Ouija-like exercise, Proctor explains the psychological and physiological factors that make the cup move. Proctor, endearingly impressed and satisfied by reality itself, is essentially a buzzkill for his lover and her friends who want to believe in something beyond what we see and hear. And Jaglom doesn’t simply situate this countercultural need for magic recreationally, but as a deep need for escape, illustrated most powerfully with Gwen Welles’s verite-esque, fourth-wall-breaking confession of suicidal tendencies.

The countercultural cinema of New Hollywood, then, not only attempted to reflect social reality and new political sensibilities onscreen, but to provide exactly the “magic” they sought to experience (how else could one describe a movie like Head?). This aspect of A Safe Place is rooted in the tradition of the New York 1960s avant-garde, which was composed of filmmakers who believed cinema could induce a transcendent experience equal to or even greater than psychedelic drugs. This is why Flaming Creatures director Jack Smith’s famous impassioned assertion that “magic is real” should not be understood as a metaphor, but as a directive. But what A Safe Placesuggests so poignantly is that this magic is sought not so much to experience the otherwordly or to escape the oppressively mundane nature of reality, but, as the title suggests, to find something more reliable and comforting than reality. Magic in A Safe Place is everywhere, but it’s also tragically elusive