There are many good lines because this was one of Jerome Bixby's episodes. Of all the published SF writers recruited in 1966-67 to contribute episodes, Bixby was the only one remaining for the third season - he did "Mirror, Mirror" and "By Any Other Name" in season 2, and this one and "Requiem for Methuselah" in…

Final sequence of "Is There in Truth No Beauty"…!
Note carefully that Spock uses his visor when operating the transporter controls just after the final lines of dialogue among him, Kirk, and Dr. Jones. After the beam-out, the last shot is a reaction shot of Kirk, who is looking at the transporter platform - WITHOUT…

Andrea Martin and Martin Short
"…Andrea Martin, and Martin Short came to watch her. Just as a friend…" Well, yes and no. They were related by marriage for a while; she was married to someone whose sister was (and is) Short's wife.

Let's not forget that "the children in Miri" included Kim Darby and Michael J. Pollard, both playing children who (according to the story) cannot have reached puberty - and both actors were so good that no one cared that they obviously were not themselves prepubescent.

Yeah, I know - I saw the series premiere, which began documentary-style and seemed quite realistic (well, I had just turned 9). I was referring to the series once its tone became firmly established, during which a walking, talking carrot (played by Stanley Adams, who played Cyrano Jones in Star Trek the same year)…

With respect to the idea that the "Spock's Brain" script - by Gene Coon as "Lee Cronin" - was a parody, I can't see it that way, perhaps because it was the FIRST episode I ever saw: the third-season premiere, which was right around my 12th birthday. And until weekday reruns began, third-season episodes were all I knew…

"Ish" in Minnesota
"AMC's 'Prisoner' has a premise. Ish."

Can you imagine?
…"Fall Out" was the first episode my wife ever saw. Not by my choice (I had seen the whole series in the early 1990s when still single) - we were flipping channels and came across it on a local non-commercial station right after the "On the grounds of" credits, and watched until the end. Now I don't…

KenzoFKC: It so happens I just finished reading The Penultimate Truth (from the year when he was knocking out novels the fastest, 1964). I never thought of Yancy as Reagan but as Eisenhower, in part because of a brief note by Dick, at the end of the story collection The Golden Man, concerning his story "The Mold of…

The best of the story collections (other than the complete five-volume set, of which The Short Happy Life… is volume 1) is, for me, The Best of Philip K. Dick, edited and introduced by John Brunner for Ballantine, 1977. Not only are all the early classics there ("Colony," "Impostor," "Paycheck," "Second Variety") and…

Bester's best, The Stars My Destination (1956), is not overtly Freudian the way some of the short stories are.

Switters, you might know that there's a link between Game Players and the earlier non-SF novel (seen in the photo) Mary and the Giant - one character adapted wholesale (the record dealer Joe Schilling), another turned into a more, um, unsettling version of her earlier self (Mary Anne with a different last name).

Now Wait for Last Year; the 1950s realist novels; Divine Invasions
I've been a PKD reader since he was alive, and the novel of his that I find myself rereading the most is less well known than some of those named here: Now Wait for Last Year (1966), which is now included in the Library of America series of PKD works…

The scariest made-for-TV movie
SPECIAL BULLETIN, the early-1980s Herskowitz-Zwick production about what happens to Charleston, S.C., when some domestic terrorists-for-peace get hold of a nuclear device. It was done on videotape to lend it the immediacy of a live local-news broadcast (with Ed Flanders as one of the…

"Hammer into Anvil" music
I'm very much enjoying this series of commentaries (first saw The Prisoner on PBS in Minneapolis, around 1992).

One great thing about Sikking's role is that the film was shot during the original run of Hill Street Blues, so fans of the show (like me) could see his three minutes on screen and suddenly imagine what sort of starship captain Lieutenant Howard Hunter might be.

Ian R. MacLeod
…wrote two alt-history novellas in the 1990s that I've read (both are in the Gardner Dozois-edited annual Best Of collections). Both are simply great.

Sorry, to be clear: Ephron had not yet directed a movie when Heartburn was released. Heartburn (the book) is Ephron's 1983 roman-a-clef, which she adapted a few years later for the Mike Nichols-directed movie wherein Streep played Rachel, the Ephron-like character. To see how denatured the movie is, read the book - a…

@WWYND: No, Heartburn (the movie) is NOT good - although Heartburn (the novel) is quite good.

I remember reading in David Gerrold's The World of Star Trek (1973) that in fact Isaac Asimov was consulted about this during the writing of the second pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before," circa 1965, and essentially he said "why not?"