Logan's Run Book

Real Rating: 2.5* of five

I remembered this book fondly. The summer the film came out, I drove my licenseless buds to the Village Multiplex in Pygge, my 1968 Bonneville. (We'd passed the book around our Scooby-group, drinking it in.) There Michael York cheekboned his way into my, um, heart shall we say, and the rest of the film...and the entirety of the book...faded into insignificance.

Netflix loses the film on January 1st. I figured I'd rewatch it, while I give the book another go; after all, they're part of my formative years, so as I enter the last laps let's look back to the track, eh what?

You would think that, by now, I'd know better.

The book is just plain bad. The prose rises to the dizzying heights of serviceability a couple times, all the way up the slope of passable; the bulk of the 150pp are spent on the Plains of Puerility. A pair of fortyish numpties wrote about a world in which they'd be dead twenty years. It went about as well as that makes it sound. It's sexist, of course; it was ground-breaking for its day because the hedonism of its society isn't particularly concerned about who you do since there are no children born of sexual congress. Makes the property base of marriage pretty useless, so marriage simply isn't.

But the big draw, the martial arts bits, are tame and tedious 50 years on. (It came out in 1967, the film in 1976.) The action scenes are mildly fun. The story's versions of Logan and Francis are in a whole father/son dynamic that never gets much of anywhere because, well, you did see the page count, right? The ending takes place in Space. I won't say why, but it is the trippiest piece of dumbfuckery I can imagine. These guys were tripping when they wrote the ending, there's no other excuse. End it does, however, so I shook my head and started streaming the film.

Rob was here that day. He hadn't heard of the book or the film. He flipped through the book a bit and quietly reshelved it after about ten minutes. "Ready to see the film?" I asked; "not really" was the honest reply. Luckily Michael York is there from the get-go, cheekbones a-jut and body firmly and revealingly encased in a spiffy dark costume. I heard no further nose-sighs from little spoon...until a scene where Logan/Michael dials up a sex worker and gets, on his first try, a man.

"...?!!?..."

"Hey, even *I* had older mentors," I said. "Wait for the robot butcher scene. That's when we get to see Logan and Jessica naked!"

And that is pretty much it. The naked scene isn't him naked, it's just her, and some artfully obscured extras who earned that paycheck; a bit disappointing, but obscured by the fact that the film takes a turn for the idiotic from there on out. We ended up wondering what the hell was the point of this exercise, how far breaking ground can go in keeping a creative endeavor in active circulation. I think it's time to let this one slide into the background and we should pack it away in shredded copies of the awful book it was inspired by but doesn't much resemble.