I saw this movie as a kid and it haunted me. Somehow, when the internet was still in its infancy (pre-WWW), the title popped into my head—I still don’t know how—and I was able to rent it on VHS at the local video rental store. It was startling how much I remembered from seeing it on TV at the age of 6 or 7.
I had a similar reaction seeing Logans Run as a kid on TV (it must have been edited pretty aggressively as the movie is very racy).
I had no idea what I had watched but I remember this show about these people who are stuck inside a mall and can never go outside ever. It really affected me incredibly deeply and filled me with melancholy whenever I thought about it.
Finally in College I was renting old sci-fi and watching it, and as I was watching Logans Run I suddenly realized that it was the show I had seen as a child about the people who couldn't go outside.
A lot of 70s dystopian sci-fi hits pretty hard to be honest. Two more that come off as incredibly prescient are The Network (about a media company that will do anything for viewership) and THX1138 (about people who take drugs to control all their emotions, confess their sins to chatbots, and masturbate to porn every night).
Same here, a very enduring memory. Although I had largely forgotten about it until I heard a song (well, some sort of psychill instrumental I guess) by Carbon Based Lifeforms, named Photosynthesis, that samples a couple of lines from this movie: https://youtu.be/KQE29az48gM?si=9q3aVxcvV7TLxBa4&t=770
My favorite era of sci-fi films, but I suppose I'm biased having grown up in that era.
Make no mistake, I was blown away when "Star Wars" came out like everyone else, but damn, it killed what had been a delicate and thoughtful genre of Hollywood.
Enjoy it mate, and all the other fat Brunners. (His Stand on Zanzibar is most of Gibson's Neuromancer ... more than a decade before.) Give the thin ones a miss.
> Silent Spring had a huge and immediate impact on the American public, which Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had very much expected and prepared for.
A couple of things here:
1. Could a book come out now that would have this kind of effect on the public and spur us to action? I suspect not because we're much more divided now than we were in the *early* 60s. (Yes, the divisions would grow quite large in the mid-to-late 60s, but the early 60s was the calm before the storm)
2. They expected that it would have the impact it did? I guess that goes back to #1.
Critical reflections about the ecological impact/carelessness of modern society was an already booming genre during that time, so the response they were preparing for was surely part of HM's decision to publish in the first place, not just some insight gleaned from how convincing the work felt or whatever.
And these books were consistently controversial and politicized at the time, which is why sales and discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that).
Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing, the US was extremely divided in the 1960's and is extremely divided again now. Practiced media companies know how to "prepare" for that by exploiting it for sales, and today's publishers do it just the same -- sometimes on ecological topics like this, sometimes on other controversial topics du jour.
I do not think so. What would it be about? Just like Carson correctly predicted indiscriminate use of DDT would lead to resistance, the corporate 'immune system' has evolved to shut down stuff like this much more effectively.
Not to nitpick but in the early 60s there was an entire race of people who were systematically marginalized to be Third Class citizens. (White) women were still effectively Second Class.
I was his assistant in the early 2000s helping him get his UFOTOG project started. His stories and the level of depth developing custom tech shaped my career. I really miss him.
The third- and second-from-last paragraphs reference a book found beside Lowell’s bunk: a copy of the “Conservation Pledge” from 1946 "when the magazine Outdoor Life held a contest to encourage outdoors enthusiasts to dedicate themselves to the preservation of the America’s natural resources. The winning entry, the one that adorns Lowell’s wall aboard Valley Forge, was submitted by L.L. Foreman, a former ranch hand turned author of pulpy adventure Westerns.
"The second-place winner of that 1946 contest? Rachel Carson."
So there's a hint that the protagonist of Silent Running had actually read Carson's Silent Spring!
It was a not-too-successful attempt by the author to create an equivalency, I think. Silent Spring was the gateway text to environmental concerns in the early 60s. Silent Running was an environmental science fiction film that had a similar theme and might have had aspirations to have a similar impact.
I had the paperback with Bruce Dern on the cover. I might have read it before seeing the movie, don’t remember. I remember being mesmerized by the book as a teen. This post brought back memories not accessed in decades.
I discovered Silent Running almost backwards when 65daysofstatic played a live re-score of the film many years back. Looks like it’s easily searchable still, comes highly recommended.
Interesting! I wouldn't be surprised if there was a concious or unconcious connection. Miyazaki did have a lot of influences in his work like Moebius and I get the feeling he consumed a lot of Western work which inspired him.
The title refers to the idea of a submarine going silent so it can't be tracked by sonar. In early drafts of the screenplay, the hero wanted to do something similar with the Valley Forge, so he painted the ship black and tried to hide, knowing that Earth would come looking for it. That idea was abandoned but the title remained.
Except that in this case, the human went berserk not because of contradictory instructions but because the other humans were planning on destroying the last surviving plant life from earth.
I really don't see the "prescience". Movies about an apocalyptic future are nearly a dime a dozen and considering how far silent running shot from the mark on almost anything of how our present world is, it's hardly brilliant. The earth is still here and full of life, more of us than ever live on it and despite this, all major metrics of human development are better than they have ever been. Yes, we still have many environmental problems, but solutions are at least possible for them and our planet is far from the hell so many movies and books of the 70's predicted for the early 21st century. Also, in at least some ways, we're even improving certain things in interesting ways, or at least working towards doing so.
Climate change is something to worry about constructively, but many of its worst consequences still exist only as predictive models no matter how much many here would like to twist otherwise and by no objective, reasoned measure are we living in an ecological hell that's in any way worse than it was in the 70s, never mind in the fantasy future worlds predicted by literature and film from that era. If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
I know that a bit of optimism isn't fashionable among a certain segment of the population, but it's if anything at least more realistic and accurate than the ridiculous notion of calling Silent Running prescient.
Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
Good science fiction is often more about the present than about the future: a projection of current problems into an amplified version of reality.
Sometimes that device gets overdone: 2004 Battlestar Galactica felt to me carrying much of 9/11 background.
Silent Running is far from alone in the pessimist outlook. It's funny that, living in a civilization so much indebted to technology, the stories that we keep telling ourselves about it are so negative.
We've accepted that as a given. I recently enjoyed a lot Altered Carbon, that has as a premise a technology that provides immortality for the masses. Well, guess what: that good guys are trying to destroy it. Because reasons.
Also the cities seem like a shithole, not sure why.
> If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
There's a bit of a y2k issue here: things have got a lot better because a lot of work has been done. But getting the work done required political action, which required scare stories.
"If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago."
The Global Living Planet Index graph shows a significant decline in the population abundance of vertebrate species from 1970 to the present, indicating a substantial loss in global biodiversity.
> Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
Y'know what else is mostly crap? Forgetting that things changec because of projected problems like this. Go look at any movie from the late 1960s showing the LA skyline and just look at the smog. Car manufacturers would never have attended to that problem without being forced to by publically popular legislation. There are many other examples here that have avoided "ecological hell" and post-facto "well, nothing bad happened" analyses are mostly crap because something did happen, except it gets conveniently forgotten by a culture that has the memory of a goldfish.
I don't think you can say "nothing". As the article puts it:
> "There are a lot of climate crisis stories in modern sci fi, but a great many of them focus, intentionally or not, on the natural world’s utility to humans: we must preserve it or else we doom ourselves. Silent Running argues that we should preserve the natural world even if we can live without it, even if it serves no purpose in feeding the hungry or curing the ill, even if we can find a way to get along just fine."
If the idea of the importance of preservation of the natural world were much more widespread, humanity would be in a very different situation now. Dern's character's argument in the movie is just as relevant today, and the general answer today remains the same: the natural world is a secondary concern compared to humanity's unconstrained and unthinking growth.
[+] [-] dhosek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanb|2 years ago|reply
I had no idea what I had watched but I remember this show about these people who are stuck inside a mall and can never go outside ever. It really affected me incredibly deeply and filled me with melancholy whenever I thought about it.
Finally in College I was renting old sci-fi and watching it, and as I was watching Logans Run I suddenly realized that it was the show I had seen as a child about the people who couldn't go outside.
A lot of 70s dystopian sci-fi hits pretty hard to be honest. Two more that come off as incredibly prescient are The Network (about a media company that will do anything for viewership) and THX1138 (about people who take drugs to control all their emotions, confess their sins to chatbots, and masturbate to porn every night).
[+] [-] technothrasher|2 years ago|reply
Me too. I still to this day have an original theater poster from it hanging in my office, next to my Collossus The Forbin Project one.
I do remember as a kid being very confused when the forest ships from the movie showed up in the fleet of ships following the Battlestar Galactica.
[+] [-] antonvs|2 years ago|reply
Same here, a very enduring memory. Although I had largely forgotten about it until I heard a song (well, some sort of psychill instrumental I guess) by Carbon Based Lifeforms, named Photosynthesis, that samples a couple of lines from this movie: https://youtu.be/KQE29az48gM?si=9q3aVxcvV7TLxBa4&t=770
For those who haven't seen the movie, here's a 16 sec non-spoiler clip that gives a little context to the lines in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Xhzo6VAWg
[+] [-] Angostura|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|2 years ago|reply
Make no mistake, I was blown away when "Star Wars" came out like everyone else, but damn, it killed what had been a delicate and thoughtful genre of Hollywood.
[+] [-] discarded1023|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antonvs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verisimi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212975
3 years ago | 60 comments
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|2 years ago|reply
A couple of things here:
[+] [-] swatcoder|2 years ago|reply
And these books were consistently controversial and politicized at the time, which is why sales and discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that).
Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing, the US was extremely divided in the 1960's and is extremely divided again now. Practiced media companies know how to "prepare" for that by exploiting it for sales, and today's publishers do it just the same -- sometimes on ecological topics like this, sometimes on other controversial topics du jour.
[+] [-] mattgrice|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
I really don't think this is substantially true. I think we're about as divided as we were then.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|2 years ago|reply
That's pretty fucking divided.
[+] [-] milleramp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enduser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myself248|2 years ago|reply
Neither one's wikipedia article makes any mention of the other.
Did I miss something?
[+] [-] fractallyte|2 years ago|reply
"The second-place winner of that 1946 contest? Rachel Carson."
So there's a hint that the protagonist of Silent Running had actually read Carson's Silent Spring!
[+] [-] themadturk|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dhosek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Isle_of_View|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] southernplaces7|2 years ago|reply
Climate change is something to worry about constructively, but many of its worst consequences still exist only as predictive models no matter how much many here would like to twist otherwise and by no objective, reasoned measure are we living in an ecological hell that's in any way worse than it was in the 70s, never mind in the fantasy future worlds predicted by literature and film from that era. If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
I know that a bit of optimism isn't fashionable among a certain segment of the population, but it's if anything at least more realistic and accurate than the ridiculous notion of calling Silent Running prescient.
Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
[+] [-] narag|2 years ago|reply
Sometimes that device gets overdone: 2004 Battlestar Galactica felt to me carrying much of 9/11 background.
Silent Running is far from alone in the pessimist outlook. It's funny that, living in a civilization so much indebted to technology, the stories that we keep telling ourselves about it are so negative.
We've accepted that as a given. I recently enjoyed a lot Altered Carbon, that has as a premise a technology that provides immortality for the masses. Well, guess what: that good guys are trying to destroy it. Because reasons.
Also the cities seem like a shithole, not sure why.
[+] [-] pjc50|2 years ago|reply
There's a bit of a y2k issue here: things have got a lot better because a lot of work has been done. But getting the work done required political action, which required scare stories.
[+] [-] yeauldfellows|2 years ago|reply
The Global Living Planet Index graph shows a significant decline in the population abundance of vertebrate species from 1970 to the present, indicating a substantial loss in global biodiversity.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-living-planet-inde...
[+] [-] smackeyacky|2 years ago|reply
Y'know what else is mostly crap? Forgetting that things changec because of projected problems like this. Go look at any movie from the late 1960s showing the LA skyline and just look at the smog. Car manufacturers would never have attended to that problem without being forced to by publically popular legislation. There are many other examples here that have avoided "ecological hell" and post-facto "well, nothing bad happened" analyses are mostly crap because something did happen, except it gets conveniently forgotten by a culture that has the memory of a goldfish.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] helf|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] petermcneeley|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antonvs|2 years ago|reply
> "There are a lot of climate crisis stories in modern sci fi, but a great many of them focus, intentionally or not, on the natural world’s utility to humans: we must preserve it or else we doom ourselves. Silent Running argues that we should preserve the natural world even if we can live without it, even if it serves no purpose in feeding the hungry or curing the ill, even if we can find a way to get along just fine."
If the idea of the importance of preservation of the natural world were much more widespread, humanity would be in a very different situation now. Dern's character's argument in the movie is just as relevant today, and the general answer today remains the same: the natural world is a secondary concern compared to humanity's unconstrained and unthinking growth.