Forbidden Planets

From Booklist MGM's sf thriller Forbidden Planet (1956), about the search for an expedition lost on a hazardous planet, has been the model for a cottage industry's worth of TV series and movies. Any show featuring a starship, a captain, and crew--particularly Star Trek and its many spin-offs--owes a debt to the Shakespeare-inspired motion picture. For the fiftieth anniversary of the movie's premiere, editor Crowther solicited 12 new stories set on other treacherous planets humans would have more wisely avoided. Ray Bradbury introduces the volume with the twin revelations that he declined writing FP 's screenplay and would have exterminated its famous robot, Robby, if he hadn't. Jay Lake's story offers an alternate "forbidden" plotline based on King Lear instead of the movie's template, The Tempest , while Matthew Hughes' dissects a forbidden and deadly alien plant instead of a planet. Other notable contributions come from Ian McDonald, Michael Moorcock, and space-opera specialist Stephen Baxter, who gives a penetrating analysis of the film's enduring influence on his own work as well as his chosen genre. Carl Hays Copyright В© American Library Association. All rights reserved