Your Midsummer Vacation Book Recommendation

It's still technically July!

Photo by Boxed Water Is Better on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is taking a few more days of vacation while it is still the middle of summer!

[It’s going to be August in a day or two. You can’t claim it is still the middle of summer!—ed.]

Is is still July?!

[….Technically, yes.—ed.]

Then kindly shut the f**k up and let me enjoy a few more days off before thinking about: a) getting back to teaching; and b) current events like the election in the United States, the post-election catastrophe in Venezuela, and the horrific, soul-destroying violence in Israel.

[Fair enough. Carry on!—ed.]

Posting will be light this week. But the reading will be intense, because I bought the perfect non-fiction vacation book that was just released today!!

Chris Nashawaty’s The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982 serve up a great premise. Over a span of just six weeks in the summer of 1982, Hollywood released eight films, each of which had an impact that lasted far longer than that summer:

• Blade Runner

• The Thing

• E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial

• Tron

• Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan

• Conan the Barbarian

• Poltergeist; and

• Mad Max: The Road Warrior

Now, anyone reading that list might not consider all eight of these films to be classics. But speaking for myself, I see two near-perfect masterpieces, two crowd-pleasing films just a whisker blow masterpiece, three more flawed films that nonetheless contain some of the most jaw-dropping effects ever put on film, and a rip-roaring science fantasy film. [Which is which?!—ed. Like I’m gonna tell! That is what readers can debate about in the comments!]

The point is, it’s an extraordinary list, and it says something about Hollywood that after decades of indifference to sci-fi, it took the studios another five years after Star Wars to finally get their s**t together and produce some films on par with George Lucas. Nashawaty’s book is not restricted to those six weeks in the summer of 1982, but traces how auteurs like Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and George Miller responded to the success of Star Wars in their own idiosyncratic ways.

The Future Was Now seems like a great way to recall what it was like to watch most of these films in the theater. Indeed, next month Ana Marie Cox and I will be talking about Nashawaty’s book for our Space the Nation podcast.

If it rains and I have to stay indoors there is time, Drezner’s World might have more thoughts about the world later in the week. Otherwise, we’ll be back on Friday.

See you in August!