Forbidden Planets

October 15, 2006
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"" 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)