JT Creative Update | Feb. 19, 2025

What’s Going On

Not a lot of note this week re: Original Fiction. Revised the outline for The Io Insurgency, wrote another 1,000ish words. Revised some 20-odd pages of the feature screenplay of The New Patriots. Doing a lot of non-fiction reading that is getting in the way of my fiction writing.

Jake’s Weekly Sci-fi Recommendation

I know I’ve only given you two recommendations so far, one of which was a Peter Hyams film, but today you’re getting another Peter Hyams film. You should watch 2010: The Year We Make Contact! Though it is a direct sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010 is so tonally disconnected from Kubrick’s film that if it were not for the shared iconography of these two pictures you'd be forgiven for thinking 2010 came from a totally different source.

If you didn’t connect with 2001 because of its glacial pace or heady, cerebral third act, do not fear: 2010 is a shot of adrenaline by comparison. Roy Scheider leads the cast of 2010 (which includes a young-ish John Lithgow and Helen Mirren) as they attempt to make contact with the newly reappeared Discovery One from the first film, which is at risk of crashing into Io (I swear I didn’t mean to include mention of Io three updates in a row) and thus compromising whatever data the original crew acquired on their doomed mission—chiefly, what happened to HAL?

There are some wild set pieces in this movie, and the effects all hold up remarkably well. Hyams knew how to get every dollar out of his modest budgets up onto the screen. Now I just need to actually read the Arthur C. Clarke books these movies are based on.