PLEASURE gleamed a step.

SATISFACTION gleamed another.

RARE DELIGHTS gleamed a third.

Who remembers that 70’s classic called Logan’s Run? I saw it ages ago and re-watched it recently and decided to give the classic sci-fi a go too.

 A new world would be formed. Living is better than dying, Francis. Dying young is a waste and a shame and a perversion. The young don’t build. They use. The wonders of Man were achieved by the mature, the wise, who lived in this world before we did

 Some two hundred years into the future, ecological disaster has seen a meagre handful of humanity retreat to domed biospheres. There, under the care of an omnipresent computer system, people live a carefree, hedonistic lifestyle.

It was awash in sexuality. Here were beach girls from Mexico and California, Japanese maidens with shy eyes, Italian girls with mooned bodies, pert Irish lads, slim exotics from Calcutta, cool Englishwomen and full-figured French girls. All here because they were lonely or bored or oversexed; because they were looking for someone new or escaping from someone old—or for no reason at all except that the glasshouse was here to be used and it was a time for mingling and touching in a shadow search for love. You never find the people that you go to meet in dreams . . .

But paradise under limited resources comes with a price: No one lives past the age of twenty-one (thirty in the movie). When time runs out and the glowing crystal in the palm of your left hand turns black, you have two choices: Either report to Carousel, an anti-grav arena where those whose time is up can attempt to snag a rare opportunity at “renewal;” or literally run for your life, and hope that your path does not cross that of a Sandman, the armed, ruthless enforcers of the system.

The computer system, discovering Logan in possession of the trinket, accelerates his crystal to its termination point, and charges him with going undercover as a runner in order to discover the location of Sanctuary. Filled with growing doubts about the system he has spent his lifetime serving, Logan joins forces with Jessica (Jenny Agutter)—possessor of another Ankh symbol—and, while being pursued by former colleague Francis (Richard Jordan), must contend with 25-year-old juvenile delinquents, homicidal plastic surgeons, an insane food-processing robot, and Peter Ustinov in order to discover the secret of Sanctuary, and the truth about his dystopic Shangri-La.

The Sanctuary

A word. The runner was repeating a word.

Logan leaned closer to catch the broken whisper: “Sanctuary.”

In the book, Sanctuary is Argos – an old forgotten space station near Mars. They take the rocket to the Moon, which is the staging post for the flight there.

But how to get out?

As the beetle rushed, Logan’s thoughts rushed with it. Sanctuary. It seemed too easy; you got into a mazecar and said a word and the obedient piece of machinery carried you—where?

Cold clubbed them.

Logan stumbled up, pulling Jess with him. In the severe cold the effects of the needle drug were rapidly dissipated.

They run across the box – a metallic robot whose purpose was to first capture in ice the loveliness of people and animals and then to sadistically murder them.

Once they escape the cold hell, they find the renegades, the fringe society, who capture him and Jess and have a different type of torture in mind as Logan gets injected with a potent love-making drug called Everlove.

“Wild me, Sandfella,” she said to him in a husky voice. She ran her fingers along his thigh. “Bedabye me.”

And the others smiled with her. The green-eyed females said, “Wild she, Sandlover. Then wild we!”

The first orgasm was good.

The second was all right.

The third orgasm was bad.

The fourth orgasm was painful.

The fifth orgasm was agony.

The sixth orgasm was damnation.

The City

When it comes to the future and how it looks like, the book seems to be more based on glass than what the movie depicted it as:

Glass all around them. Glass walls and ceilings and floors. The bed, glass fiber. The chairs and tables, glass. The building was one vast transparent globe, shot periodically with colored lights.

Each room was equipped to illumine itself at irregular intervals, but it was impossible to determine just when a room would flare into brightness. Caught in the act of lovemaking, a couple would suddenly find themselves tangled in a wash of silver, or gold, or red, yellow or green. Other couples, around, above and below, would be able to watch them from glass floors, walls, ceilings. Then the light would die—to spring on in another chamber.

Cathedral: a festering sore in the side of Greater Los Angeles, an area of rubble and dust and burned-out buildings, a place of shadow and pollution, of stealth and sudden death. Cubscout territory. 

Below them, the great city was alive with snakes of light. He saw the rows of blinking glasshouses near Hurley Square and, beyond, the dazzle of Arcade. The fire galleries sent up their rose glow, staining the edge of the night sky.

The computers of that time were also imagined as clunky machines, full of noise and unable to process data without a human processor.

The room clicked and flashed, metallically coding, decoding, indexing,  weighing, processing, filing, tracking—rendering its impersonal machine data to the DS operatives who moved before its faceted wall of insect lights.

The Lifespan

flower history: YELLOW: Childhood. Birth to seven years: machine-reared in a Missouri nursery. No unusual traits noted. BLUE: Boyhood. Seven to fourteen. The usual pattern. Lived in a dozen states, roamed Europe. No arrests. RED: Manhood. Fourteen to twenty-one. Rebel. Arrested at sixteen for blocking a DS man on a hunt.

In the Grand Plan Of Chaney Moon, no one “dies” at 21, they instead Accept Sleep. Moon was the 16 year old Messiah who emerged as the most influential world leader following The Little War. Sleep was the answer to the population crisis which led to the war. This is handled similarly in The Giver by Lois Lowry where older people were quietly removed from society and killed. So were the second children. Overpopulation leads to war as resources are limited.

At the end of the Twentieth Century, before the Little War, when men spawned like microbes on a culture dish, the great problem was food. The fourth horseman rode the land and his name was Famine.

The Little War was a combination of forced abdications and military missteps which led to all world governments being led by young people, the majority of which were teenagers. Moon emerged as first the leading speaker of the victors, then the Messiah who saved an overpopulated Earth. His plan involved adhering to a predetermined lifespan of 21, controlled by a computerized timer.

No child under seven belongs on her own. I was happy in the nursery.” Jess sat down on the platform edge with Logan. “No, no I wasn’t happy.” Her voice trembled. “I accepted everything then, without questioning but I was never happy there

The messianic quality of Moon is often overlooked when discussing the book. He cemented his place in history by publicly accepting sleep at 21. After the rest of the older population was executed, it would only be a handful of years before NO ONE had ever seen a living person over 21. It was loosely mentioned by at least one nervous person on Lastday (day before turning 21), but quickly dismissed as “just the way things were, Earth can only support so many people…”

Of course, there were always going to be those individuals who wouldn’t just accept Moon’s truisms as gospel and walk into their local Sleepshop at 21. Instead of Accepting Sleep, those people would require help in the form of the Sandmen.

Being a Runner was considered the lowest form of treachery. Why, Moon had rescued the Earth from drowning in a sea of humanity! Who are YOU to want more than what he took for himself? I’ll tell you who, someone who deserves the business end of a Gun’s Homer charge.

The book spends some time talking about Jessica’s life. And work. What do people do for work when they die so early?

Three hours a day, three days a week. I hated it.

What can anyone really work at? You can paint or write poetry or go on pairup. You can glassdance or firewalk in the Arcades.” Her voice was scornful. “You can breed roses or collect stones or compose for the Tri-Dims. But there’s no meaning to any of it.