As Timeless As Infinity: Vol 2, edited by Tony Albarella
Book Review by Jeff Edwards
Have you read this book?
Gauntlet Press continues its ambitious undertaking to present the complete Twilight Zone scripts
of Rod Serling in As Timeless As Infinity: Volume Two. In addition to teleplays from all
five seasons, the book contains tributes, photographs, music cue sheets, and insightful
commentaries from editor Tony Albarella.
Rod Serling once said, "My major hang-up is nostalgia," and that yearning to return to a simpler world is evident within the collection. Exhausted by the demands of producing a weekly television show, and plagued by disagreements with sponsors and the network, Serling must have identified completely with Martin Sloan, the tense advertising executive who retreats to his hometown in "Walking Distance." Sloan is delighted to find that everything is exactly the way he left it a quarter-century before - until he realizes that you truly "can't go home again." A heartless industrialist named William Feathersmith takes a far darker trip in "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville." Feathersmith - a "predatory, grasping, covetous, acquisitive animal of a man" - has reached a career pinnacle, and he's bored. But when he strikes a Faustian bargain to go back fifty years and start all over again, things don't turn out the way he had planned.
Not all of Serling's characters want to relive the past: some want to prolong their future. In "The Trade-Ins," an elderly couple visits a corporation that promises a second chance at life via new, artificial bodies. But the husband and wife - both in their seventies - face a difficult decision after discovering that they can only afford one new body. In "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain," a man in a troubled May-December marriage injects himself with an experimental youth serum to please his younger wife - and the results are unexpected.
The "unexpected" quickly became stock-in-trade for The Twilight Zone, and Serling rightfully earned a reputation for his twist endings. In "The Silence," an exasperated member of a gentlemen's club wagers that a fast-talking boor can't keep quiet for an entire year, and each man takes drastic steps to win the bet. In "Judgment Night," a ship inches through a "phantom-like" fog while one of its passengers is lost in a fog of his own: Struggling with partial amnesia, the man is gripped with an impending sense of doom and the fear that he has done all of this before. Here, Serling remakes the myth of the Flying Dutchman into a wartime story pitting a German submarine against a British freighter, just as H.P. Lovecraft did decades earlier in "The Temple."
A character in "Walking Distance" offers this piece of advice: "You've been looking behind you...Try looking ahead." But Gauntlet Press understands the importance of preserving and celebrating past achievements in speculative fiction: Each script in the book has been painstakingly reproduced, complete with handwritten notes, from Serling's personal collection. As Timeless As Infinity: Volume Two is like a time capsule for Twilight Zone fans, transporting them back to the halcyon days of Rod Serling's remarkable television series.
Rod Serling once said, "My major hang-up is nostalgia," and that yearning to return to a simpler world is evident within the collection. Exhausted by the demands of producing a weekly television show, and plagued by disagreements with sponsors and the network, Serling must have identified completely with Martin Sloan, the tense advertising executive who retreats to his hometown in "Walking Distance." Sloan is delighted to find that everything is exactly the way he left it a quarter-century before - until he realizes that you truly "can't go home again." A heartless industrialist named William Feathersmith takes a far darker trip in "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville." Feathersmith - a "predatory, grasping, covetous, acquisitive animal of a man" - has reached a career pinnacle, and he's bored. But when he strikes a Faustian bargain to go back fifty years and start all over again, things don't turn out the way he had planned.
Not all of Serling's characters want to relive the past: some want to prolong their future. In "The Trade-Ins," an elderly couple visits a corporation that promises a second chance at life via new, artificial bodies. But the husband and wife - both in their seventies - face a difficult decision after discovering that they can only afford one new body. In "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain," a man in a troubled May-December marriage injects himself with an experimental youth serum to please his younger wife - and the results are unexpected.
The "unexpected" quickly became stock-in-trade for The Twilight Zone, and Serling rightfully earned a reputation for his twist endings. In "The Silence," an exasperated member of a gentlemen's club wagers that a fast-talking boor can't keep quiet for an entire year, and each man takes drastic steps to win the bet. In "Judgment Night," a ship inches through a "phantom-like" fog while one of its passengers is lost in a fog of his own: Struggling with partial amnesia, the man is gripped with an impending sense of doom and the fear that he has done all of this before. Here, Serling remakes the myth of the Flying Dutchman into a wartime story pitting a German submarine against a British freighter, just as H.P. Lovecraft did decades earlier in "The Temple."
A character in "Walking Distance" offers this piece of advice: "You've been looking behind you...Try looking ahead." But Gauntlet Press understands the importance of preserving and celebrating past achievements in speculative fiction: Each script in the book has been painstakingly reproduced, complete with handwritten notes, from Serling's personal collection. As Timeless As Infinity: Volume Two is like a time capsule for Twilight Zone fans, transporting them back to the halcyon days of Rod Serling's remarkable television series.
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