(This short piece on the film Silent Running appeared in Cinema Futura, edited by Mark Morris, in 2010.)


In the future, some kind of catastrophe – planned or otherwise - has befallen Earth's once great natural environments. All that's left is a handful of domed preserves, drifting through the solar system attached like glistening seed pods to huge skeletal space freighters. After the order arrives to jettison the forests, blow them up with nuclear bombs, and return the ships to commercial use...