We Were There First: Edge of Tomorrow

The rather excellent comics news site Bleeding Cool has a semi-regular feature it calls The Swipe Files, where recent comics covers are placed side-by-side with covers from the past, to which they bear an uncanny resemblance. Readers are left to their own discretion to decide whether the similarity is coincidence, homage or . . .

Published 2012
Rush Limbaugh’s newsletter, 2012

Published 2002
D&D Third Edition Monster Manual II, 2002

. . . well.

<ahem> Given the frequency with which films (especially; sometimes TV but mostly films) are trumpeted as having remarkable and original ideas, which turn out to be so revolutionary they were done by SF books or stories decades earlier (we’re looking at you, The Matrix), we thought we might try something similar to Bleeding Cool’s Swipe Files. You know: as an homage . . .

We therefore present instalment one in a semi-regular recurring feature we like to call We Were There First:

In the blue corner: Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise‘s new Sci-Fi blockbuster in which an officer finds himself caught in a time loop in a war with an alien race. His skills increase as he faces the same brutal combat scenarios time and again, and his union with a Special Forces warrior gets him closer and closer to defeating the enemy. Released 2014

In the red corner: Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys influential SF thriller in which an alien artefact on the Moon turns out to be a deadly maze that kills anyone who makes an incorrect choice; as the humans matter transmitted to the Moon to penetrate the structure are ‘duplicates’ of the original being on Earth, the protagonist learns from each agonising death and is able to make it a little further through the maze. Published 1960.

Over to you . . .