So I met my long-suffering wife for lunch today. Well, I say lunch, it was actually what passes for lunch at Costa. Maybe I should downgrade the experience from ‘lunch’ to ‘coffee and pastries’.

But I digress. As usual.

I told aforementioned wifey that I was re-reading K.W. Jeter’s ‘Morlock Night’ – pretty much the first classic steampunk book from 1979 (heck, it was Jeter who coined the term ‘steampunk’) – which is a rollicking sequel to H.G. Well’s classic ‘The Time Machine’.

Wifey gave me a blank stare at the term ‘Morlock’.

‘You know, the horrible creatures from ‘The Time Machine.’ I said. ‘You remember the film?’

‘I haven’t seen it.’ She said.

I was pretty sure she had, but launched off into a rant about the brilliance of the book and the film (not the remake, obviously) and soon I was demanding that there be an H.G. Wells Day, to commemorate that outstanding, visionary writer.

Ever the diplomat (and as I said earlier, long-suffering) wifey suggested that if such a day ever came she would personally build a Martian tripod, complete with heat ray.

At some point in the following, excited, flight of fancy I somehow conflated ‘tripod’ with ‘wife’ and might have accidentally called her a ‘Martian’.

Might have.

Okay, did.

I called my wife a Martian.

The indignation on her face was probably a kind of pantomimic ‘just going with it’, or she might genuinely have been offended. I’m a bloke. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between faux offence and the real thing.

But, being of an SF/nerdy/when you’ve dug a hole just keep digging kind of a guy I plucked Nigel Kneale out of the ether as a way of getting myself out it, and started to outline the plot of ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ to her.

Yeah, proving that romance isn’t dead by . . . well . . . killing it.

‘You must have seen it.’ I said.

‘I don’t think so . . .’

‘Scientists investigate an alien ship and find the unfathomable creatures who piloted it, only to discover that they were our creators and . . .’ I broke off.

So that’s why I didn’t enjoy ‘Prometheus’ as much as I thought I was going to.

Nigel Kneale did it (with admittedly less spectacular effects work, but with a much better plot/script, and with much better revelations than ‘Prometheus’) in 1958!

‘What’s that got to do with me being a Martian?’ My wife asked.

‘Oh, well, at the end, Quatermass realises that ‘We are all Martians!” I said, somewhat feebly.

I might not have got myself off the hook as far as calling my wife a Martian, but I finally understood the sense of derivative-ness I felt when walking out of the cinema after ‘Prometheus’.

The ‘revelation’ that formed its DNA was fifty-four years old, at least. And Kneale did it better, because his thinking was so much clearer and infinitely deeper.

Don’t get me wrong, ‘Prometheus’ was one of the best-looking sf films I’ve seen for a long time, but it did leave me feeling hollow and vaguely cheated when the experience was over. Now I’ve put my finger on it.

(Anyway, there is a happy ending: the wife wants to read ‘The Time Machine’ now, and then watch the film. Hopefully she’ll go for ‘Quatermass and the Pit’, too.)