The Letters to the Editor department is intended to be a forum for our readers to express their own opinions and ideas. While we appreciate the many complimentary letters we receive each day, you won't find them on this page. Instead, you will find letters that go beyond or even contradict what we have written, letters that offer a different perspective and provide a different view of science fiction.
— Scott Edelman, Editor-in-Chief
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atrick Wynne in "Buffy Finale Has Little Girl Power" (Science Fiction
Weekly, Issue #319, Letters) suggested that "Chosen" lacks girl power because [Warning: Spoilers ahead!] Spike was fundamental to saving the world (and destroying the Sunnydale Hellmouth). Yes, Spike used the
amulet, was a champion and that the amulet was delivered by Angel; so two men helped save the world. (I certainly wouldn't be childish enough to point out it was given to Angel by Lilah—a woman.) So what if Spike was one of those who fought to help save the world? So did all the new Slayers—some of whom died (at least, I'm sure, Amanda did)—so did Faith,
so did Dawn, so did Willow (in a very pretty, spectacular and satisfying counterpoint to last season's finale, I might add), and so did Giles, Andrew, Xander and principal (of a bloody great hole in the ground) Wood.
Yes, Spike's death/sacrifice/act-of-championess was very touching, and pretty, and a bit sad. And it felt a bit familiar ... because it was very, very similar to a sacrifice Buffy made at the end of season five! And why does that matter? Because the finale (and most of season 7) was a
conversation about subverting both traditional gender expectations, and the narratological expectations of the show itself. We've seen Buffy die to save the world before, so this time Spike dies (being somewhat less heroic, I might add, since he didn't know it was going to happen when he agreed to wield the amulet).
We've seen the Watcher's Council as the patriarchal center of knowledge for the entire show subverted: (a) by most of them dying, (b) by Buffy explaining to Giles there's nothing he's got left to teach her and (c) by Buffy completely re-shaping the power of the Slayer(s) by ignoring the "traditional" way and symbolically enacting the show's feminist message in its most literal form. (We also see Giles accept Buffy as leader and admire her tactics and intelligence, not just her fighting skills). We also see Joss Whedon wave goodbye to the "Chosen One" idea per se, and wave goodbye to the show in an enjoyably self-referential dig at the show's original prologue. We see Angel and Spike being the emotionally "bitchy" characters in terms of jealousy. We see Xander become the emotional heart of the group, the empathic character (and slightly less successfully try and build a bond with Andrew "get used to the feeling, Betazoid"); we see Dawn creeping into a
Watcher-like role (Watcher Junior!); we see the darkest magics (evil Willow) juxtaposed with the most brilliant ("oh, my goddess!"). And, of course, we see Anya finally taking on those damn bunnies. Now, there could be a lot more to this rant, but my point is, the show finally and utterly destroys (within the show, at least) the idea that any role or act is gender specific
and, in a similar vein, the idea that any heroic act can be an individual act: everyone helped fight The First and the ubervamps.
Sure, Spike died, but so did Anya (and Amanda ... and other Potentials before that). It wasn't the Chosen One who did anything, but the power of the whole Scooby Gang, and more, which saved the world. And Buffy's symbolic gaze down the open road ahead in the last scene, and her telling smile when asked about tomorrow, reminds us that it's the future that matters ... a future full of empowered (but not all-powerful) women who are (at least) equal to men in every sense. So at the end of the show Spike is dead (for a while, at least) and Buffy, Faith and a host of Potentials (and, yes, that symbolically includes all women) are empowered. Forgive my ignorance, but that certainly seems like "girl power" to me.
Tama Leaver
tamaleaver@yahoo.com
n Nathan Brazil's letter ("McTrek Will Rot Your Mind")
he says, "There is no room for shows chock full of wow, such as Prey,
Brimstone or Crusade."
Putting the dark and boring Brimstone in the same sentence as the mystical Crusade is like putting a rusty can of worms next to a golden goblet. Brimstone had no "wow." Its
appearance begged the question, "How did this depressing pile of crap make it to television?"
While in the case of Crusade, the question was, "What were the execs thinking when they canceled this gem after one season?"
Ann E. Bermingham
asafron@earthlink.net
he abused stepdaughter of the entertainment industry"—very well put ("SF Should Stick to Its Defining Core"). But the fact has always been, remains, and will always be that the vast majority of any creative genre is unmitigated dreck. What sells the most, for instance, in women's writings? Not Toni Morrison or Doris Lessing, but
M&B. It hardly needs to be said that porn sells far more than erotica. The sublime doesn't have a proletarian customer base.
In the very same sense, of course much of science fiction—written and filmic—is bilge: it's meant to entertain, not educate, and entertainment's where the hard cash is. What else do you expect in a capitalist society? A society that's to the extreme right of Torquemada where intellection, and tolerance of intellection, are concerned. For those of us canvassing for aesthetic and mind refreshments, there are always movies like Gattaca, cult stuff and long-term break-even works of love and thought but—seemingly by courageous design—weekend box office minnows.
I think that science fiction's one saving grace, vis-a-vis the other genres, is that it has more than its share of raucous and blunt Cassandras, many of whom I read, with pride in their forthrightness, in this letters column. The evidence of a genre's health is in its gripers.
Kajal Basu
kajalbasu@yahoo.com
ent Roller, I think, put a lot of thought into the idea, "The central theme of science fiction is the defense or restoration of freedom involving an as yet to be discovered technology." ("SF Should Stick to Its Defining Core") Yet, sadly, I have to say I don't agree. I feel it just doesn't make much sense.
Even if we discount the fact that the term "Scientific Romance" was used by Wells, there is still the issue of the science-fiction magazines that existed before the 1930s. Gernsback, and so forth. These were not born as a response to the rise of Fascism. Italian Fascism had been a concern, but not a great threat yet. The Stalinist had been somewhat more threatening in the 1920s, but much less so in the U.S. where these stories were written. No, as a whole, these magazines were born by the hopes of future inventions and discoveries. Gernsback himself seemed quite clear on that. Thus fitting more the dictionary definition of science fiction as "stories that concern real or imagined sci-tech affects on society or individuals."
Another problem, though, with freedom as the core is the sad fact many of the early writers looked forward to rule by an elite of scientists or engineers. Indeed, Italian Fascism itself had been influenced by Italian Futurism. Likewise, the early fan group "The Futurians" included a few Stalinists and one author who at the time embraced the vaguely fascist ideas of Oswald Spengler. The "restoration or defense of freedom" for people they considered beneath them would not have been such authors concern. While the larger group felt their freedom safe as they lived in stable democratic societies.
Also this idea as "core" would cause other problems. James Bond would be quintessential core science fiction as he defends British democracy with unreal technology. A Canticle for Leibowitz would however not be as the issue is about rebuilding society. Childhood's End would be almost the opposite of this core as humanity learns to accept their invaders as a means for them to evolve. Even if the ending is "freeing" for humans it is not the restoration of any known freedom.
Not that the dictionary definition lacks complications, but it seems generally more workable.
Thomas Redding
TRedding@sciam.com
ll true speculative-fiction fans must realize that SF is not for the general public. Only a small minority of thinkers truly understands this genre. I am not talking about the fanboys that love cool special effects and action sequences in the sci-fi blockbusters we get every summer. They
are not the true SF fans. I am talking about the adults that have grown up with SF and appreciate the genre as a source of ideas. They may have started out as fanboys but grew to be true fans of the genre.
It has been said that SF is a literature of ideas. I fully agree with that statement. SF has its origins in the myths, fables and fairy tales that have been told throughout history to get people thinking by introducing them to new ideas or reinforcing old ones. These stories sometimes create new imaginary places where the mind is free to explore ideas that maybe difficult to fully examine in the stark light of the real world.
The mainstream public thinks that SF is all rayguns, robots and spaceships. They believe that it is just silly entertainment that they may indulge in by seeing the latest high-budgeted movie. The general public believes that those devoted to the genre are a group of people that cannot face reality. Yet the true SF fan is a person that can lift their minds out of the bounds of their culture, religion, race and nationality. Only in this state of freedom can a person be truly objective and see the true reality that we inhabit.
True SF fans do not worry about the bad genre movies and television shows that are flooding the theatres and airwaves. They know that good SF can always be found in novels and short stories produced by people that understand our beloved genre.
Hollywood has no understanding of SF. They usually produce the "leave your brain at the door" type movies that make loads of money and spawn a few sequels. Hollywood also has very talented people making very bad SF. Steven Spielberg has been making bad SF movies for years. E.T. was a remake of Old Yeller and The Yearling with an alien replacing the animals. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a bad movie that promoted the UFO mythology that some choose to believe. Minority Report watered down all of Philip K. Dick's wonderful ideas until we were left with nothing but a cop-thriller dressed like SF. A.I. had the potential to be great SF but in Spielberg hands it was just a familiar fairy tale.
Steven Soderbergh took the Stanislaw Lem idea-filled novel [Solaris] and made it into a deadly boring movie about a whiny man that cannot get over the death of his whiny wife.
M. Night Shyamalan took H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and reshaped it into a vehicle to spread his twisted new-age religious views in Signs. This had to be one of the worst SF film made in years.
True SF is like jazz or fine wine. It is only appreciated by a few. We shouldn't worry about what the mainstream believe SF to be or about what they think about us. We should do what we can to convert fanboys into true fans. If you see a kid reading the latest mindless Harry Potter drivel, give them the far superior A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin to read.
If you know a Star Trek or Star Wars fan, give them a copy of one of the great new space-opera novels being produced by Ken MacLeod or Scott Westerfeld.
If you are true fan, it is your duty to help keep the genre alive. If you are a fanboy, please try to feed your mind true SF.
Ronald Hood
sunjata7@yahoo.com
have read many letters on the current state of sci-fi, and as I do, I have to just shake my head and laugh.
So there are more stinkers out there than gems. So what? The same is true of many other genres. The trick is to broaden your definition of a genre.
I don't read science fiction, I read romance (by romance, I mean the 19th-century definition, as in a story that doesn't take place in the real world as it currently is). The romance has several sub-genres, including fantasy, horror, adventure (to some degree), speculative fiction, alternate history, space fantasy and, of course, science fiction. By this, I mean I prefer the
fantastic elements of these genres over any scientific truth they might possess.
These all exist in several different forms. TV shows, movies, books, comic books, animes; all of them have elements of this group of genres. With that many options, how can you not find something you like?
Take TV shows. True, a lot of current TV shows are lacking in great SF, but Farscape was an awesome space fantasy and Stargate: SG-1 is great speculative fiction/alternate history (what if the ancient gods were really aliens?).
Meanwhile, anime continues to pave the way for the future of these genres. Although a lot of animes don't reach the U.S. until much later than there debut in Japan, they still offer innovative ideas. There are three great ones running in Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block: Inuyasha, Cowboy Bebop and Trigun. And these are even better because they focus on the characters rather than on the unique worlds they live in. Cartoon Network's Toonami has at least one good one: Yuyu Hakusho.
How about comic books? Hollywood has recently discovered something comic-book fans have known for years: Comic books have great stories in them. From the racial issues posed in all manifestations of the X-Men to the isolation of the Hulk, comic books have often given rise to great stories that just happened to have fantastic elements.
So don't go heralding sci-fi's death just yet. Rather, praise its evolution as we go deeper into a new millennium, and face constantly fresh faces in the genre with a whole different set of influences than the previous generation.
Basically, just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Shane Stephenson
fsfan1@yahoo.com
ike Mr. Scott ("BG Fans Should Reserve Judgment"), I'm getting a little tired of people bashing movies that haven't even been made yet. A Battlestar Galactica remake is just that: a remake.
There is little sense in making an exact copy. We can all just watch the original series if that's what we want. I also grit my teeth when people complain that a movie wasn't like the book. Our understanding of what we read is colored by our own backgrounds and points of view. Why should we expect a scriptwriter or director to be any different?
When the latest version of The Time Machine came out, a lot of people complained that it wasn't at all like the book. Well, I ask, so what? I saw the original Time Machine and it was nothing to write home about. I wonder if H.G. Wells would have appreciated what they did to his manuscript in either version. The movie is the movie and the book is the book and never the twain shall meet.
Norma Engelberg
njengel@adelphia.net
V Guide posted the network schedule for fall, and there is an all-time low of science fiction or related-type programming. So why in their infinite stupidity, has The WB put Smallville up against Enterprise (and Angel up against Jake 2.0)? I know part of the answer is that The WB took flack from parents of younger kids who wanted to watch Smallville—hence last season's repeats on Sunday at an earlier viewing hour. But why choose the 8 p.m. slot opposite one of the few other sci-fi shows on? Smallville will undoubtedly out-rate Enterprise—but both shows will have lower ratings than they might have because both shows are wooing more or less the same audience. Can't The WB see that this isn't as good as putting the show in an "unopposed slot" for its audience? Those lowered numbers will only make television science fiction look even less desirable to programmers.
So, from start to finish, this stinks. Sure, I can tape one set to watch on one of the many nights without first-run SF, but I would like to give my ratings support to both. Bummer!
Barbara Goldstein
psifidoll@attbi.com
n his review of Ben Bova's "latest novel in his 'Grand Tour' series ... published over the past decade," D. Douglas Fratz wrote "Saturn is in almost every aspect merely adequate, and never approaches the current cutting edge of SF ... To the point where credibility is strained ... The characters sometimes feel dated ... All of the science and technology consists of standard off-the-shelf SF ideas, with only some run-of-the-mill nanotechnology going beyond what we could do today. The 'secret purpose' of the mission is a disappointing non-event. Even the startling sense-of-wonder-invoking scientific discovery at the end is too similar to those in other SF novels to pack a full punch."
Oh, but Saturn does pack a powerful punch—at the heart of science fiction publishing. Not that it's a bad book, but yet another safe one relying not on new ideas, concepts and conflicts, but on last century name recognition—old-millennium thinking in a new-millennium market.
Don't blame Bova. His contributions to science fiction as an author and editor are worthy of every award and honor he's received. Nor is Tor at fault. The company has published SF classics in the past and had every reason to believe that another novel by an SF legend would expand the shrinking science fiction readership.
Therein lies the crisis in science-fiction publishing: "vinyl LP" thinking in a CD age. In a cutthroat competitive business, the genre is not unlike a sports team fantasizing that its former superstars will return it to glory.
Some 70 years ago, John W. Campbell, SF's most influential editor, defined science fiction as "what science fiction editors buy." Inbreeding has since turned the genre into a "closed shop," locked into the illusion that "Science fiction is what science fiction says science fiction is—written only by science fiction writers only for science fiction fans."
The real world has not stood still. Neither has the public's image of science fiction—a genre for the eye rather than the mind. F/X has usurped IQ leaving science fiction publishing lost in space back in the twentieth century. And it's only getting worse.
Somewhere out there is an aspiring author who can write rings around Bova, but he or she will never get published because the "closed shop" mentality refuses to take a chance on new voices reaching out to an ever-declining audience. Also out there is a struggling writer with new ideas on humanity's role in the universe who will read Saturn and conclude that science-fiction editors are only interested in the old, the tried and the true. Last but not least is the loyal science-fiction reader who buys Saturn and yet again is disappointed, giving up on written science fiction forever.
Ironic, isn't it? All those stars in the universe and science-fiction publishing doesn't have any. But I remain hopeful. Science fiction itself is too strong, too meaningful and too important to be beaten down and defeated by those who believe their best days and their future are behind them.
"What if...?" used to ignite the passion and power of science fiction. But unless science-fiction publishers suddenly acquire 21st-century vision, ambition and guts, there'll be a new question very few will bother to ask....
"So what?"
Kevin Ahearn
KEVTOMA@aol.com
atrix Reloaded had a lot of sizzle, but very little steak. In fact, most science fiction/fantasy stuff today has a lot of grilling going on, but very little meat to it. We get caught up in the marketing hype of a new movie or tv series, we plunk down our cash and time, and some entertainment company walks away with barrels of money.
A lot of stuff today is like fast food sci-fi. We buy it, the producers keep making more. When a trend hits, suddenly a flock of producers jump on the bandwagon. The market gets saturated with garbage sci-fi. The marketers assume the consumers want the stuff. Someone is buying it, otherwise it wouldn't get produced. It's more difficult to market new writers/series than to market a brand name sci-fi series like Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.
Computers have made producing science-fiction films with dazzling special effects more affordable than in the past. If you watch the original Star Wars trilogy (pre special-edition) you'll definitely notice the special effects are not as good as today's standards, but the movies hold up as entertaining because the stories are good. Enterprise has great special effects, but are the stories and characters as interesting as Kirk and Spock? (It's getting better, there's hope ....)
If you're a marketer, why reinvent the wheel? You know more people will watch another Star Trek or Star Wars knock off, for example, than invest in a new show/series. There's room for the new. We as fans need to find and demand better quality in our stories and characters.
I don't think todays viewers are jaded by today's special effects, I think they want good stories and interesting characters. People have wanted that for as long as people have told stories. The Matrix was a good movie, Matrix Reloaded was missing an engrossing story. It had the right characters and an interesting setting, it left me lacking. The eye candy was great, but the new villainous characters were two dimensional. Agent Smith was not as menacing, just an annoyance. The Wachowski brothers are gonna be rolling in dough, and will probably make more cutting edge special effects stinkers.
This leaves us, the fans, with a few choices. We can gripe about the degrading quality of science fiction, or we can sit down at our computers and create new worlds to discover and new stories to tell. Today's stuff has only hit the tip of the iceberg of ideas. Wordpad comes with most versions of Windows. Your public library probably has a few books on writing and books on science. Like most of you, I want to see something new on the horizon. There's a whole market out there waiting for something new. Create it.
Dave
dgrhm@hotmail.com
get tired of hearing critics of Matrix Reloaded complaining about the
juvenile philosophy of the film. [Warning: Spoilers ahead.] True, it's not as fresh and exciting as the first movie, but it's, in my mind, a set-up for the conclusion.
The dialogue was a little heavy at the beginning of the movie, but it also raised some intriguing ideas about the relationship between human and machine, an idea that there's something deeper than what we saw in the original. The introduction of the Architect and the Merovingian were interesting and the ideas presented were a little mind-boggling.
The critics didn't call the
ideas simplistic when the first movie came out. I'm thinking they really didn't want to put much thought into the movie or possibly didn't understand the concepts. About the idea of the creators of the movie wanting it to be Dune ("Reloaded Is Only Eye Candy"), that's a confusing statement. There may be vague parallels but it's in a totally different context. Eye candy? Sure, there was plenty but there was also substance if you look for it. I think this movie was a segue for what's going to be an incredible conclusion. Sci-fi fans need to quit dissecting and just sit back and enjoy. That's what's made this genre so popular.
Brett B
Brettb@aol.com
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