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— Scott Edelman, Editor-in-Chief
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ne item in Science Fiction Weekly News really caught my eye this week. J. Michael
Straczynski, working with Bryce Zabel to pitch an all new Star Trek series ("B5 Creator Pitches Trek"). If anyone can do it, those two can, with a single proviso; Paramount must allow them to write, entirely unfettered by the
chain-like legacy of Roddenberry. While revolutionary and refreshing in its day, the world has moved on. SF has moved on even further, or gone boldly, if you prefer. If anything new in the Trek universe is going to reach, or surpass, its former glory, these facts have to be
recognized. Star Trek, written to its potential, by people who truly understand the genre, would be wonderful news. If the Paramount suits are smart enough to follow the bouncing ball.
Speaking of which, I've started to wonder whatever happened to the new Babylon 5 series that JMS was supposed to have signed and sealed? Could this and the new Trek be one and the same? If so, we might be about to see a Federation vessel move far beyond the Delta Quadrant, into Vorlon space.
In the words of Jean-Luc Picard, make it so.
Nathan Brazil
nathanbrazil(at)freeuk.com
almost wrote last week, but desisted, as I thought it would be beating a dead horse. But since that horse has become a reanimated zombie, thanks to Nathan Brazil ("Our Tech Is Greater Than We Know"), I'll throw in my opinion.
1. Set design sure has advanced in 30 years. But just because something looks better (LCD screens vs. Spock's box with the blue light and knob or Bone's mechanical pointers on the sick bay scanners) doesn't actually mean it works better. Or in today's terms, the latest computer in a beige box will outperform last years in a modded and lit-up box, even if it doesn't look as
cool.
2. Our history isn't their history. If I recall the backstory correctly, by now there should have been, among other things, wars against genetically engineered uber-humans who get exiled into space using reliable cryogenic techniques. (The whole Khan thing). Though it gets glossed over in the various series, we are not a part of their past. It is an alternate history, and technology evolved differently there.
Actually, I personally think that the original series, for all the archaic terminology used to describe the technology of that time, did a better job showing people working with it than the current one: In "The City on the Edge of Forever" Spock needs a room full of tubes and wires to repair a tricorder, while in the first episode of the second season (IIRC) the guy from the future and Archer end up having the hardest component to find of their makeshift time machine to be a piece of copper foil. How very MacGuyver.
Anyhow, there will always be things that will be out of reach, like in that episode where the computer accessory takes over the ship and runs amok displaying the subconscious sociopathic tendencies of its creator. The U.S. Navy tried some of that, but they couldn't get the ship to actually run amok (www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1998/july13/cov2.htm).
But I suppose that could be simple disinformation, and there are fleets of automated warships wandering the seas. ...
So while yeah, the government has some secret stuff that outclasses current technology (stashed in a warehouse between the Ark of the Covenant and those aliens from Area 51), and current consumer tech can be really amazing (or not, given the lousy signal my cell phone gets in my apartment—or since the 9/11 reference was thrown out, the fact that the firefighter's radios didn't work in the WTC). A tricorder that can outperform a room-sized MRI is not a laptop with a camera, nor is a communicator that can transmit from any distance under any condition (through solid rock, for instance) a cell phone. Though, come to think of it, Mulder's cell phone was
rarely out of range—the government is hoarding technology! But wait, that's a different series altogether. ...
Alex S.
al_x(at)sbcglobal.net
hanks so much for the wonderful article on Winsor McKay ("Finding the Other Nemo"). I had forgotten about him since college when I took a class on animation. I had seen the Gertie animation—it's really impressive, considering all the drawings.
Now I'm going to have to visit the library and see what they've got on Little Nemo and Mr. McKay.
I really enjoy your articles and newsletter, Science Fiction Weekly. Reading it during the week is blue skies and fresh air for me. (I live in a low, gray-walled cubicle during the week with visitations to my family most nights and weekends ... something about needing a paycheck.)
Keep up the good work!
Scott Flanders
SFlander(at)ncen.com
t is ironic that readers Kissinger ("Cinema Should Go to School") and Timmons ("Some Science Facts Stink") letters complain about the poor science portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow by demonstrating their own poor understanding of science. It is unfortunate that scientists who should know better are feeding their ignorance.
Ever since the "hole in the ozone layer" was "discovered" in International Geophysical Year 1957, climatologists have been publishing articles about the greenhouse effect and its possible consequences. The climate changed used in The Day After Tomorrow is not impossible; and
no one can really predict its probability. But we do have evidence that some areas inside the current Arctic Circle changed to that state from a temperate zone climate literally overnight—effectively undergoing a snap freeze that preserved semi-tropical trees inside the ice.
Furthermore, one worrisome possibility of warmer Antarctic temperatures is the sudden collapse of the South Pole ice cap, allowing the depressed surface of the Earth to suddenly spring back and releasing sufficient energy in the form of a soliton to create tsunamis that could drown much
of the U.S. Kansas would once again return to being a sea floor (and closer to my home, so would most of Australia).
One last comment for Mr Timmons: the greenhouse effect has nothing to do with the ozone layer, but it the result of the progressive buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere trapping heat. As global temperatures rise, carbon dioxide already held trapped in the oceans would be released to start a positive feedback cycle that could possibly turn this planet into an analogue of Venus. Fortunately for humanity, the current climate changes resulting from the greenhouse effect are only causing more extreme seasonal temperature changes, allowing us a chance to adapt our environments. Planetary temperature oscillations are not uncommon (in geological timeframes).
Neville Angove
lecygne(at)iprimus.com.au
aving read John Kissinger's letter ("Cinema Should Go to School") regarding pseudo-science in cinema (not to mention the minds of the public) and the flap over global warming after the release of The Day After Tomorrow, I must take exception to his stance, using his own argument. He stated that humans cannot have any effect on the climate, since true understanding of the environment on a planetary scale would require tens of thousands of years of data, and the forces involved are huge and relatively juggernaut in their progress. This may be true, but his argument that it is hubris to say we can alter the climate is equally hubris in itself.
To insist we cannot alter the environment contradicts one of the very characteristics of humanity—we alter our environment. It is how we have had the success we have as a species. It can, I believe, also provide the flap of the butterfly wing that may indeed make the environment change just enough that we cannot maintain the societies we have established. So much of human survival is artificial today (think disease control, insulin, vitamins, fertilizer, concrete, metallurgy, all of technology from low to high) that a few good disruptions might cause the dystopia so often touted in SF tales. I agree it is silly to think that there will be the dramatic and very cinematic episodes from the movies, but to say we have no effect on the climate? That is equally silly.
Another thing he glossed over is that while we have been here for a miniscule fraction of the earth's history, so what? An explosion lasts for a moment but its effect is generally permanent. To defend our not being able to affect the system because of lack of time is specious, or at least a bad choice of metaphors.
Since Mr. Kissinger offered no bona fides as a climatologist, my next assumption is his beliefs are, well, beliefs. As a species, nothing has applied more direct changes to the surface and atmosphere of the planet as have humans since oxygen started being pumped into the atmosphere by plants. It may be small compared to the total, but it isn't insignificant. I strongly suggest that anyone who wants to be informed do the homework themselves, consider all the sources of information, and then start making noise, however you feel about the topic. Mr. Kissinger is completely correct in one statement: Someone must do some thinking in advance of the problem, as whatever it may manifest.
Robert F. Volk
[address withheld by request]
rrrrrrrrrrgh! There are sometimes when a person just wants to scream at his computer monitor, and now is one of them.
When the heck did "fact" become a prerequisite for science fiction? I just read two letters ("Cinema Should Go to School" and "Some Science Facts Stink") that just show why we have the poor state we do of new science fiction. Somewhere along the line, the words "plausible," "factual" and "realistic" became
necessary for a science-fiction story or movie to become successful.
If this plausibility factor had been in force at the beginning of science fiction, Jules Verne never would have sold 20,000 Leagues or Robur the Conqueror. H.G. Wells would have passed in obscurity because who would want to read about Martians invading earth, an invisible man or a time traveler—that stuff is impossible!
Even if it had manifest sometime in the 1950's, there would have been no When World's Collide, Them! or The Blob. Star Trek would have been sneered at. Most of the classics we know today would have been ash-canned in the manuscript phase under the standards that seem to be in effect for today's sci-fi.
Just because there are some journalists and viewers who are stupid enough to believe that what happens on screen in The Day After Tomorrow could happen, doesn't mean we have to start condemning a film. These same dimbulbs would have been terrified of finding a tanker truck sized snake in their closet after seeing Anaconda or that the midnight scratching at the back door might have been killer shrews.
For God's sake people its science fiction. Let me repeat that with emphasis, it's SCIENCE FICTION, not fact. It is a movie, not reality. Grab a tub of popcorn, settle back, forget about the plausible world and enjoy. Stop analyzing it.
Robert McNay
cptmatt(at)ameritech.net
t's hard to see how Ray Bradbury, a fine and usually insightful author, could fail to understand that Michael Moore's title Fahrenheit 9/11 was a salute to the original Fahrenheit 451, not simply an allusion—and certainly not a rip-off as Dan Jeanes ("Fahrenheit Turns Up the Heat") and Brian Taam ("Moore Needed Bradbury's Permission") suggest. Regardless of how one might feel about Michael Moore's works, it's a shame that his homage to Bradbury was so bitterly rejected by the author, and obviously misperceived by others who have written to this forum.
Ross Chamberlain
rossworx(at)cox.net
n response to Mr. Burke's somewhat sarcastic response ("Dead Promos Were Alive and Well") to a reader's complaint over USA's flubs over promoting the premiere of The Dead Zone ("Dead Scheduling Kills Zone"), I think most of us depend on
general information to be reminded about upcoming broadcast schedules and do not spend the time researching websites for information. I am also one who missed the premiere episode of The Dead Zone and half-wondered if I had missed something. Nope. The premiere episode was listed locally for the wrong week. Someone flubbed.
O Shepard
Lestka(at)aol.com
rojection is a term that means that a person takes an ambiguous stimuli and interprets it in a way meaningful to them, and this [letter] may well be that. But for three years now I've kept thinking the Greg Stillson character on Dead Zone is George W. Bush.
(Yes, I realize I just pissed off 45 percent of the readership, and they won't see the parallels.)
It's the way the character is portrayed, although Stillson is smarmier and smarter; it's also what he will bring onto this country per Johnny's vision, a more likely outcome, in reality, now that the U.S. is hated so much more around the world. Further, there's the deep involvement of the religious right in the politics in the character of Reverand Purdy and the foundation. Finally, this season's second episode showing the fixing of the election only further concretized the perception and set off this letter. I felt like I took my own walk in the Dead Zone and "saw" how Florida was handled in 2000. Powerful episode.
Maybe this is just me; [or] maybe the similarity was intended by the show's producers.
For those on the right who think my perception is out to lunch, live and let live. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind.
All this season's episodes of Dead Zone seem tighter than the second season and have really held my interest.
Barbara Goldstein
psifidoll(at)comcast.net
he recent SCIFI.com/SCI FI Wire poll on which Irwin Allen TV series should be remade is indicative of the sci-fi mindset of the new millennium, but not J.R.R. Tolkien's.
I prefer science fiction to fantasy, but I had to see the Lord of the Rings trilogy to experience the latter genre at its zenith. Most of all, after the hype and the hoopla and the Academy Awards' sweep and the billion-dollar box office, I had to know why this story had come to mean so much to so many fantasy fans. Surely this masterpiece had a heartfelt coda to leave with us, words of wisdom we could take home after the credits rolled and the lights came on.
As the final film drew to its conclusion, I became apprehensive, almost afraid that some gnome or wizard or warrior or even a troll would break into a pompous soliloquy about youth and truth and beauty and honor and valor—that old, old stuff we've heard in countless forgettable films for all ages.
Instead Frodo said, "There is no going back."
Then his aged uncle added, "I'm ready for another great adventure."
With those few words, two of the master's finest creations defined the very heart and soul of his realm. Just as much as science fiction professes to be, fantasy, too, is about going forward.
But so many letters posted in this column from science fiction and fantasy fans alike calling for the remaking or the return or the re-imagining of dated films and TV shows make me wonder: of the vast majority of you who saw the complete Lord of the Rings, how many of you LISTENED to it?
Kevin Ahearn
kahearn(at)netpub.net
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