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. If you would like to submit a letter, please use our feedback form or send a message to scifiweekly@scifi.com.
-- Craig E. Engler, Editor
Recommends more Ray Bradbury
read your review of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. I read it rather late in my Sci-Fi life, myself. I hadn't read anything by Bradbury, although many of my friends had when we were kids. I didn't know what I was missing. I think earlier exposure to his writing would have made me a better writer.
I found his writing style instantly attractive and in my mind there is no better writer in the science fiction world. Stories aside, his writing style is so poetic as to make a trip to the market sound romantic and enticing.
If you liked Martian Chronicles I highly recommend Something Wicked This Way Comes (my first exposure to Bradbury) and if you like film noir detective fiction at all, read Death is a Lonely Business also by Bradbury. It is his entry into non-SF detective fiction and is both depressing and a joy to read at the same time. I was completely enraptured by it. Being a huge fan of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, reading Death is a Lonely Business was a great homage to those writers, while being a completely Bradbury work.
At one point the character goes behind a cinema film screen while a movie is playing and that paragraph alone makes this book worth reading twice.
Where can you find it? Not sure. I found it in an old used book store, but if it is currently available, get it. You will never regret it.
Sean Huxter
sean@2ni.com
Editor: I'm a huge Bradbury fan myself (100 feet tall, if you can believe it. Really. I don't even want to talk about trying to get through doorways). For those intersted, Death is a Lonely Business was most recently reprinted in trade paperback by Bantam Doubleday Dell, ISBN: 0553354620.
Can't you just enjoy it?
fter reading various comments about how stupid and awful NBC's Asteroid was I can only shake my head in wonder that so many took the miniseries so seriously. All movie and TV programs take us into worlds that do not exist and to try to drag them into our world just does not make sense. Nothing in Asteroid even suggested that the science was accurate. Have we lost our ability to just sit back enjoy something?
Whenever I go to a movie or watch a TV show, I put all thoughts of the real world out of my head and focus all my attention on what's on the screen. Call me crazy, but no movie or TV show exists in the "real world," even those supposedly based on fact. Dramatic license is taken all the time in both TV and motion pictures.
I do suspect that Asteroid would have worked better without commercials or if it had been a single three-hour movie, but I enjoyed it anyway. As for the second part of Asteroid that no one seemed to like, I found it as enjoyable and engrossing as the first part. Far too many people these days cry about how bad movies and TV are when in fact they can't just enjoy the show for what it is not what it should be.
Tom Murin
Anonymous e-mail
Editor: Good points, Tom. Personally I found the first half enjoyable despite the poor science, but I have to admit the second half wasn't quite to my taste.
You were too kind to Asteroid
reat job, generally! But you were much too kind to NBC's collosal turkey Asteroid. Virtually all of the astronomy was totally botched (e.g. an observatory lit up like a Las Vegas casino. Can you say "light pollution"?), but even the more down-to-earth aspects of the plot failed to make much sense.
A senior federal bureaucrat (the FEMA Director) who seems to spend all his time playing Rescue 911? A female director of the "National Observatory" who is only 29, meaning she reached her position in only about 5 years since she got her Ph.D., all while raising a child as a single parent? Give us a break! By the way, did you notice how she could tell the Earth was in trouble just from looking at a couple of 35mm slide of a comet. Smart lady! So what does she do? Goes to bed, then calls a staff meeting the next morning! Only then, with no further information in hand, does she decide to call Washington, going, of course, directly to FEMA rather than through her own chain of command! And to top it all off, the president proceeds to order the evacuation of an entire city entirely on the say-so of these two characters, with no independent verification!
What really galls me is that with a plethora of good material on asteroid/comet impacts to choose from, NBC ignored it all and actually paid people who apparently know as little about fiction as they do about science to write this piece of garbage.
Sorry, but I just had to vent to someone. Keep up the good work. You guys have the best SF site on the Web.
John DeVries
devries@promptus.com
Editor: I'm sorry you didn't find Asteroid to your liking, but I'm glad you enjoy our publication. I'll talk to NBC for you, but I'm not sure how much pull I have with them...
Rankin-Bass did a version of The Return of the King
eoff Poremka is both right and wrong. There was a The Return of the King, but it was a television animated special produced by Rankin-Bass, and therefore technically not a sequel to the Bakshi The Lord of the Rings. Rankin-Bass also had an earlier The Hobbit television special. Personally I feel that today's computer-generated graphics and special effects techniques could, in the right hands, produce a spectacular live-action version of The Lord of the Rings -- please keep us informed!
M.L. Orwig
werechow@netexpress.net
Editor: Thanks for passing along the information. And you can bet that we'll keep you posted on the latest news about the new live action movie.
