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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am a voracious reader. I love to read. According to my mom, I started reading nursery rhymes that were printed on a shoebox when I was two. I read the works of Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, J.R.R. Tolkien, Richard Adams, J.K. Rowling and other notable authors. Nothing beats a book for sheer delight and the fact you can hold it in your own hands. It can be borrowed from the library or you can get one as a special gift or buy one yourself.
I'm an educator and a writer. I give new books as presents to my students and family. I'll buy a book for me and a friend, if I know they will like it. Books are treasures. Yes, books cost more nowadays, but this is 2005. Everything has gone up. I went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire yesterday. I enjoyed the movie, but that cost $10 for one adult ticket. I bought Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in July. my husband and I read the book. We enjoyed the book, and we liked the movie. I can read my book anytime I want to. I have to buy the movie if I want to see it again.
Books are, as they say in the common vernacular, cool. Books rule. Now if you don't mind, I'll go back to where I left off in this short story I was reading. ...
Roberta A. McQueen
rmcqueen(at)suffolk.lib.ny.us
attlestar Galactica is one of the best shows on television, bar none. It is on par in quality with Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was a breakthrough sci-fi series.
However, with my new HD cable service and wonderful TV, BSG is limited in its greatness by the most frustrating variable: The delivery of the content is not high-definition.
It's frustrating because [SCI FI] already did all the impossible things perfectly: Casting, production and writing are all top-notch on the same series. In other words, the fundamentals are there, like a great cake. But instead of delivering this great cake with delicious icing, you deliver the cake bare.
How many great cakes don't have icing?
Jon [last name withheld]
emailme(at)myself.com
ow about a reality check for all those who think that racism can be erased simply by putting an equal number of black characters on TV? Its effect will be superficial at best.
What so many well-intentioned people seem to forget is that "racism" usually has little to do with skin color, per se. The real reason for racial division is the very human (and it affects all humans) preoccupation with "identity through rivalry." The physical fact of someone being black, white, Chinese or Indian is not what's directly causing the prejudice. It's people's overwhelming desire to mark their identity against that of a perceived opposite. It applies to all forms of rivalry, be it between different races, classes, cultures, faiths, countries, cities, sports teams, pop groups or political parties. Anything, really—they all have their roots in the same
desire to be a rival to something.
Yet although such rivalries will always be present in society, it is still a worthy goal to aim for political equality. This at least means that the political establishment won't try and exploit such divisions for their own vested interests. Sadly though, they still do. I fully believe the Civil Rights movement was perfectly justified in demanding an end to politically forced racial segregation. But tackling racism at the top is a lot easier than tackling racism at the bottom.
Darren Simpson
darrensimpson10(at)hotmail.com
ust heard about the Night Stalker cancellation. I'm sad. Which just adds more meat to my theory: "Science Fiction does not belong on the big three networks." Unless they're viewed as thriller/action shows, they probably won't last two seasons.
Sci-fi has cult status, and I'm fine with that. It really belongs on the smaller networks like SCI FI, UPN, The WB and the like. These are not mainstream networks, and they don't have to conform to mainstream shows. The pressure to capture large viewership via mass-marketing campaigns isn't there. Yet they stay in business because you really don't need overblown budgets to produce decent programming. If this wasn't true Smallville wouldn't have gotten this far ... or Buffy, for that matter.
Imagine if you will: UPN picks up Night Stalker, not only would it have something to counter The WB's Supernatural but it would last a good five seasons thanks to better (and ethnically diverse) casting and X-Files-esque appeal. They could even develop more controversial episodes.
And while they're at it, they should consider picking up a good Marvel title they could produce into a serial, like X-Statix—produced in that Paul Verhoeven style, it would be sensationalist and controversial.
Angel Cordero
myangeldust(at)earthlink.net
ell, as he assumed himself already, I am quite happy that Brannon Braga will not try to help any next incarnation of Star Trek along with his creativity.
There is hope now for people who know their business, like the Whedons, Straczynskis, Moores and Kempers out there to save what is left of the franchise. Because these folks were carrying the torch of Trek over the last 15 years, in their minds and hearts.
And if Threshold is doing not so well on its new Tuesdays at 10 timeslot, Braga can always bring in the Borg. ...
Thorsten Wulff
zwobot(at)mac.com
his is a sad response to Keith Kitchen's letter ("Coming Out News Is Irrelevant") about how Sulu coming out
should have been no biggie.
It took me a while to find the article, but in the April 2004, Discover did a lengthy article on morality titled "Whose Life Would You Save?" Science proves both Immanual Kant (pure reason should lead to moral truths) and John Stuart Mill (actions for the greatest good of the group, although individuals could be harmed) are only a part of the picture in making moral judgments. According to a large number of MRI brain scans taken while subjects were confronted with choices like (page 63) "Your plane has been taken over by a terrorist. He has taken a passenger's baby hostage and is holding a knife to its throat. Do you rush the terrorist to subdue him (and save everyone else), knowing the baby will die before you get there?" Many moral decisions involve emotional areas of the brain.
Now I can't recount the whole article here, but they showed there is a component of something feeling right or wrong—literally, although I'm not going to rattle off the list of brain parts. Morality's wired into us at some level and is seen in chimp societies—but that morality has little influence in modern situations. It would be far harder to push the heaviest person in an overloaded life raft into the sea to keep it from slowly sinking than to pull a switch to swerve a runaway train onto a track with one worker than on its current track with five workers. It feels "wrong" to push a person to their death by millions of years of wiring (unless you're a psychopath). Pulling the railroad switch is more rationally decided—no biological wiring for that. But that's still a lot of emotion in our moral judgments.
This intersects with Mr. Kitchen because they argue that different cultures produce different kinds of moral intuition and different kinds of brains, shaped in early childhood and ending up hard-wired to some extent. Their example was how people of India come up in a culture stressing purity whereas the U.S. focuses on individual autonomy—big difference in what gets wired, but it applies within culture as well including topics like racism, religious intolerance, anti-gay feelings and, their example, abortion.
To quote Dr. Joshua Greene, who did the scans (page 65): "We have people talking past each other, thinking the other people are incredibly dumb or willfully blind to see what's right in front of them. It's not just that people disagree; it's that they have a hard time imagining how anyone could disagree on this point that seems so obvious." Others' moral circuitry is not necessarily wired the same as ours.
I said this was a sad response? I take it back—try chilling. As the article says, "Many of the world's greatest conflicts may be rooted in such neuronal differences."
Barbara Goldstein
psifidoll(at)comcast.net
his is my response to Mr. Timothy Morgan's comments ("FX Can Co-Exist With Storytelling") about my feverish rant: ("SFX Helped Kill Thoughtful Films") "Special Effects Suck, or Why
the Seventies ruined my movie going experience": Sir, you are correct.
I now realize how the ingenious logic puzzles and philosophical conversations in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot were greatly enhanced by slo-mo shotgun blasts and high-speed futuristic bike chases.
Also, I can see how the storyline of the Star Wars prequels wouldn't be as poignant and heartfelt without many (many, many) shots of spaceships landing.
The only thing I regret now is that my lifelong dream of adapting Foundation as an all-sock-puppet review has been shattered. Oh well. Diff'rent strokes, I guess.
On a completely unrelated (and serious) note, I wholeheartedly agree with Jetse de Vries ("SCI FICTION Should Live On") proposals to keep SCI Fiction alive. Sadly, it's the only aspect of the SCI FI Channel that still deserves the "sci" prefix.
I really hope this works out.
Pablo del Moral
delmoral(at)yahoo.com
h come on! I publish a small sci-fi print magazine myself (Farthing—see
www.farthingmagazine.com) and if I, mere individual (a lowly British civil servant at that) can afford to publish (translation: "subsidize") a magazine, surely [SCI FI], a successful multinational corporation, can manage to subsidize the incomparable [editor] Ellen [Datlow] and [SCI FI's] online mag a bit longer.
Wendy Bradley
sheffield(at)couchspud.freeserve.co.uk
can understand Sash Scott's criticisms ("Americans Lose in Translation") of some translated works of Japanese television and movies, live or animated. It's true—there are some really bastardized shows out there. And don't get me started on the game shows like MXC that are "ported" to America by Spike TV ... ugh. ... But keep in mind, it's only fairly recently that such foreign programming was though to be acceptable by even off-the-mainstream avenues of media, like Cartoon Network and G4 (and, naturally, the new Anime Network, which I wish I had ... sniff ...), and the cool "Samurai Saturdays" movies on IFC.
It's really a simple economic issue—you're a producer, you've got this property that looks really cool, but you want, nay need, to reach the largest audience you can to turn a profit and make your investment worthwhile. Some take the low road, and strip away much of what made the show culturally unique, "Americanizing" the program and sacrificing integrity for broader appeal—it allows them to sell the show cheaper on a "per-eyeball" basis, makes it likelier to sell and helps insure a profit for them and a toehold for "Japanese" shows in the U.S. market. If a show is aimed squarely at kids, they may strip out some of the action—but again, they're selling to a particular target audience, and they want that target to be large, so the product has to be acceptable by the largest number of content providers (the "lowest common denominator" principle of program importing).
It's dumbing down, but it's because of this dumbing down that these shows get into circulation, and pave the way for people to accept the less-dumb versions that many companies opt for, making quality voice-overs and translations that hew more closely to the original (albeit tweaked to suit the "lip-flaps" of the original characters, but generally a good and faithful simulacrum of the original). This is finally becoming more mainstream, with the near-demise of comic books in favor of the "graphic novel"—and with it, the rapidly growing acceptance of the manga digest, mislabeled as graphic novels by major booksellers but still sold by them nonetheless, in increasingly large numbers and to a broader audience than comics ever managed to achieve. Manga used to be translated into comic books' magazine-like format, with flipped artwork and translated sound effects—but now, more often than not, they appear as pocket-sized digests, with unflipped art, untranslated sounds, and even presented in a "right-to-left" page format authentic to the original. Why? People are more open to learning more about the original culture and desire manga (and shows) that aren't bastardized into pabulum—but for the moment you just have to dig a little deeper to find the shows, TV being the broadcast medium that it is (unless you're willing to shell out the serious dollars an anime DVD collection can set you back). It's not as bad as it was back in the first "anime revolutions" of the '60s or the '80s, and in a decade or two, you'll look back on this and wonder how we could have been so backward-thinking in our butchering of Japanese programs.
To sum up—it's dumbing down, not censorship (at least not usually, unless the product is targeted directly at the kids' market); and it sucks, but it's not the universal choice of all production companies importing Japanese works, and is becoming less popular as time goes on (thank the gods of TV and film)...
Don Boyer
scifi(at)tatooine.org
olks, I think [Serenity] and series [Firefly] were among the best ever to be shown. Somehow, information about them seemed so limited. I saw the television show Firefly, by accident one night and fell in love with the show. Since then, I have learned the show has been around for awhile and now won't be back. I don't know the solution, but there has got to be a better way to get the word out. I fell in love with Farscape in a similar fashion.
Kevin Jackson
kevinjac(at)ameritech.net
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