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
Tired of Tamara's "double-speak"
Dear Ms. Hladik,
f you can't leave your left-wing sensibilities out of your reviews, [see The Lost World reviews] why don't you just pass the project off to someone who will treat the subject matter with more respect? This reader is just a little more than sick and tired of your politically correct double-speak.
Daren Bush
bushclan@olywa.net
Culture has changed since Doyle
Dear Ms. Hladik,
read your review of Doyle's book, The Lost World, and found it very unenlightened. To take a book out of a time period that had different moral values and slam it is irresponsible. If we did that to every book that we disagreed with, we would have no books at all. There would be very few books over 10 years old (about the time it takes for society to change various values). Just because things in this book offend your personal moral values gives you no reason to off-handedly relegate the book to the trash heap. Mr. Doyle was an excellent author and thinker. The social events in his books give you a literary time machine that takes you back to his era and lets you see how people thought and acted. It can be very exciting. Please remember that people think and act differently from culture to culture and time to time. If you do not judge their values then you may actually get some enjoyment from your books.
Joseph McDonald
jbmcdon@teal.csn.net
Editor: Tamara was careful to explain the book both in its historical and modern context. I fear you're overlooking one in favor of the other.
History helps us move forward
have just read your review of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and I have some comments I wish to make.
I am constantly annoyed when reviewers have the notion that because Political Correctness is trendy, it should be "retrofitted" to great literature of the past. I'm not arguing that the book is necessarily a great work, but that it does no justice to the PC movement, nor to Conan Doyle to attempt to conform Edwardian views to 1990's trends.
To wit:
Although his novel might have impressed his contemporaries, it will win him no great audience today. Conan Doyle's characters do all the things that must have seemed proper and exciting in his day, but have the tang of odiousness now. They are condescending to their native guides, they massacre and enslave the ape-men, and clumsily and possessively name every new thing they see (e.g. "Lake Gladys"). They also commit what might be interpreted today as murder; of course, back then, killing "half-breeds" was a less troublesome matter.
Like it or not, that was reality in 1912. According to your logic, we as a society should eschew everything that does not conform to our societal norms today. Should we not speak of the Holocaust? Should the Bible be updated with politically correct language? I think not.
This current PC fad is so intent on making everything "acceptable" in modern terms that it is sometimes easy to forget that we need history (and accurate history at that) to move forward. Why try to villainize those of the past who were, just as you are, conforming to the norms of their era? What we need to do is to understand the era they were living in and read their works with that in mind. They couldn't foresee the future any more than we can.
Even more so than the 1925 film that it inspired, The Lost World captured here is that of the Euro-centric, white, classist male, who placed every new discovery in an ordered hierarchy of superiority, himself at the top. Conan Doyle's characters are so insufferably racist, specist and sexist.
This was the state of the world in 1912. Take a good look at the RMS Titanic disaster. Many of the real-life tales that have been told revolve around classism and Euro-centrism. Ironically, in that disaster, the males valiantly allowed "women and children first." Nothing wrong with that, but I wonder if PC-ers would rather see the men trample the women and children on their way to the lifeboats?
The Lost World has lost all its original relevance.
Try reading some Dickens or Wharton or Austen or Shakespeare (or insert your own author from the past here) and coming to this conclusion. If you properly understand the era in which it was written and set, you'd be more likely to accept the work at face value. "Those who do not know history," etc.
Scott Monty
SMonty@phcs.com
Editor: I think fundamentally you and Tamara would agree on most points. She did not retrofit the book to be PC but she did -- as any reader must -- look at the book from her/our vantage point in time. When she wrote "Conan Doyle's characters do all the things that must have seemed proper and exciting in his day, but have the tang of odiousness now" she was not being PC, merely stating a fact.
Crichton read Doyle
iven that you review all manner of The Lost World in the current issue, it might be of interest to note that Micheal Crichton also clearly has read the original. In his (surprisingly bad) novel, on which the current movie is very loosely based, there are a number of very specific references to the first novel, of which the most obvious is the map in the book, which very closely resembles the map of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel. This has no real meaning, and nobody in the Crichton novel seems to have read the Doyle novel, but it is amusing.
ASKornheiser@prodigy.net
You are invited to a banquet
hanks for continuing to provide coverage on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Just one error: although this year's inductees were announced at ConQuesT, the actual induction will take place at the Campbell Conference Banquet (along with the awarding of the John W. Campbell and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards) on July 11 at the University of Kansas.
The public is invited. Reservations can be made with Professor James Gunn 1-913-864-3380. The banquet cost is $25. The Campbell Conference is on Saturday and Sunday, July 12-13 and may be attended for $15. Dormitory housing is available for $22 single or $24 double.
Keith Stokes
sfreader@unicom.net
Editor: Thanks Keith. We've since corrected our news item.
Addendum to The Reality Dysfunction review
his one was good, and told well the concept of [The Reality Dysfunction] in short. The only note I'd like to do is that Ione isn't exactly Edenist. She just has the affinity gene (because of her state as Lord of Ruin). She's an Adamist with genetic engineering and so forth. For example, Edenists have left the religion away, but Ione is still christian as her forefathers.
Juha Karttunen
algernon@freenet.hut.fi
Thanks for the recommendation
have just finished reading The Reality Dysfunction and think that it is one of the best books I have read in a long time. The anticipation of a sequel rivals that of The Fall of Hyperion, in fact both The Reality Dysfunction and Hyperion were outstanding stories.
Joshua Calvert is a Hero with a capital "H," he is every male's secret hero, idol in fact! His conquest of women is becoming legendary, Bondish in fact, suave, classy and animalistic, but there is a hidden caring factor very deeply layered, but it's there I think? He is rough, tough and smart. His luck is also very familiar like Golan Trevize of Foundation and Earth fame? He is also a funny, and by the sounds of it, great bloke. To women he is irresistible (well in the story he is), daring, ingenious in a universe of boring programmed predictable men. He is one who lives by his wits and seems to always fall on his feet very profitably, witty and has a killer smile. Oh, by the by, he's great in the sack too.
The universe is big and the characters rich and rewarding. The usual human traits of greed, lust, murder and sex are all there, Harrold Robbins would be proud so to I think would Asimov, Simmons and Julian May.
Anyway thanks for a good read.
Stephen Bendall
sbsball@wr.com.au
Right on the mark!
fter reading your review of The Reality Dysfunction I went out and bought a copy. Right on the mark! I'm about 100 pages in and should finish sometime tomorrow if I'm lucky. Thanks again.
By the way: The second part comes out in July of 1997 but it appears there is more to this story coming next year.
Frank Cone
lbadge@hotmail.com
I'll miss Dark Skies
Dear Patrick,
have two questions: 1) How old are you? and 2) Have you ever read a book?
To dismiss a show like Dark Skies while pumping up the X-Files clones and poor copies of Silence of the Lambs makes me wonder if you have any background in science fiction, real science fiction, not television sci-fi.
Dark Skies was fun. It was a delightful amalgamation of many of the traditions of science fiction, and blended in a majority of the fringe/cult/conspiracy stories that entertain our society. The writers did their homework, and were familiar with myriad aspects of science fiction history and its sub-genre of the weird and unexplained. They didn't get their stories from reading Entertainment Weekly and copying the story synopses of the current hollywierd trash.
It wasn't serious, it wasn't formula, but it was delightful. I'll miss it. Without it we're all back to a menu of some surfer's idea of what science fiction can be.
Dale Goble
oteditP@gateway.wvi.com
Editor: I don't know the answer to either question you posed to Patrick, but I suspect he would reply with a "yes" to #2. In the meantime, you'll probably be happy to learn that it's likely Dark Skies will be returning to TV in the form of one or more telefilms. Check out this issue's News of the Week for details.
Dark Skies had great conspiracy
have to disagree with the comments made regarding Dark Skies. From the beginning my wife and I have liked the show.
My first impression on seeing Dark Skies was that the producers were trying to out X-Files the X-Files. I thought the show did a pretty good job of doing just that.
While the paranoia level was not as hysterical as X-Files, Dark Skies was well done with its tie-ins to various historical events and figures. What more could a conspiracy fan ask for? Not only is there a secret government agency with unprecedented power but they were in cahoots with the Soviets as well.
It's a pity the show will not be able to run its full course. It would have been fun to have seen what the writers would come up with.
Marc Wiz
marc@wiz.co
