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
B5 Brings Intelligence To The Genre
t is obvious to me that Patrick Lee is not a fan of Babylon 5. While I haven't seen the River of Souls movie yet, Mr. Lee should know that Babylon 5 has always been a plot-oriented, dialogue-heavy show. If you want a science fiction/action story, watch the original Star Trek or a theatrical movie. That is one of the good things about B5, it brings intelligence back into the genre.
B5 has also never used special effects just to use special effects, unlike other shows or movies. The effects it uses are there for a specific reason. J. Michael Straczynski and his crew have also been able to consistently bring in each episode within a reasonable budget, on time and still tell the story in a well-produced show.
If the budget for River of Souls was only $3 million, then that's because that is all they needed. As Mr. Lee pointed out, it's slightly more than what it costs to produce two one-hour episodes of the show. It would have surprised me if it cost more to make.
Jeffrey Kaplan
jkaplan@world.std.com
Patrick Lee Replies: I've actually been a fan of Babylon 5 from the beginning, but have found it wildly uneven. At its best, I think it surpasses anything on television. I don't object to dialogue-heavy drama per se. I just object to dialogue that is devoid of drama. I also don't object to producers bringing their shows in on time and under budget; I just don't want to feel like the show's been rushed or made cheaply.
Likes IKEA And B5 Dialogue
hile I found your review "interesting" and did agree with some of what you said about B5, I have to take exception to your use of the phrase "cheesy sets." Personally, I like IKEA furniture and found the set design a much welcome change from many of the same-old-same-old of other SF shows with a low budget. The dialogue and character interaction is always what drew me and my husband to this show, so it will be interesting to see if we will agree with your viewpoint on the dialogue in River.
Annette Hook
ash02@webtv.net
Vampires Is About Vampire Hunters
irst of all, while the movie was called Vampires, it is not in fact a "vampire" movie. Vampires is a movie about vampire hunters, the vampires are not characters to be shown as people with feeling and clear motivations, the vampires are inhuman monsters devoid of the right to live. The vampires are portrayed this way because that is how a vampire killer has to see them in order to kill them; any hesitation on a vampire hunter's part equals a live vampire and a dead hunter.
This dehumanizing attitude also explains why the hooker character was treated so brutally; once bitten, a victim apparently has no hope of staying human. The hunters treated her in a brutal, inhumane manner in order to distance themselves from her and see the hooker as something not human. The need for this attitude is seen when the sidekick began to see the hooker as human and ends up getting bitten by her, thus doomed to die because he treated the inhuman as human. So yes, the film lacks the Anne Rice seductive fascinating vampires, and the hunters are shown as brutal killers nearly as bad as the vampires they hunt, but that was the point.
Al & Diane Hellar
hdhellar@driveninc.com
What About Tom Corbett Books And Comics?
read the Jeff Berkwits review of the new Tom Corbett video with great pleasure. I watched Tom Corbett, Space Cadet as a very young child. (I was five years old when it went on the air in 1950.) It was undoubtedly my first introduction to science fiction. I still remember most of the lyrics of the show's theme, and I have a vivid memory of the time my father took me to Crowley's department store in downtown Detroit for a personal appearance by the cast.
When I got a bit older, I read the series of Tom Corbett juvenile novels which were published in the early '50s. There was a comic book series as well--published by Dell, I believe. Does anyone know anything about them?
Art Fried
anyfried@nh.ultranet.com
Reaper Sounds Like "Blit"
hat TV movie Reaper sounds like a lot of fun. People have been e-mailing me the exciting details ever since they appeared in Science Fiction Weekly and asking whether I will be receiving huge royalties for use of the concept from my own 1988 Interzone story called "Blit." This is on the Web at the Infinity Plus site
and also brought me gratifying fan mail from Bruce Sterling
and Charles Platt, plus explicit homages in novels by Greg
Egan and Ken MacLeod, so presumably it's not wholly obscure.
Dave Langford
ansible@cix.co.uk
EW Missed John Campbell and Astounding
hen Entertainment Weekly did its interesting cover story on the 100 greatest events in science fiction history, didn't they miss a huge one? A mention of Huge Gernsback and Amazing, but not a word about John Campbell and Astounding. Now tell me, which one really had the greatest, longest lasting impact?
Dave Jewett
davidrj@teleport.com
Phantom Menace Should Be Surprising
o those who seem quite anxious over the title of the new Star Wars film: Firstly, it's only a title. I would venture to say that nearly all of us (members of the general viewing audience who are raising such concern) have very little idea about what the film is really about. What is this "Phantom"? Why is it a menace, and to whom? (See--it's already got the imagination going.) Many of us--doubters--could very well come to realize, once we actually see the film (and we can't and therefore shouldn't do too much judging until then), that the title is perfectly apt.
Secondly, most of us would admit that the title is surprising. And that's a great virtue, isn't it? Would we really want in a title--and, more importantly, in a film--a simple rehashing of all of the old Star Wars formulae? Would that really be worth the two-decade-plus wait? What I know from being a fan all these years is that a great part of the amazing appeal of Star Wars is its ability to present new, exciting and unique cinematic experiences again and again.
Thirdly (and this is related to the second point), it makes a lot of sense for this "first" film to start on a "small" (i.e. episodic) scale, as most feel the title suggests it will do. How effective would it be for such a saga to begin with the macro/epic? The series wouldn't really "go" anywhere if it left off at the same place it started. Some of the greatness of Star Wars, as with all epics, is its ability to write the small into the large, the individual onto the universe.
Lastly, I find myself in agreement with many others--who have noted the simple fact that Lucas's vision of the series is one that borrows much from numerous serial SF films from the '30s and '40s--who contend that this title is quite fitting with the rest of the Star Wars vision, a vision which we've all been pretty happy with up until now, I'd say (excluding the Ewoks, of course). And to call such a title "cheesy," as some have done, is to forget/neglect/ignore not only the greatness of such classic SF (and therefore Lucas's vision), but also how indebted Star Wars is to it.
Matthew McGowan
mcgowam@hrw.org
Remembering The Blue Harvest Buzz
n response to the letter from Ron Giles about Phantom Menace and the Jedi smokescreen. I was visiting in Crescent City back in '82. People were coming into the local diners and such wearing jackets that had Blue Harvest printed on them. The buzz around town was that a horror movie was being shot in the forest nearby. Uh huh...a horror movie with stormtroopers in it!
Scott R. Wright
scottwright@waterhouse.com
Hopes Brimstone Stays On The Air
ust a few words about Brimstone. My husband and I really like it but are afraid to get too excited because as soon as you get into a good show, they cancel it. We hope not.
Kitty Bridges
kittyb@quicktel.com
A Recent Legend Fan Writes
ou're probably sick of letters about Legend. But let me just add this note. I'm a recent Legend fan. But I'm not so young that I wouldn't have loved to have heard about this novel when it was first published.
Maybe one of the reasons why such a high quality, substantial novel has been ignored while a number of lesser works got the exposure was that until recently there have been very few outlets for sharing information: information about books that for whatever reason aren't the flavor of the day, and just information on speculative fiction and on fandom in general.
One of the great things about the Internet and especially about publications like Science Fiction Weekly (not that there is any publication just like Science Fiction Weekly of course) is that you provide such badly needed outlets. So maybe in the future there will be less likelihood that exceptional books will slip through the cracks.
James Sturm
jim241@postmark.net
Satan Is In The Pages Of Legend
thought you might like to know just what you've been promoting in your Letters column. I too have read the novel, Legend, over which your readers have been gushing for the last couple of weeks. I am as big a science fiction fan as anyone, at least I once was. But when you get beneath the skin of far too much science fiction, all too often what you discover is a tired moral relativism and an empty humanism.
Far too many of the alternate worlds that science fiction posits are alternate worlds that exist without God. Far too seldom does God figure in the science fiction equation in any meaningful manner. But we should ask ourselves what kind of "art" does man create when he creates an imaginary world that's empty of the True Creator?
That is the problem I have with too much science fiction. But this particular novel is even worse than most. In my estimation, far worse.
Legend virtually promotes Satanism (though of course it pretends just the opposite), questioning and twisting the bedrock values that have built the actual real-world civilization that nurtures all of us.
If the novel is exciting, it is made exciting by calling forth Satan into its pages. If it is, as your readers claim, positive and uplifting, it is a positivity based on a shallow humanism, a triumph of man who not only pays no heed to God, but who ultimately sets himself up in place of God. For if you read the novel carefully that is undeniably what it is about: man's triumph over the forces of darkness by pretending to become God and thus usurping the rightful place of the Lord. Something which anyone who has ever studied history will know can never happen. Man alone is man at the mercy of evil, never triumphant over it.
If such a story is uplifting, then God spare me from being uplifted. And God spare me from those who are uplifted by such writing. And God help them.
Some of your letter writers were worried about Legend vanishing from sight. Let's only hope they were right.
Joseph Allen
happyone1@mailcity.com
